* 5 things you shouldn't do with social media
Over the last few weeks I’ve written extensively about social media, what you need to do corporately to get in the swim, and how to behave once you’ve got your feet wet. This week I want to talk about what not to do.
Slideshow: Where IT pros do their social networking
First, let’s revisit the purpose of social media. It is not about how many people follow you or whatever kind of approval rating you might have, it’s about whether you are engaged with other people in a meaningful way.
What does meaningful actually mean? I can’t tell you, every organization’s social context is different. That said, in general, meaningful is not about how many people follow you, its about whether your use of social media furthers your business objectives – are you selling more, do you have greater mindshare, is your brand recognition increasing? These are the questions that you need to ask.
Here are 5 things I strongly suggest you don’t do with social media:
1. Don’t neglect “traditional” forms of market communications (paper advertising, Web advertising, newsletter, and so on) in favor of social media. Social media may be compelling but its value is largely unproven. Look upon social media as an opportunity with great potential. Is it a cornerstone of your market communications? Yes. Is it the foundation? No (at least, not yet).
2. Don’t be random in your engagement with the social media, which is to say don’t start and stop your engagement unless you absolutely have no choice. Sure, in times of overload you can reduce you postings to once per day or so but don’t abandon your streams of communications for weeks or months. Those people who followed you, for whatever reasons they did, will find it hard to reconnect after a long lull (Stephen Colbert on Twitter, I’m talking to you).
3. Don’t be irrelevant to your market. They will grow to expect a certain consistency in your communications and random junk will just make your core messaging – which is the reason you are bothering with social media at all – at best weak or at worst invisible.
Allow me to digress for a moment and note that there’s a service I think is totally ridiculous, which is founded on the idea of helping those with nothing to say find something to Twitter or blog about. The service is called Plinky, and their strategy is to prompt you by e-mail with a few questions every day. The result, should you answer the questions and post the results, will be a stream of random junk that at best will paint a pop culture pastiche of whatever you stand for and care about. If you have nothing to say, lurk and engage with other people’s comments, but don’t just dump crud into the sociosphere. Which leads me to …
4. Don’t try to use social media as a one way street that runs just from you to your supposedly adoring public unless you are Barack Obama, a news service, or some other kind of celebrity. You have to be really big or part of mainstream pop culture for your personal stream of consciousness to be interesting to a huge audience.
5. Don’t assume that your initial approach to social media is the correct approach. Test, verify, adapt, evolve. Repeat. In the sociosphere there’s not a single formula for success and worse than that, there’s not even an enduring formula. Sure, you need to have a theme or platform, but be willing and able to reinvent your approach as your marketplace evolves, as it surely will.
Follow these rules and you’ll avoid most of the basic mistakes that you can see being made over and over as individuals and corporations try to get to grips with the sociosphere.
