Mal Chia – Southern Soapbox

If you spend much time on social media, you know how easy it is to connect and share with people you identify with.

It has unmistakably revolutionised how we interact and ultimately build relationships with each other.

One of the most significant changes is that we now have the ability to filter the content we are exposed whether by carefuly curating who we are following or searching for a hashtag (or topic, prefixed by a # such as #ausvotes) on Twitter.

While this increases the relevance of the news that we see, it is often the case that the views expressed in our Twitter feeds, blogs and podcasts echo our own, which is the reason we follow them in the first place.

Take for example the recent Federal election. My Twitter stream was filled with tweets supporting the National Broadband Network and decrying the Internet filter – two views I passionately support. If I wanted to know the other side of the argument, I wasn’t going to get it without stepping outside my circle on Twitter.

If you want to truly understand, you need the complete picture. You need to consciously get outside your personal social media echo chamber and follow someone whose views challenge our own and force us to answer the tough questions.

If you’ve been following the #socadl hashtag on Twitter the last week or so you would have seen some ranting directed at mainstream journos hating on social media.

The most recent of these came in the Sunday Mail, where tweeting was compared to ‘mind-farting’ and social media is enabling a generation of rudeness and selfishness.

Clearly these are people with no idea about social media and how it works. All they see is what they want to see.

And it’s understandable why.

The power of traditional media is predicated on the fact that the historically, the barriers to entry to become a publisher and thus be heard are insanely high and that being a journalist meant having exclusive access to stories as well as some talent to write. This scarcity meant that you could only find news that the publishers deemed worthy.

The emergence of new technologies including social media, however, has seen this power gradually shift from traditional media publishers to the hands of the people. These tools mean that everybody now has the capacity to be both a publisher and a journalist -  take this blog, for example.

The way we find and access the news has also changed. Instead of waiting for the morning paper or a TV broadcast to tell us the news, we can now find out what is happening anywhere around the world wherever and whenever we want. (More on this in my next post)

This scares the hell out of most traditional media outlets because we no longer rely on them solely to tell us what’s going on. They no longer control the news cycle as it now happens 24/7. In fact, you can expect the number of stories that break on social media to grow.

Traditional media is deluding itself by thinking that social media is irrelevant and/or dangerous. The very fact that these stories are becoming more frequent points to this very fear.

However, the revolution is happening with or without them and if they are to survive they must rethink their attitude toward social media and see it for the opportunity it is to reach out and actually interact with their audience, and not for the negative hype. For every offensive Facebook page, there are a dozen more that are genuinely useful and advance thought and conversation.

That’s right, conversation. Because that’s something traditional media by by being the very definition of broadcaster has very little concept of.

To quote the Cluetrain Manifesto, “markets are conversations”. You only need to look at the furore surrounding the BP and Nestle’s recent disasters to know that social media is where that conversation is happening today.

Last week, Michelle Prak asked on her blog where social media sits in an organisation. As social media becomes a mainstream activity, the question must be who within an organisation is ultimately responsible for it?

“Social media and PR work well together”

Michelle argues that since social media is about conversations, PR professionals are best suited to take advantage of it. Marketers, she says, are not as interested in what audiences are saying about their brands.

The problem I have with this, is the general misunderstanding about what exactly marketing is. I am a marketer, and in my mind, the essence of marketing is matching consumers with the right products and services that fulfils a need or want in their life. This encompasses everything from supply chain management and customer service to sales and communication.

By my definition, PR, advertising, digital, etc. are all fall under the umbrella discipline of marketing. This is not to say that I’m a PR expert, which I’m not. I’m a marketer with specialised expertise in marketing communications and digital media. Conversely, all PR people are also marketers and to extend that a little bit further, so too is everyone else in an organisation. Understanding what marketing is and what the implications are for business can only make you better at what you do. For instance, customer service are right at the coal face and have more interaction with customers than anyone else. They have as much responsibility for marketing an organisation and embodying what it stands for as someone with ‘marketing’ or ‘communications’ in their job title. By being aware of why it is important to stay on-brand and what that means, they are more able to do their job than someone with no clue about why they have to say or do the things their job demands.

Where was I? Oh, right.

To try and limit social media to just the realm of PR, advertising or any other niche discipline, is to restrict the potential social media has to fundamentally transform a business. Social media must have a multi-disciplinary, marketing-led approach that first and foremost takes into account business objectives before tactics and execution. Only by taking a step back to ask ‘why?’ will an organisation truly know how best it applies to their business.

“Social media fits within a business’s communications strategy”

The first instinct most marcomms people have when presented with something like social media is, how can I use this to broadcast my message? This is exactly the wrong approach to be taking. While the disintermediation of media has enormous advantages, it has almost meant that brands now think they can start broadcasting their message directly to their target market instead of going through a media channel. Just because a conversation is happening out there about your brand doesn’t give you the right to engage with them uninvited.

Thinking about social media purely as a communications tool ignores what I see as two of it’s biggest benefits. Instead of rushing into engage, organisations need to first listen and learn what their customer’s are saying and how they want to be engaged. Going beyond Google alerts and other searches, social media monitoring tools such as Radian 6 and Dialogix gives brands unprecedented ability to monitor and analyse what’s being said about them online.

This insight and access into the mind’s of their consumers allows brands to really build intimate relationships with their customers by tailoring and personalising their approach. Building massive followings and blindly bombarding them with offers and promotions is no different to the traditional advertising that audiences are already switching off to.

As the always insightful Jay Baer writes, a better use for social media might be to strengthen the relationships you already have, rather than create new ones with people you don’t know.

“Why would a consumer “friend” us or “fan” us or “follow” us in social media, unless they were either already a customer, or at the very least had us in their purchase consideration funnel? The average Facebook member becomes a fan of just two companies per month, yet is exposed to thousands of brands during that same period. People don’t experimentally engage with brands in social media, they engage with the brands they already support.”

While the industry is still incredibly nascent, it appears that the best use of social media is when it is approached holistically and not just focused on the conversation but also on the insights into what an organisation’s customers think and say.

Read Michelle’s original post.