Social Media Marketing: What’s the Goal?

Start with a question: What's the goal for your social media strategy?

In grade nine I took my first (and last) computer programming class. For our final project, we were asked to build a simple game. Mine was called ‘catch the bugs’.  The bugs (square blocks) would fall from the top of the screen and the object of the game was to catch them in your basket (also a square block). I did horribly in that class largely because my basket didn’t actually catch the bugs…they just passed right on through. So as simple as the design of mattscottnelson.com is, I relied heavily on helpful people online in forums and blogs.

Rob Feltz at The Four O’Clock Project was particularly helpful and revealed a lot about what our goal should be as marketers when it comes to social media strategy.

I ran into a hurdle with a piece of code featured on his site, and after hours of troubleshooting turned to Rob for help.    I sent him the code in question and that same afternoon he responded with the help I needed. One simple, thoughtful interaction converted me from a random google searcher into a subscriber and ultimately, a word of mouth promoter.

What is your organization’s prime social media marketing goal?

Start by leaving monetization and ROI at the door. Our social media strategy needs to have deadly focus on one key goal: Add value – add as much value we can to as many people as possible – whether they are customers, prospects, press or none of the above. Adding enough value, and we be come a part of someones daily routine – something no traditional advertising campaign can offer.

If you’re unsure how to add value, learn from the ones who do it well – the authors of your favorite blogs. Also, check out an article that Twitter recently released called Twitter 101 for business.

This week, John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing wrote a post called The ROI of Social Networking in response to complaints about organizations stagnating social networking efforts with requests for ROI. John’s response: “…How does your boss measure the ROI of attending Chamber mixers, participating in Associations, and dropping in on networking luncheons? Done correctly, social networking on sites like Facebook is really no different…”

To his point I’d add customer service, customer affinity and delight:

• Customer Service: Traditional customer service ROI is also intangible but nobody questions its necessity.  Imagine a customer finds a software bug on the day of the launch?  Broadcast it across all channels.  Post answers to simple and common questions.  The opportunities are endless and allow you to broadcast one-to-many.
• Customer Affinity: It’s a lot harder to get angry with someone we know.  When  customers build relationships online with the people behind the products, they are a lot less likely to blow up at a customer service rep or make a lot of negative noise online.  Often a negative experience can be culled immediately in a one-to-one encounter online.
• Delight: When apple designs elegant packaging they aren’t thinking ROI – they’re thinking post-purchase delight.   Post-purchase delight is the heart of word-of-mouth and word of mouth can’t be adequately measured against ROI.

If you’re a lone internal advocate for the value of social media marketing and networking, hopefully John Jantsch’s insights and this article are of some help.  Your position (however necessary) is not an enviable place to be.  Everyone in your business thinks they know social media… because they have a Facebook page.

Tagged as: customer service, marketing, social media, twitter