Can Social Media Solve All Your Marketing Problems?

Of course not, but it's hard to live down those expectations

By Mike Chirveno

Member of FreshXperts

I enthusiastically read Garland Jaeger's Social media isn't as great as you might think opinion piece posted on The Packer website on October 28, 2011. As someone who gets paid to help clients in our industry create and maintain their social media presence, I feel a strong urge to join the discussion. 

Let me say up front, I agree with Garland's initial point that those who look at social media as the sure cure for all that ails you marketing-wise are going to be sorely disappointed. Social media are important customer-facing platforms, but for social media to merit all of the buzz that surrounds them, a company has to have a good understanding of what social media will and won't do and a solid strategy for their own social media initiatives. 

Social media are not primarily acquisition channels. When it comes to selling, nothing beats asking for the order and social media is not the place to do that. In fact, those who blatantly sell in social media are branded as clueless self-promoters, not looking out for the big picture of promoting the general good of the topic being discussed. Let me be clear - I'm all in favor of posting new product releases and announcing sales and special offers, but Facebook and other social media platforms are not the place for a full-court press. If you're looking to slot social media into traditional business roles, it lends itself more naturally to the customer facing activities of customer service and product support. Social media is about conversing, interacting and providing a platform to let customers interact with each other. If you're posting today's location and menu for your food truck, go for it. For the rest of us, there's probably a better use for social media. 

Social media are about delivering value.

My favorite use for social media is earning the privilege of being heard. In our world, there's no shortage of information on almost every topic. So why should your current and potential customers listen and respond to you? Because you've earned your place at the table through the information and insight you've shared with them personally and through social media venues. 

Social media are about listening. We've gone to great lengths to avoid talking with customers. In the name of saving money to keep our prices low and bottom line healthy, we've routed their calls to voicemail, transferred them to outsourced call centers, made them punch one for sales or two for service and emailed them instead of calling them on the phone. I'm not against any of these things per se, but if they've built a wall between us and our customers, we no longer know what those who pay our salary have to say. When social media surfaced and customers had the chance to tell us what they thought on a platform that we couldn't ignore, they capitalized on it. Smart companies pick up the other end of the conversation and find out things from customers they should have been learning all along. 

Social media are about referrals. I don't think any of us would disagree that the best way to get a new customer is via a recommendation from an existing customer. Social media are great places for our customers to sing our praises. When we delight a customer with a good or service and provide them an easy way to tell their friends, they will do it. I spend a lot of time on my client's social sites and it never fails to thrill me when I get to converse with a customer who had a great experience with a product. I always ask them to share a more detailed version of the story with our online family and I've never been turned down.  

Social media are about connecting the dots. 

The next wave of great business intelligence will come, in part, from a company's ability to harness the information shared about them and their competitors in social media.  I wish space would permit me to walk you through some simple ways to harvest all sorts of intelligence about your company, your competitors, your products and your industry, using simple free tools.  Companies that successfully leverage their own transactional data and this available intelligence for better decision-making have a much greater likelihood to build sustained competitive advantage. 

So, back to my original premise - is social media the cure for whatever ails you? No, but social media is a great tool for reclaiming the connection we should have been building with current and potential customers all along.