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Getting Social with Social Media It's the latest trend in an endless and rapidly changing digital landscape – it's Social Media. Some may argue that it’s a bit more than simply a trend, but more an evolution of the premise that people want to be able to communicate in a democratic and free-thinking environment. An environment that enables brand owners to have conversations with their users in real-time and across multiple digital channels, writes Yoav Tchelet, digital director at Joe Public Ad Agency.
Either way, Social Media is not something you can ignore, if the latest statistics are anything to go by.
Facebook currently boasts just over 1.8 million South African users and is growing every day. Twitter, the ingenious micro-blogging platform, is still small in the South African market compared with Facebook, but the uptake of this platform and its ease of communication is something to watch very carefully.
There are a number of other social marketing platforms, way too many to mention in this article, hence the use of the largest and most popular as examples.
But my concern is the lack of knowledge and understanding that many brands have of the opportunities that are present via Social Media.
Firstly, there is the problem of brands viewing these platforms as an opportunity for their biggest opponents and dissatisfied customers to knock their brand in a free and democratic environment.
“What if we get a wrath of negative comments about our brand?” Well, if that is the case, it may be a good thing to be out and about in the Social Media world, as this is probably a good indication that you need to fix something about your brand. Another thing to bear in mind is that people welcome the opportunity to communicate with brand owners in an open and unpretentious environment – your brand will only benefit from this in the long term.
I am sure that in time you will have both lovers of your brand and brand haters, but the brand lovers will assist you in defending your brand while giving you the opportunity to manage your problems while giving users a voice to assist you in fixing whatever requires fixing.
Social Media allows you to get down and dirty, so to speak. It gives you the ability to truly connect with your audience and delve into the mindsets of your users. Are you afraid of losing control of your brand?
If you think that if you don’t have a controlled presence on the various social media platforms it will remove the ability of people to talk about you, then you are mistaken. People out there are already talking about you in forums, closed Facebook groups, blogs, tweets and more.
You don’t have control and you are better off joining the conversation and engaging with these users – your brand will reap the rewards in the long run.
Most Social Media tools are free and at face value, it seems quite easy to set up a Twitter account, start a blog and set up a fan page on Facebook. It's also quite easy to designate someone in marketing to 'look' after it and make sure it 'works'.
What many brands don’t take into account is that you wouldn’t simply palm off part of your marketing strategy to someone in the marketing department and ensure it 'works' – you would spend a considerable amount of time understanding how it would be aligned with the overall marketing strategy and how it would affect the brand and what kind of measurables are in place for the success of the campaign.
So, too, with Social Media it takes experience, perspective and time to effectively develop and execute a long-term, successful strategy.
I stress the importance of long-term, as Social Media is not a quick-fix strategy to employ and requires careful planning and dedicated, skilled and experienced people to make it work. Social Media is rapidly evolving, and having a strategy to effectively tackle this medium is an important part of any brand strategy. I think Rupert Murdoch sums it up perfectly: "There is so much media now with the Internet and people, and so easy and so cheap to start a newspaper or start a magazine, there’s just millions of voices and people wanting to be heard.”
