Social Marketing is Strategy. Social Media is Id. (Part I)

When marketing practitioners discuss the tools of the trade amongst ourselves, we usually manage to keep the customer in mind. We do care about the fact that someone has to earn the money we spend, and we need to produce measurable results. To get there, we may recommend a certain level of print or online investment to get certain shares of voice, or certain mixes of tactics to get viral effects. But we also know clients have budget, culture and operation limits that can make these targets impossible. Those limits can force us to re-focus tactics around events (like tradeshows) or calendar cycles (like peak quarters) that tend to drive sales outcomes.

Unfortunately, too many in our trade lose this sanity-check when it comes to social networks. They suddenly assume clients have tons of headcount to maintain social presences, or can get their leadership to constantly post, or field lots of social network sites. In reality, the same forces that hold back our traditional media tactics are the same ones holding back what we can do in social media. And if you’re a smart marketer, you should be making these limits part of your strategic planning from the start.

It also doesn’t help that some folks mash together the client’s ongoing brand management with their day-to-day sales needs. You can’t address the different needs of reputation management and sales performance with one quick fix. It’s also true that some social media is seeing sky-high audience penetration and frequency. But it’s not accurate to claim a client can’t “keep up” unless they “go big” with a wide palette of social outreach. In reality, what these marketers should be doing is competitive social-presence benchmarking, customer preference research, and sales analytics – in short, the insights and outcomes they’re being paid to produce!

It’s time to cut through the chatter. Social marketing (the practice) and social media (the toolset) are completely different animals, with completely different thinking. Here’s why:

1. Social marketing is using social tools to carry out your marketing and customer care strategy with social tools. The way you configure or scale it is no different from any other tool you already know. In fact, you should tailor these tools to specific products, product / service lines, solutions, customer groups or demographic levels, just as you already do for your current marketing and customer care tactics. You should measure and analyze their results, just like you do for your existing tools. You can do all this because your stakeholders accept social marketing as the limited and commercial dialogue it is; that’s what makes it strategic.
2. Social media is an ongoing exchange (wanted or not) between your organization and its stakeholders. The difference is that it uses social tools and not email or phone calls. Forget the word “media;” it’s a shared experience, not a method mediated by anyone. You can’t control or own it, no matter how many people or how much money you throw at it. Emotional, situational, and utterly frank, social media is the Id of your market. Like a force of nature, its true value to you is as a barometer of your brand. Use it to find your place in the world; monitor it for changes in competition; gain insights from it about other things that hit your brand; but don’t try to control it.

Failing to get this difference between marketing and media is how a lot of organizations often get into trouble. They bite off more in marketing than their entire institution can chew. Worse yet, they try to market to a mood that’s in no mood to be marketed to. We’ll cover a couple recent high-profile examples in our next post …