The Five and Dime

The hype and the reality of social media

(Please note: this article is really written for the small business. For our larger clients, you may find it interesting, but there really is a different strategy for larger companies dealing with social media. Contact me and we can talk about those ideas.)

Everywhere you turn, it seems like people are telling business owners that they have to be working with social media. The latest buzz is all about Twitter and “tweeting”.

As a marketing person, I have a keen interest in anything that helps promote my customers’ business (or my business, too.) But with all of the hype, all of the articles, and all of the news, I have yet to see many concrete examples on how a typical small business can use social media such as Twitter as a marketing tool.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-social media. I just believe that there is quite a bit of hype and less substance when dealing with social media. There’s simply a lot of businesses that really can’t take advantage of Twitter and Facebook (other than placing ads on Facebook.)

So let’s define the marketing opportunities that social media has to offer and then look at who can and who can’t take advantage of the different social media.

Tweets and social pages

A Twitter announcement is referred to as a “tweet”. A tweet is a short message that someone posts on their Twitter page. If you have no one following your tweets, no one actually sees those messages. But if you have “followers”, whenever you tweet something, those tweets appear on their page when they log on. (Other sites may refer to these  “followers” as “friends” or “fans”.)

For some small businesses, a tweet can pass along useful information. If you’re a restaurant, sending out the day’s lunch specials may be a good use of Twitter. It’s information that your followers will find useful before they head out to lunch. With that in mind, I would define a restaurant as a “social business”.

Social business defined

Defining someone as a “social business” is my own way of looking at the types of businesses that have an inherent interest level on a regular basis. If you are a restaurant and people frequent you more than a couple times a month, you fit that category. Other food places such as coffee shops and grocery stores fit in this category too. If people are following your establishment on a regular basis, you can be considered a social business.

Another way a business can be a social business is if they have customers who are “fans”. These are the types of businesses where people are genuinely interested in what is going on with that organization. The local sports team can fit this criteria. Or perhaps a musical group. If people are often wondering what is going on with your business, you fit this social business mold.

Apple Computers is an example of this. (Sorry, I couldn’t think of a small business example.) They are newsworthy, people want to know more about them. It could be interest in new technology or gadgetry. It could be because people own their stock and  want to know if the value is going up. It could be because they have a charismatic leader in Steve Jobs. (Who gets as much coverage because he’s not speaking at an event as he does when he is speaking at it.) A lot of people are “fans” of Apple.

On the local level, schools fit this model very well. If you have a son or daughter attending the local grade school, or if you are attending college, the latest information from the school is good to have at your fingertips. You want to know the latest news and getting information every day (or even several times a day) doesn’t bother you. In fact you desire the contact.

The problem is that most businesses don’t fit this definition of a social business. Most businesses have to struggle to get attention. They have to work to get a news story about them. Most of them have products or services that their clients and prospects really only think about when they have a need for that particular product or service. Sorry to say, people really don’t care about them on a daily basis.

Who really wants to follow the tweets of their local insurance agent?

Can the insurance agent use social media to help grow her business? Of course. But what she needs to do is think of social media like marketing media. In other words, advertise using social media.

Is advertising a bad word?

The social gurus are going to have a field day with that last statement. They’re saying you can’t advertise. They’re saying that people don’t want to be advertised to, they want relevant information. People want to be entertained. Advertising doesn’t work because people ignore it.

I’ve got news, good advertising has been supplying relevant information for years. Good advertising has been entertaining for years. Good advertising doesn’t get ignored. The problem is that there is a lot of bad advertising out there and that is what people associate with advertising. Good advertising depends on creativity, risk-taking, and the ability to understand the psyche of the viewer.

A few years ago, BMW came out with a series of eight short films on the web that starred Clive Owen and hired well-known directors, including John Woo, Tony Scott, John Frankenheimer and Guy Ritchie, for their “The Hire” series. These web-based movies were ground breaking at the time, using the web as their distribution.

Now that there is so much film content on the web, it is hard to stand out like BMW did. But the bottom line is that they blurred the line between advertising and entertainment. In reality, these were very long, very elaborate commercials to showcase how hot the BMW cars were. Whether you walked away consciously with that isn’t important, the subconscious message was there. And instead of showing these movies on TV or in a theater, they showed them online.

That’s what good advertising has always done. It entertains while educating, creating a brand promise while developing an interest in the product. Whether it is a good TV commercial, an innovative radio ad, a compelling print ad, or a good brochure, direct mail piece, or other traditional media, advertising can reach its audience in an interesting way. It can also be achieved with a quality website, compelling viral sales video usingYouTube, or other new media.

Media is media is media

What makes good advertising isn’t dependent on the media, it’s dependent on creativity. A bad online ad won’t be any better than a bad TV commercial. The strategy to use online and social media isn’t that different than the strategies used in traditional media.

So if you are the insurance agent that we referred to earlier, can you use social media to promote your business? Of course. Here are some suggestions.

Your website. Your website is probably your most important social media tool. Practically everything else you can do with social media can be accomplished to some degree with your website. When people are looking for insurance advice, your website can give it to them. It can be an online brochure, educational library and how-to video resource. People can find it through searches (see our other whitepaper on SEO to learn more about how to get on the search engines) or through advertising. A website can be an ad, a brochure, a catalog, a sales video, and a press announcement all at the same time.

Facebook and Twitter. We don’t have any problem with you creating a Facebook or Twitter page, just don’t overdo it with the messages. We prefer Facebook for businesses. If it is for your business, not for you personally, make sure that you have relevant information. Comments on the new tax laws and how they affect investments is appropriate. The idea that you voted on what your favorite musical group isn’t.

For businesses, a more relevant social media group is LinkedIn. This is mainly for professionals who use it to develop business contacts. It creates an environment where you can enlist your contacts to connect with their contacts. The other aspect of LinkedIn is there are numerous professional groups that you can join through the site. These are forums where you can reach out to your peers, ask questions, and gather information.

Advertising on Facebook and using YouTube

More relevant than creating a Facebook page is the fact that you can advertise on Facebook. You can target the ads geographically, so you reach only your local area. You can target by gender or age. And you can even target by interests. So if you have a specialty in insuring over-the-road truckers, you can probably find people interested in trucks to target. Plus, you can choose what level you want to advertise, setting limits on what you will pay per click and daily limits on your spending levels.

YouTube has become the defacto place to host video. You really no longer have to store video on your own site, you can put it on YouTube and then embed it on your own site. (It will have the YouTube logo in the lower right hand corner, but I think it is common enough that people don’t think twice about it.)

YouTube now allows higher resolution content, so your videos can be uploaded and seen with good picture quality. (See our UFO story to see a sample of an embedded YouTube video.) If the video is relevant to someone searching, there’s also a possibility of someone finding it on the YouTube site itself. A TV commercial that we did for one of our clients has now had over 50,000 views on YouTube. (And that’s low for YouTube standards, but not bad for a local company to get extra views for no cost.)

Be selective on what you put up on YouTube, make sure that it is professional quality. Don’t just get a camera and record your own video and place it up on YouTube. We’re talking about your brand image and everything you do positions your brand. There are a lot of people putting up amateur looking videos on YouTube but don’t make your business one of them.

Email marketing

We flip-flop all the time on email marketing. It can be effective, but also can be annoying. Personally, we never send mass emails out more than twice a year. Yet, if you develop a list, it is a very cost-effective way of reaching a lot of people with little out-of-pocket expense. (Assuming that you are doing it yourself and not hiring it out.)

Email marketing is not different in strategy than traditional direct mail. You need something to get people’s attention, and then have an offer that makes it interesting for the person to follow through with your call to action. Sometimes the call to action is immediate (click here and order), sometimes its more branding oriented (when it’s time to buy insurance, think of us.)

Blogs and e-Newsletters

If you can offer pertinent information that is useful to your clients and prospects, a blog or email newsletter can be a good tool. We’ve had success with our own newsletter, and have now switched over to a blog instead. (With the intent of adding information on a more random basis, but still sending out an email a couple times a year letting people know what has been posted on the site.) If people are savvy enough to use an RSS feed, they can get the latest updates whenever they are posted.

We’ve always been a proponent that a blog or newsletter has to include more helpful information than sales propaganda. A little bit of sales is okay, just don’t overdo it.

Getting mentioned on other people’s blogs, newsletters and websites should now be a component of any public relations program. To do this, you need to examine how your press release is written and distributed in order to meet the criteria of the social media/web world. Being an expert for blogs is an intelligent PR strategy in its own right. (Look for a future white paper on PR strategies that use the web.)

Conclusion

We see that a lot of businesses are caught up in the hype telling them that they have to dedicate a lot of time and energy towards social media. We think there is a lot of “Emperor’s New Clothes” in that outlook, sometimes people are afraid to be seen as out of touch, so they don’t trust their common sense.

Although we don’t believe there is anything wrong with having your social media points of contact, we would much rather you spent your time and energies developing a strategy that uses a balance of traditional media and sales tactics, and include using some social media as an advertising vehicle. For most businesses, that’s a course that will reward you with more sales, better branding, and a higher return on investment.

Tags: Facebook, Online Advertising, Social Media, Traditional Media, Twitter

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 10:18 pm and is filed under White Paper. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.