The By-Product of Social Media Becoming a Buzzword
If you work in the web / interactive marketing industry you have no doubt had to sit your clients down and have the social media talk. The whole social media buzzword comes up in just about every conversation these days. Something that I have found myself having to do is to debunk a lot of pre-conceived notions as to what social media can bring to a customers bottom line.
While I agree that there is no better tool for getting the message out there, it still all comes down to the message. If a clients message is not as good as their competitors message, or their product or service description is lacking, it’s going to get pointed out a lot quicker in a user generated content environment than it is anywhere else. Now, this is not to say that all of our clients have bad products or services, let’s just say that they have a great product or service but they don’t do a good job “selling” it in an interactive environment. I will go as far as to say they might have an awesome product but are promoting it with dry white-papers or boring static content and product pages that, frankly, no one wants to read. Adding social media to the mix is just going to irritate the problem instead of making it better…
I think that before pushing existing content onto the social spectrum, a close evaluation should be done to see if the information on hand is in tip-top shape. This blog post comes on the heels of another post I recently launched where I talked about how Social Media has caused a lot of us in the industry to stop preaching the basics of web2.0 to our clients, primarily blogging.
As I mentioned earlier, I find myself debunking a lot of myths about Social Media with people that I talk to today, and this is probably partly my fault, I talk about it a lot. Probably because as long as I have been in this industry, no greater tool has come along for pushing content and building an audience, but losing sight of the fact that social media is a tool has given a lot of businesses the idea that they can just plug into it and boom! overnight success!! This is not the case.
Granted, having a presence in the social realm should be a top priority for any business, regardless. I always tell clients that the conversation is going on anyway, you may as well have a voice, but it’s the voice (aka your message) that needs to be right on target and where you focus your efforts.
As I watch clients sit there as we discuss social media I can’t help but notice their wide hopeful eyes, and misleading clients is something my partners and I would rather get stung by hornets than do, so we are cautious as we go into our spill to emphasize that it’s all going to come back to what they are already doing. If they are doing a terrible job promoting their brand right now, it’s going to be compounded by adding social media. They need to re-evaluate the basics before going into any type of social campaign…
I see this wide-eyed hopefulness that we have to debunk, or rain on, as one of the biggest byproducts of social media becoming a buzzword.
Related Posts:
