Socially Yours

“Got to work early this morning I logged in and I looked at:

My Facebook page for friend updates; our company My Space page for new friends; the SMH, Guardian and ODT newspapers; my internet banking; Trade Me looking for a new kayak; uploaded photos to my flickr account; You Tube because I had been notified someone had posted a comment to one of my videos; my last.fm account to listen to music while I worked; my RSS feed reader for interesting blog posts, a few funnies and all the celebrity news; my Google alerts for any new related webpages that I can share across social networks; LinkedIn because I was notified one of my contacts had changed their status; Google analytics on my blog; and, switched on Twitter, checked how many new followers I had and mentions – Tweeted everyone hello.

Finally, by 11am I was ready to start work and check my emails. Does this sound familiar? It is the new world of the Internet and the demands to share everything about yourself all the time. 24 months ago we were talking about a phenomenon called Web 2.0 where everyone would be an author of their own content – now we just call this world of mad content sharing – the Internet. The likes of Facebook and Twitter are just so mainstream. A great tweet on Twitter from @wrumbsy reads “First my mum and now my old boss have friended me on Facebook”.

The infiltration of social media into our everyday lives affords many opportunities for New Zealand businesses and likewise it has sprung up a whole new industry – social media marketers. A friend of mine recently referred to these professionals as “the new snake oil salesman, firstly it was SEO and now it is social media marketing”. Like search engine optimisation (abbreviated as SEO this is the process of getting a website ranked higher in search engines), social media marketing is indeed a dark art. The answer to any question about how one does either of these is always met with a mystical mumble – oh, it is quite complicated – we have a few tricks. Even better with social media marketing you will most likely be told that measuring ROI is almost impossible – it is all about brand recognition.

Yet, this is not a warning away from social media marketing, rather an endorsement of the power of the “new” social Internet. Social networking is not a fad, nor is it something that will pass your company by. Eventually, and quickly, social networking will impact almost every role, at every company, in all parts of the world. Social media provides an exceptional marketing opportunity because of the speed with which news travels the Internet. Say something today and it is everywhere – offer a stunning deal and it will travel fast. But yesterdays news is so last year. Twitter, Facebook, Friend Feed provide immediate opportunities to send your message.

And therein lies one of the biggest challenges facing New Zealand business – identifying a message that is pertinent enough to travel across the social media virally without being filtered by our innate built-in spam filters. That’s right, along with our new socialness we all developed the ability to see right through any message for it’s pure advertising worth. Reaching your target market has become simultaneously easier and harder. Easier because you can get your message directly to your customer, they are easier to find and reach than with previous old school broad brush stroke marketing; but harder because your customers are being bombarded by advertising messages and the technology allows them to tune out those that are not relevant or interesting.

Success in social media does not happen overnight. It needs everyone within the business including senior management to be involved. Avoid appointing someone solely as your social media manager – the burden of the efforts should be collective and no one person within an organisation should own social media. It is a shift in the way your marketing message is delivered from a top down delivered message to a consumer focussed pull model. That is, the customers are in control of how and when they receive the marketing message.

Social media marketing challenges the corporate identity. Social media necessitates a very real personal approach. This means no avatars of sunny beaches or sailing boats – but actual real persons faces. Consumers will respond much more readily to social media messaging if there is a real name and real face to the communications. In most cases this will mean that you will have to let go of control of your marketing message to your actual staff within your business. It also means you are going to have that horrible internal debate with yourself over the productivity of staff because they are Tweeting and Facebooking during work hours. The secret to success is to shape the conversations they are having and insist that it be business focussed.

Take a long term view of social media – and obviously long term in the Internet does not mean too long. Drop the focus on campaigns and think about establishing relationships with your customers. This also means getting away from the Facebook or Twitter page that looks like a series of press releases. It is not about interruptive marketing message but about establishing a collaborative relationship with your customers or potential customers.

Clearly social media marketing is a minefield for New Zealand businesses – hence the reference to the new snake oil salesmen. Social media covers a wide spectrum of technologies such as wikis, blogs, podcasts, forums, reviews and ratings and of course the infamous social networks such as Twitter, My Space, Facebook and Friend Feed. Social media marketing will become an integral part of marketing and customer service for New Zealand companies as they increasingly engage with online communities to generate exposure, opportunity and sales. “