How to Avoid a Social Media Mess?
A classic case of a social media disaster is signing up on Facebook and Myspace and attaching your formal company profile in the 'About Me' section, or creating a blog on Blogger or Wordpress and filling it up with press releases, or better yet, leaving links that track back to your company website on every available thread related to shoes (if you?re in the shoe business) without writing even a word as a message.
But isn't this social media?
The trouble of these tactics is that while they are part of a viable social media campaign, they reek of insincerity and callousness because they ignore the basic premise of social media and make a mockery of it. Social media is centered on conversations and interaction between consumers and brands. It is way to bridge the gulf between brands and consumers by providing a platform wherein the two can meet, talk, discuss, interact, and enjoy.
Social media is based upon listening and understanding markets. According to the Cluetrain Manifesto, markets are conversations. A conversation consists of listening and talking. You cannot have a conversation without listening and without a conversation, the consumers and your market are not interested.
What is to be done then?
There is a new pattern emerging. A pattern in which people are meeting, connecting, organizing, sharing and collaborating in an unprecedented fashion - this pattern is called social media. If you want to use social media to promote your brand, you have to become a part of the pattern and talk, meet, connect, share, organize, and collaborate with your consumers.
Social media is founded upon digital experiences that result in word-of-mouth affirmation or condemnation of an experience through tools like blogs, forums, and social networking sites. When a brand makes an experience available to its users and consumers it opens a conversation that leads to the formation of a relationship which further leads to the creation of an affinity between the brand and the consumer. But in order to give shape to this relationship, marketers must first start a conversation.
Interact
Finding ways to interact with your consumers is the only way to implement social media. Be consistent in your dealings with the customer, if you have created a blog, update it with real posts, talk about something real and exciting inside the company, talk about your achievements and accomplishments, about challenges faced and overcome, about innovations made, about environmentally friendly policies.
All you have to do is start the conversation; your users will continue it for you.