Click image for video.
The hard thing about being social is that we don’t know what that is.
Is it an adjective as in “social media” or a noun as in, “Are you going to the Church Social?”
As a company, is it about conversations with your customers or about sharing content with them?
In an interview I did this week with Mattias Grönberg, I was asked ,
“What is the biggest mistake you see companies do with social media?”
It took a nanosecond to reply: “People just don’t get “social”.
It’s seen as an “add-on” that must be checked off the to-do list before getting down to the real business.
Breaking news! – Social business is real business.
In his blog post today, Mitch Joel writes:
What makes something (anything) “social” is a brand’s ability to make their marketing materials (and this includes their content) as shareable and as findable as possible.
To back up his point, he makes the following point:
Brands fail at conversations -
Write a blog post about your favourite brand and let me know a couple of things:
- Did the brand even come by and acknowledge it?
- Did the brand engage in the comment section?
- Did you respond to the brand’s comment and did they come back to continue the engagement?
- Did other readers of your blog jump into the comments and did the brand respond to them as well?
- Did the brand come back at a future point because of how great the conversation was?
Do you agree with Mitch? Are consumers not interested in having conversations with brands?
Do you think they’d rather engage with faces instead of logos?
Whether you trade in widgets or wisdom, the currency you use is the content you share.
Content is currency and advertisers produce lots of it.
It gets shared when it’s clever, funny or moving. Of course, this is the goal as the more it’s shared the more “real” currency it generates.
But it doesn’t generate “social” currency unless the company behind it reaches past the marketing firm to shake hands directly with the consumer.
Advertising and social media do coexist.
As Mitch has often said, it’s a case of “with” not “instead of”.
The problem is when we confuse the two.
Speaking of content, I came across this very cool guide for content management from Copyblogger that I think you might find helpful.
Click here for the full-sized infographic.
Like this infographic? Get more content marketing tips from Copyblogger.
Ray Hiltz is a Social Media Strategist with management roots in restaurant, hotel and performing arts.
A strong proponent for the power of collaborative communication and "humanized" digital networking, Ray writes about social media, social business and Google Plus.
His clients include hotels, restaurants, consulting firms, entrepreneurs, writers and individuals just trying to make sense of "social".
Ray is a popular speaker on Social Media, Social Business and Google+.
1 Like