As my profile in the marketing and digital scene in Australia has increased, I get asked for advice by businesses more often. Sometimes this is as part of the panel discussions for Nett Magazine where we troubleshoot the online strategies for a small business, sometimes just other business owners looking for advice on Twitter.
What is interesting is that often the question I am asked is the wrong one. For example; "How can I use Twitter and Facebook to increase sales and brand awareness?" or "How can I generate an income through social media?"
The truth of social media is that if the question refers to your own goals, the answer is doomed to failure. Social media relies on the other people in the conversation and not what you want to make them do.
It's not about you!
If you create a strategy focussed on your own benefits, ironically, you'll find you benefit very little. Creating link after optimised link, and tracking clicks and conversions to determine an ROIto justify the failure or success of a campaign, may work in search engine marketing, but is an absolute disaster if you transfer that theory to Twitter or forums or any other social media platform. Social media is an engagement medium, not an advertising one, and this fundamental difference is what separates the savvy online marketers from those who insist on making decisions based solely on zeroes and ones tracked on a balance sheet. Guess who has the stronger long term model.
Instead, if you turn the question on its head, you can potentially make a lot of money.
By asking "How can I use social media to help my target audience achieve their goals better?", you may end up developing a strategy where the happy side-product is more and more of that target audience flocking to your brand, increasing awareness and thereby increasing sales. Sure, this is much harder to track and can take a lot longer to achieve, but the rewards can be huge and long-lasting. Relationship marketing means building a large customer base that not only buys from you again and again but also advocates your brand, snowballing your business.
Putting customers in control
The problem is that most businesses are just not that used to giving away control like this. Traditional marketing has revolved around telling consumers how to behave, what to buy, blasting messages to the masses in the hope that the percentages get you over the line and make a profit. But social media is changing all this.
Why is this so? Because no brand has control over the message in these spaces. The users do. Your customers do. Telling them to behave the way you want them to in order to achieve your goals is tantamount to herding cats. But, conversely, provide your target audience with tools or content that is genuinely useful to them in achieving their goals and you won't need to preach to them, they'll start spreading your message for you.
Jeff Jarvis, in his recent book What Would Google Do?, tells how Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook explained this concept to some of the world's greatest business leaders and media magnates. Zuckerberg's point - you can't create communities. Communities already exist, doing whatever it is they want to do. Facebook didn't create a community any more than the local pub created the village it sits in. What Facebook - and the pub - do is provide the venue and the tools/facilities to enable people to organise their own social lives better. Zuckerberg calls this "elegant organisation" - helping the communities that already exist to organise their activities and achieve their goals better.
So, when considering how your business or brand could use social media to increase sales or brand awareness or whatever, think instead about the customer's goals and provide them with elegant solutions to achieve those goals through simple engagement and clever design.
To paraphrase Spock from Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan; on the web...
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
Your goals are irrelevant. Serve the goals of the many with elegant organisaton, stand back and watch your goals happen by accident.
