I’ve been following Shama Kabani (@shama) on Twitter for quite some time. She has some great ideas about social media marketing and recently came out with a book entitled “The Zen of Social Media Marketing.” (Amazon affiliate link.) I’m putting this one on my reading list.
Shama recently authored an article in the April 2010 edition of “Online Strategies” Magazine (the article begins on page 6 in the electronic reader). She brings up some excellent points why some social media campaigns don’t succeed. In many cases it comes down to wrong expectations.
Great (but Wrong) Expectations
Many times, marketers try using “old school” methods to reach “new school” people. As Chris Brogan and Julien Smith pointed out in “Trust Agents” (check out my review) and Bob Garfield pointed out in “The Chaos Scenario” (I reviewed that one, too) that pool of potential customers hanging out in social media spaces aren’t looking to be “sold to.” The old methods of throwing out ads and commercials which work in the old media of T.V., radio and in print don’t work in new media.
The expectations of these marketers are incorrect. Instead of engaging they are pushing their message. Instead of working with the relationship-building back and forth flow of social media, they look at it as another venue for pitches and commercials. They are fighting the culture of those social spaces and losing and end up frustrated believing that social media marketing only works for “someone else.”
In her article, which contains excerpts from her book, Shama tells how she advises her clients to go with the Zen of social media, to go with the flow. Instead of bucking the trend and trying to force a message out to the masses, she encourages them to engage people.
You Can Do This
Any marketer can do what Shama and many, many others recommend and cultivate relationships people. Those engaged are not targets or just a demographic, they are people. They have real lives, real stories, and real problems which need solving. If you can add value to them they will look to you when it comes to buying the products or services you offer. Rob Snell of Gun Dog Supply described this quite well in his recent PubCon keynote in Dallas.
Excellent Example
Sometimes, though, cultivating a relationship isn’t quite necessary. Here’s a great example which happened to me just yesterday:
The company I work for recently sponsored a Twitter party. This was a first for us and I am keen to work out in detail how it went. Dipping into my previous life experience, I decided to analyze the tweets to see who was there, who said the most, what they said and when and if we left any questions unanswered.
I started out doing a search on Twitter, then copying and pasting the data I wanted to sort through and analyze into an Excel spreadsheet. As I went through the hour-and-a-half worth of tweets, I noted that copying and pasting from the search results on Twitter was rather tedious and time-consuming (at least I was installing software on a server at the time – multitasking made this time a lot more productive).
At one point during the arduous copy/paste operation I sent the following tweet:
A little while later I received this reply from twextract:
This is someone monitoring the traffic on Twitter looking for opportunities. I was asking for the very thing twextract offers. They popped up and offered a solution to help me solve a problem I asked for help in solving. This isn’t blindly pitching a product or service, this is social marketing done right.
It’s Not Microwave Fast
Other than in rare instances like the anecdote I shared above, social media marketing is not quick and easy. It’s not a microwave solution, it’s a crock pot (phrase blatantly stolen from Dave Ramsey). It takes time and effort, but if you take the time to do it right you will succeed in the end. Just ask Shama, or Chris, or Julien or Bob or Rob.
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i have tried social media marketing for getting our new products to be known on the market. it seems to work well specially if the audience is targeted .-
Hi Matthew – thank you for stopping by. It’s like the example I mentioned in this post, if you target the audience well it will work. However, you really have to also watch that you don’t start spamming. It’s a tightrope one has to walk to do this correctly.
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