Why Social Media Fails 

So am I the only one tired of everyone talking about twitter and facebook all day long.  Probably not, but that doesn’t change the fact that social media is changing the way customers interact with their favorite brands, and the way those brands leverage their online presence. So instead of writing another blog about how to leverage social media correctly, I thought it’d be better to write about what not to do.  It’s that “what not to do” that a lot of brands in the Middle East are getting wrong.

Objectives. It seems that the first thing to go wrong is the very first step that anyone should take.  ‘I want to be on twitter because its important” is not a good reason to dive into twitter.  Why is it important?

I want to use social media to:

1.   interact with my customers through an ongoing dialogue
2.  push tactical information about my products and services, using it for direct response
3.  use it as a customer service touch point
4. to boost brand interaction and leverage my other online/offline properties

It really comes down to the kind of company/service/product that is going social.  But one thing is for sure, and let me be clear – collecting friends/followers does not build brand equity.  Your users need to be engaged.  Take a certain UAE bank that some would classify as being successful on facebook.  If ‘success’ is measured by the number of followers then yes – but are those people brand ambassadors taking the brand into the online realm, or better yet talking about it in other channels. Social media, like radio, TV, print, POS, and OOH should be a line item in a marketing calendar and a fully integrated channel with its own objectives and business case.  360 marketing strategies include online media, so why not social media?

Content.Question: would I follow a UAE telecoms provider on twitter only to be welcomed each morning with an inane ‘Hi everyone, hope you have a great day’?Another dubious example is from a local UAE bank – when their facebook page went quite for a week, we were welcomed back with a message from the administrator saying – ‘Hi everyone, great to be back, went on holiday, how was your weekends?’Whaaaaaaaa? I know of many MENA brands where the content for the facebook page comes from a low-level manager in charge of ‘digital’, or worse yet someone from IT, rather than a briefed and professional PR agency that was involved in setting the KPIs and objectives for the channel. Bad content editors and no contact strategy mean that everyone suffers. Content managers need calendars of plans of what to talk about, how to talk about it, and how often, gauging response and feedback then organically adapting the contact strategy as time goes on.

Frequency.  How many brands have you un-followed because they posted 8 times a day and overwhelmed you with chatter?  The opposite is also true.  When cleaning up my facebook profile recently I was surprised to discover that I was a group member of (or liked) a whole series of products and brands that I haven’t heard from in over 2 months. Frequency is of course affected by the kind of content that is being pushed and like messaging, needs planning and should be central to any tight contact strategy for social media.

Messaging.  The rule for online communication and messaging is the same as offline – be single minded.  By not understanding the audience and the message and not being clear on strategyusers need to wade through tons of irrelevant messaging to get to something that is important to them.  Take a certain credit card company – their facebook page is populated by post after post of images from events that they sponsor, and sprinkled in every few weeks are pieces of content that someone in some department thought should be online.  Everything from white papers on the credit crunch tolinks for a micro site touting travel rewards on a new card product.  The only thing that this will serve to accomplish is to make all the party goers who follow the group to track nightlife think ‘jeez who cares’, as anyone actually interested in the brand has disengaged long ago after realizing the lack of value in participating. Social Media is a direct channel, and should be treated as much – it isn’t mass people!

As with any marketing exercise the goal at the end of the day is to build equity and then leverage that equity to your existing base, but also to prospects.  Social media has a rich role to play here and as marketers we know that the people that are following us online are opted in, and have chosen to be engaged with us – by being careful and planning our social media objectives and contact strategy hopefully social media will come into its own as a channel.