Social Media Success Takes Forever
February 17, 2010 by admin
Filed under Featured, Social Media
Typical marketing campaigns can last from days to years. My shortest campaign was 5 days. A Super Bowl commercial may only run once.
Social Media is a different animal. Social Media should not be treated as a campaign but as a relationship. To make a relationship successful requires constant work (ask my wife). Social Media is an ongoing relationship between people, brands, etc. Engaging in short term campaigns typical of traditional and online marketing is like a sandwich board promoter, standing on the street shouting out tag lines and sales prices. An attention getter for sure but will you buy what they sell? Will you remember the brand?
Engaging in a long term Social Media strategy has obvious perks. For a decade I’ve been building micro-sites, splash pages, ad banners for companies. They spend fortunes on these short bursts of marketing. Imagine if they didn’t have to build a new channel from scratch? A few years ago I was talking to a small PC gaming company whose products targeted women. Their games followed a continuous set of characters. I recommended setting each character and the group in general up each with their own Social Media presence. The idea was to keep communication going between characters and with fans. This would allow a small community to build up around the franchise, a robust and loyal channel for marketing. Rather than building new promotions for each new game, the company could spend months seeding game info through characters, even kicking off the game with a pre-story or augmenting it with side-stories. Between games the channel could be a little less active then ramping up as it got closer to product launch time.
Needless to say, they didn’t follow the strategy and still only dabble in Social Media, but at least they’re trying now. The idea of achieving success through short campaigns in Social Media is the opposite of what SoMe is all about. Take your time and commit to building your community and keep the conversation going because with Social Media, commitment and conversation is what it’s all about.
Image by antydiluvian
Clients struggle with the sustained effort required to make this stuff work. Helping them focus on the durability of the asset once it does is a good approach, but it too takes some time to prove.
Dig the blog, would like to learn more about Rangl.me. Let me know if you’re up for coffee sometime.
Hi Mike,
I’m always up for beverages, other than coffee, but I don’t mind drinking them in the morning. Drop me an email after the 16th. I’ll be at SXSW and speaking at the XPX Summit until then: mdurwin@gmail.com.
Great post, and such an important message for everyone working with social media and for those considering it.
I get two consistent messages when I read and learn about social media: It’s about building relationships and sharing useful information. I am the marketing person for a small company which means I do everything from outside sales, to print media, direct mail and any facet of online presence. I decided a while back to just jump in and put myself and our company out there in the social media world. I think as company that serves the local community, face to face relationships are where I need to spend the bulk of my time connecting. I know that by not making a larger time commitment to social media that it will take longer to build relationships, but I hope that my sporadic involvement isn’t worse for us than no involvement at all.
Sporadic involvement is worse than no involvement. Imagine a customer’s frustration that your company doesn’t have a Facebook page or a Twitter account. No that bad right, they can always try your website. Now think how frustrating it would be to a customer to try to contact you through your social media presence and to get no response. You’ve made the effort to be there but you’re ignoring them. Social media is constant. Social media is persistent. Social media is NOW.