Social media is not for interns

There was a time not long ago when so called “experts” talked about how easy social media was to operate.  ”Huck an intern on it.” After all it’s only a twitter account, Facebook fan page and/or blog.

Today’s organizations should realize that assigning the responsibility of social media to an intern does a few things that are not necessarily great for their brand.

1.) Puts front-line communications of the brand message in the hands of the inexperienced.  If you wouldn’t position your intern to pitch your biggest client in a lead capacity, don’t put a mass communications tool(s) in their hands either.

2.) Puts inexperienced intern in a position where they may be forced to make a critical “judgement call” decision publicly and in real-time.

In both cases, serious damage could be done to the brand “when” the situation is mishandled.  Often it’s a matter of time, not if but when.

Here’s another perspective.  Assign a value to your brand. Once you’ve estimated the financial value of your brand – $10M, $100 million dollars, measure that against how old your company is.  Then realize that it can all be negatively and dramatically impacted with an ill-advised tweet, video, blog post or photograph.

Sure many executives today are social media rookies, however, they should know what’s critical to communicate about their businesses and they have the authority that comes with their positions to back it up. In many cases the simple fact that the executive is the one communicating builds credibility, credibility that could lead to business.

Social media is not a place for interns to learn about your business via real-time interactions with your customers.

Your top line executives cannot afford to be “too busy.”  The world is a different place today for business and organizations, if your CEO, VP Marketing, VP Communications are not prepared to operate in this space to some degree and they’re not prepared to learn more about social media, your organization is at a severe disadvantage.

How would you like to wake up one morning as the CEO of a publicly traded company to find out your stock “allegedly” lost $180 million dollars in value?  The result of a song that went viral on Youtube.  You didn’t see it coming because you were “too busy.”

The above blog post link refers to the “cost of inaction,” I would offer an alternative to that – “cost of ignorance” could actually be proved in many cases.  Ignoring the implications of social media on your business model and its frontline communications or subsequently handing this important aspect of business communications to an intern is in my opinion foolish.

Social media vs traditional advertising

When was the last time the number of “impressions” your ad campaign generated also told you how many conversations about your brand were happening in real-time?

When was the last time “frequency” explained how many times a customer mentioned your brand, product or service to others and the sentiment of that comment?

When was the last time the above information actually told you “why” people were buying your stuff?  Or why they didn’t buy?

The truth is, most organizations despite the decline are still spending large dollars in the traditional advertising space and are justifying these expenditures on metrics that are estimates in many cases.  Then those same executives look at social media investments with risk in their eyes, a lack of understanding and claiming there’s no way to measure.

Top executives claim there’s no budget for social media.

What they’re really saying is “we don’t understand.”  Then they provide a media buyer with $250,000.00 or more to go fire away at the big three, print, television, radio for a 90 day campaign.  Why?  Not because it’s necessarily the right answer but because it’s what they understand and the safe move.  Now in this recovering economy there are shifts in these patterns to be sure.  Much of the traditional ad industry is feeling the effects.

Every once and a while, I come across an executive who has thought the above questions through and has realized that the ability to hold conversations, build rapport, inspire action directly on a mass scale or one on one and track all of those activities is definitely appealing. “Welcome to the social web.”

Social media metrics do exist, they’re just different.

Social media is word-of-mouth advertising ON FIRE!  You have to change how you look at measuring things.  Measuring conversations is a hands on job.  You can’t just tally up the traffic numbers and say we won.  You have to dig deeper than that and it is possible to do so.

A strong online campaign will demonstrate “engagement” levels that will include a number of things.

My definition of social media “impressions” would constitute the number of times elements of your campaign get mentioned across blogs, articles, comments, video, images, mass-media, micro-sharing platforms, social networks.  This information would also include, “sentiment and influence within micro-tribes.”

Beyond just eyes seeing the message, many other things can be identified.  Did your message move or inspire further actions or discussion publicly online?  If it did, this can almost certainly be tracked.

What was the sentiment of action taken?  Are citizens blogging about your message, brand, product or service positively or negatively?  If they explain their position and why they feel the way they do that can be identified.  Did they spoof your television ad on Youtube?  Did they create a twitter hashtag and engage others on Twitter?

The interaction and what can learned within the social dynamics identified can help your organization understand your customer and their relationships or “social networks” better.  That understanding can lead to emotional engagements, emotional engagements can lead to influence and influence leads to action.  The social web is where you need to commit your resources long-term and you need to do it, yesterday.

Where’s the value?

The value is in the human connections and relationships generated between your brand and your customer.  Those connections properly nurtured will build loyalty and loyalty means repeat business and influencing new business.  The social web is the perfect environment for this.  That’s where the value is.  This doesn’t happen overnight and it isn’t easy.  However, the ability to amplify a message is immense and shouldn’t be ignored.  The problem isn’t with the social web, the problem is with current organizational mind-sets and it’s time for a change.  If you truly understood the social web, you’d never call it a fad.

• The Social Web Isn’t Just for the Young Anymore (gigaom.com)
• Forrester: Social networking grows up (infoworld.com)

fusedlogic Food Bank Challenge

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