How To Avoid Social Media Disaster

The biggest mistake a marketer can make in Social Media is failing to recognise that Social Media is fundamentally different from everything that has gone before in digital marketing. It is not ‘the same, only more so’, it is a step in a new direction. 

Maybe the best way to avoid Social Media disasters is to administer a small electric shock to anyone who uses the phrase “one-to-one” in the same sentence as Social Media.  Because it is not a “one-to-one” medium, and to apply the same tactics and metrics which apply to the direct-response model of digital marketing is to invite failure.

In fact, Social Media may mark the end of “one-to-one” marketing. An increasing number of people choose to conduct an increasing amount of their online interactions through the ‘Social Lens’. This means that there are large numbers of potential customers your brand will never get to speak to alone. You’ll always and only find them in them in a social setting, and you’ll have to be comfortable there in order to engage. 

Social Media upends the notion of how campaigns are deployed and measured. For the school of digital marketing evolved from direct-response DNA, a campaign is like a pick-up line. You try it out on a number of customers and achieve a certain rate of success. To extend the analogy to Social Media, imagine approaching someone you’d like to impress at a pleasant gathering of mutual friends and loudly asking: “wanna go back to my place?” It would go over like a… Social Media disaster.

An alternative to using electric shock therapy on your digital marketing staff is to evolve the resources, metrics and tactics that will drive Social Media strategy from your PR/Communications team. Their experience, and their understanding of how opinions are made and managed, is probably a more natural fit for the medium.