10 Golden Rules in Social Media Marketing

Background and context

Blogs, online communities, social media and then social networks: they have permanently changed online marketing. In this new landscape brands are in a constant dialogue with customers who increasingly play critical roles in advocacy and recommendation. The brand is only one guest among millions and the challenge for marketers is that while the rewards may be great, the risks are greater.

A different way of thinking to harness social media

There‟s a new type of transparency in customer relationships. The interruptive model of advertising continues weakening in favour of engagement. The challenge to persuade consumers to listen has replaced the ease of buying time to interrupt. Consumers are more conscious than ever of where and how they give their attention, and are ruthless in tuning out when the message doesn‟t resonate. Between Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google and the portals, there‟s a ceaseless stream of new technologies and techniques for marketers to try, and the roadmaps for many brands remain unclear.

Added to this is organisational complexity because effective social media ties together PR, advertising, customer service and corporate messaging. It demands cross functional teams with broader insights and skills than classic advertising required. Yet in the right hands it creates news, sparks discussion, delivers entertainment customers want, and achieves an engagement lost by the advertising industry. With the right team and ideas, brands can nurture consumer generated content, boosting discussion and the reach of their messages. Feeding the social media ecosystem places new challenges on website publishers, as they rework their content into malleable and exportable formats ready to invite participation.

Ten Golden Rules For effective social media marketing

For navigating the social media marketing journey there is a surprising amount in common among brands that succeed. From Cadbury‟s to Diet Coke, BMW to Skittles, the similarity in approach reveals the DNA for developing powerful social media marketing. These 10 Golden Rules emerged as not only being present among the campaigns that worked, but also being absent among those that failed to take off. They offer a strong foundation for best practice and remain neutral to the individual executional technologies and toolkits brands can choose from.

1. Stay

Once a brand is in a social media space they are in it for the long haul. There's an importance attached to not simply taking part, but continuing to take part.

The media brands represent the best examples of this, where tools like YouTube or Twitter have become additional broadcast channels for feeds of content from the likes of the BBC or CNET, with some media groups already clocking up tens of thousands of updates on Twitter in a relatively short space of time. Once content is malleable it adapts easily into different platforms and this approach can extend the reach of social media campaigns by embracing new platforms without any impacts on budget. It also positions the brands perfectly as new tools and techniques arrive, whether it‟s extensions to the wall on Facebook or the arrival of new platforms such as Kindle in the publishing industry.

2. Ease

Make participation simple, make participation a single click. The easier the participation, the higher the chance of involvement. For every one person who readily wants to write their opinions and comments, fifty or more may be ready to click on a voting tool to give an existing comment a star rating. Creating a group on Facebook may take commitment, but simply accepting an invitation from a trusted friend is effortless. Smart social media marketers make participation easy and give brand advocates additional tools to become more deeply involved in the message.

3. Initiate and then let go

Brands need to start the discussion but not set out to own it. It's an important distinction, repositioning the brand as initiator. In social media the brand is only one voice and smart marketers create content that sparks discussions which continue without their involvement. The loss of control on the web means brands cannot take responsibility for what happens once the message is released. It‟s also important from a regulatory perspective that they distance themselves from the conversations their customers subsequently have.

4. Think webspace, not website

Consumers rarely want to visit brands websites and for brands that see their online marketing model as simply about driving traffic to their site it‟s time to rethink the approach. While for retailers the direct response traffic generating model makes sense, for many firms this puts additional hurdles in the path of a consumer. When the goal is about shifting consumer perceptions and involving consumers in the discussion, the large social networks are where the consumer is spending their time and therefore a far better vehicle for reaching out to them. Example Sure Girl on Bebo.com/whatmakesyousweat One brand that understood this early on was the deodorant, Sure. Their SureGirl campaign on Bebo is a good example of reaching out to the target consumer where she is and taking the message to her rather than asking her to come to the message.

5. Release

Brands need to spread their content widely on the web. This is key to extending the message, a goal behind many online marketing campaigns. Taking the brand into social networks by setting up a presence is one solution, but there are many others alongside this that are not mutually exclusive. If the goal is to boost the reach of the brand message then first prize is to create content that can be distributed by its consumers. This means being comfortable with the release of images, videos, games and content that can be used by consumers and passed through their networks of friends. In the nineties this typically meant emails of content to seed groups with the hope of triggering a viral effect. In today‟s landscape email and messenger applications still play key roles but delivery channels are as likely to include Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, and the devices your content is seen on could as easily be an iPhone or wireless laptop rather than a cabled PC. That‟s why for extending the reach of consumer messaging, releasing assets to consumers online can achieve a breakthrough.

1. Learn from customer insight which type of content is likely to work and why
2. Start building assets for syndication
3. Remember that iconic brand assets may have long term appeal in social media, while current campaigns may lose their energy after a while
4. Ensure necessary copyrights are obtained to allow distribution
5. Create final assets
6. Release them on the platforms where the brand‟s customers spend most time
7. Make content tearable so it can be easily taken from your pages, copied, pasted and used by the consumer in their own social media environments
8. Reach out to customers directly, telling them the news with the right tone of voice for the brand

For these processes to work, the mindset of releasing content rather than controlling it needs to be clearly in place. Once the genie is out of the bottle there's no predicting how it will behave and as every brand has its vandals as well as its advocates, the business has to be prepared for any type of reaction. It‟s this authenticity that gives social media its value to the brands that get it right, but the lack of control is a stark reminder for brands that have anything to hide. Example: Marmite on Facebook Marmite‟s „love it / hate it‟ campaign on Facebook is a great example of a brand pushing itself out into the social spaces and offering its fans content they can – and want – to use. Something as simple as images from a PR campaign (like the Marmite sculpture of a kiss) to the iconic pack shots every brand stores on file – both can be powerful ways to create content that consumers can take further. The key is having a strategy that encourages its release.

6. Share

Encourage brand advocates to advocate
To accelerate the spread of the message brands need to actively encourage customers to share the content. This can be as simple as the „forward to a friend‟ mechanics built into the structure of many web pages or the more energetic feeds of content inside Facebook. Different audiences respond in different ways but most online social networks have strong mechanisms for letting people share content within opt-in groups.

7. Build tools and content for customers, not ‘marketing’ slogans

Marketers need to shift their mindset away from the simplicity of advertising if they‟re to succeed in social media. Although advertising models still flourish in social media (such as the skyscrapers graphical ad formats or background wallpapers on sites like MySpace and Yahoo), social media marketing is really about harnessing the consumer‟s personal social network to propagate the message. Persuading people to join in demands creative thinking, clear benefits to the consumer and strong reasons for them to pay attention. This is why the creation of compelling content or powerful tools that satisfy clear needs in people‟s lives is key to the challenge. The lack of depth in the messaging of traditional advertising means it lacks the richness needed for social media, and that‟s why marketers with an advertising mindset need to rethink their approach.

8. Encourage

Authenticity in marketing ideas is increasingly coming from the brand‟s community rather than the brand‟s agency. Social media has released the creative valves in millions of would-be film producers, artists and creatives that took YouTube and Facebook by storm. While the vast majority of content on YouTube remains far from where most brands would like to be seen, the ideas of this mass of talent can now readily be reviewed and cherry-picked.
Nurturing individual‟s creative talent can boost the authenticity of brand communication. From formal talent contests to recruiting brand adorers through Facebook, there are numerous models for nurturing their ideas and energy, encouraging them to create and enthuse.

9. Amplification

Using social media to amplify the effectiveness of offline marketing
The power and impact of social media doesn‟t demand a web centric marketing strategy. For brands heavily committed to classic media channels there are many options for integrating their online and offline strategies into a seamless whole, letting one fuel the other. Each channel and tool has its own strengths, but harnessed together they can amplify the effectiveness of each other.

This could be as simple as extending the reach or frequency of a television commercial by releasing it on YouTube, or releasing archived product shots of a brand‟s development over time. Similarly, using YouTube as another touch point for video demonstrations of the brand or interviews with the team behind it can increase the discoverability of content and build stronger customer connections.

10. Honesty: Be yourself, be transparent, be true

The web is an incredibly transparent place. Society has yet to feel the real impacts of the scale of this transparency, but marketers should be cautious about their approach when everything is literally a single click away. With Google‟s ability to decode the content of billions of web pages, and consumer publishing platforms that allow anyone to share what they‟ve discovered, there is a clock ticking for brands that are not honest with consumers or fail to fulfil on their promises. From motor companies to detergents, banks to soft drinks, dozens of global brands have already felt the rough side of social media.

Applying the 10 Golden Rules

The 10 Golden Rules are not intended to be an inflexible process, but instead a checklist of ideas marketers can test their approaches and campaigns against. All the excitement and potential of digital technologies is in no way a substitute for a good idea and marketers need strong ideas to fuel their social media campaigns. What the 10 Golden Rules succeed in doing is helping strong ideas stretch that much further.

Reflections

Social media has changed the landscape of marketing. Whether marketers are actively engaged in it, or still in the process of evaluation, understanding the models and approaches social media offers are key to making smarter decisions with marketing budgets across the board.

The irony is that for all the hype and excitement of the social media sector today, the phenomenon is still in its infancy. Thinking of where Google was in c1999 proves a good way of gaining perspective on where social media and online social networking will head. That‟s why this is neither something marketers can ignore nor delay. As the culture of marketing changes, it gravitates towards the thinking emerging from social media which is why understanding these rules of engagement is key for marketers in any sector and any discipline.

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Danny has been coaching firms in digital marketing for over 15 years. More than 45,000 people have attended his talks and courses in over 30 countries. He set up and ran the UK and European IAB trade associations for almost 10 years, was the pioneering publisher of Telegraph.co.uk, held the Vice Presidency of NBC’s European internet business, and has been a government policy advisor in the UK. He is chairman of the Digital Training Academy that coaches marketing teams to improve their ROI and founder of the Digital Strategy Consulting practice that creates internet marketing strategies for brands. He is a Commissioner at the digital marketing regulator in the UK, and the publisher of Netimperative and Digital Intelligence. He now coaches management teams, helping them accelerate their businesses and transform their organizations. Contact him on Danny@DigitalStrategyConsulting.com or http://uk.linkedin.com/in/dannymeadowsklue