Intergration

With Halloween already becoming a distant memory we will all have packed away our ghoulish costumes for another year. Sadly, this isn’t the case in the business world as they have to suffer a degree of horror all year round, particularly in the world of social media. Many have discovered to their chagrin just how black the dark side of social media really can be and the results of those public outcries can be very hard to come back from. Here are some right clangers you may or may not have been aware of.

The wrong way to promote your service

4AutoInsuranceQuote pride themselves on being on the cutting edge of providing the best auto insurance quotes online, shame they didn’t read the dictionary for the meanings of tact and diplomacy. The entertainment world was rocked in November 2013 when it was announced that the Fast and Furious actor Paul Walker had died in a horrific car crash. While everyone was in mourning this company decided it would be a good idea, the day following the crash, to post on Twitter that they hoped he had auto insurance, even posting directly on Walker’s own Twitter. Not content with that they went on to post the same question on numerous media sites. The public backlash was of epic proportion and rightly so, some so called digital marketing guru deserved a kick in the pants for that clanger.

Mayday!

One side of social media which has taken off big style is ‘complaintvertising’ where users who haven’t received satisfaction from the companies themselves buy advertising space on Facebook, Twitter etc in order to air their grievances and taunt brands. BA discovered the power of this when a hair care entrepreneur from Chicago used the Twitter self-service advertising platform to post a Tweet, which was featured, declaring “Don’t fly @British_Airways their customer service is horrendous”. He and his father had flown business class to Paris with BA and the company had lost dad’s luggage. When they failed to respond to his complaints he took the matter into his own hands. The ad cost $1000 and was viewed by over 50,000 Twitter followers in the US and UK where the ad was promoted.

Auto-Tweet Nightmare

Most corporations who Tweet seemingly constantly have auto tweets set up in advance and set to post at regular intervals. The failure to check these auto tweets proved to be extremely costly for Tesco. When the horse meat scandal broke and it was the only news in the media one of the supermarket giants auto tweets said that “It’s sleepy time so we’re off to hit the hay”. The complaints flowed in in their thousands and Tesco were forced to respond with an apology that the tweet had been scheduled before the situation had come to light and it was never their intention to make light of it. The following day several full page adds appeared in the national dailies apologising for the ‘unacceptable situation’ and vowing that the company would never make that mistake again.

Time those Q & A’s

Live ‘tweet ups’ where company CEO’s take part in the social media equivalent of a question and answer service are hugely popular as a way of raising the profile of a company and making it seem human. Timing of these is key and needs to be strictly managed, they should not be held on the day a company has announced a 10% price hike as British Gas did. Customer Services Director Bert Pijls was the unfortunate soul hosting this tweet up and you have to wonder who was behind this social marketing strategy and whether it was done on purpose.

If you run a business, you’ve no doubt been told that you need to be utilising social media, as “everyone is” and if you don’t, you’ll get left behind.

No doubt you’ve setup a Facebook page and a Twitter account (you may even have been persuaded to put a Google+ page together, following all the hype about its value for businesses over the last couple of years), and have waited for the customers to roll in.

And waited. And waited…

An interesting article on SiteProNews – http://www.sitepronews.com/2014/10/17/email-vs-social-media-marketing-facts-2/ – raises the same point, then goes on to suggest that email marketing is “where it’s at” in terms of promoting your business.

Certainly, there is far more value to a business in having a quality email list of potential clients than having a few hundred (or even thousand) Facebook Likes and Twitter Followers; for the simple reason that the key word in the description “social media” is the word “social”. ie people use Facebook to learn what their friends are up to and find out which Game of Thrones character they would be if they’d been born in Belgium (or something).

Similarly, Twitter is a means for making short observations about news stories and finding out about cool websites that your favourite member of One Direction has visited in the last few minutes.

So is there really a place for business in social media? If you’re like 90% of businesses, you’re almost certainly wondering what all the fuss is about. However, when done the right way, social media can be a great means of targeting prospective customers who you would never have been able to reach any other way.

Essentially, it’s a stepping stone to getting people to visit your website, then putting them into your normal sales process as you would do with anyone who makes an enquiry. There is an added bonus, too, in that Google is keen on sites having links from other sites, and social media provides a great medium for you to promote your website – thus acquiring links from bloggers etc over time. (Links directly from Facebook are not of any value for search ranking purposes – though Twitter links can be of some value in this regard).

So you should certainly include social media as part of your online marketing mix, but you need to play to its strengths – eg immediacy, shareability – rather than expecting it to provide a constant stream of new business through regurgitating the same old boring corporate rubbish that people have come to Facebook and Twitter to avoid.