As social media continues to grow in the mainstream and bust out of the fishbowl, there are certainly growing pains.
One of those pains is what scared a lot of the early adopters. Their fear was that as more people became interested and involved in social media, they would try to cram their “square peg” practices of marketing and communication into the “round hole” of new media.
Mitch had a great post the other day that outlined this incredibly well. His assertion is that many people equate marketing with spam – and they’re not necessarily wrong to do so.
For years, marketing essentially was spam.
- A company would come up with what they wanted people to know/believe.
- Said company would push that message out everywhere they could.
- People would believe those messages because they didn’t get any other messages from anywhere else.
- Lather, rinse, repeat while ignoring any customer opinion because it really didn’t matter.
This analysis of the old way of doing things isn’t anything new.
Changes thanks to social media
In the early days of social media, this model changed and companies weren’t the only ones distributing messages.
Everyone talked to everyone else and branding came to be as much about what other people were saying as what the company was saying (if not more).
You could get the “real” story about a company from other consumers just like you without it being filtered through the company.
Companies get “hip” to social media
As companies saw the power of social media, some of them did it right. They joined the conversation by being a trusted, useful resource. They provided content that customers could use in decision making, or content that people just plain found interesting.
Those companies that did it right knew that if they gave enough useful information, people would seek it out and when they were ready to buy, they would work with the company that they had the best relationship with – the one that gave them the information they enjoyed.
Too many companies do it wrong
Unfortunately, as the adoption of social media has grown, so has the number of companies doing it wrong.
Too many companies have seen the growth of social media, read the news stories and decided they need to get involved. They pay lip service to the “social” part and figure they’re joining the conversation by running ads on social media sites.
This is just spam for the 21st century.
With great power comes great responsibility
Despite what many marketers seem to think, social media is not a “quick fix” to the problem of people ignoring their marketing messages more and more.
Social media is not just another channel, it’s a complete shift in thinking about what marketing is, as well as what business looks like. “Doing” social media means being a resource. It means offering information and products that people want, not just forcing what you want to give them down their throats.
It means bringing the same social skills that your mother taught you to the web.
The most important skill in marketing
I believe that the “skill” that is most important in marketing and business today is patience.
Social media can help a company nurture what they have longed for – loyal customers. But, it’s not that easy.
Social media means raising the standards of the content that you distribute to the level that potential customers want. It means eliminating the expectation that a customer or potential customer “owes” you anything because you gave them that great content.
More than anything, it means building a relationship and waiting for the other person to see the same value in that relationship that you do.
When they feel that value, and when they need what you offer, they will buy. Not before.
If you’re not giving them a message or content that they value, they’ll ignore you forever.
Worse yet, if you’re forcing a message on them that they haven’t asked for and don’t find relevant (which, like Mitch says, is spam), they’ll tell other people to ignore you.
But if you regularly give them useful information that they want, they’ll enjoy building the relationship for the long term. It just takes time.
So, hurry up and wait.
Image courtesy of scrapetv.com
