Find Your Social Spark!
We’ve talked (and we’ll keep talking) about the need for a strategy to apply social media to your business. The islands of Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter accounts, Youtube Channels, and one-off blogs need to be reigned in and managed. A strategy integrating them into an overall marketing and execution plan is needed. These new media components can become important to how your organization grows its business, or they can become paid hobbies for fervent employees leaving you to ask later on whether any value was gleaned from their activities. Even after your strategy is developed, even after HR and Marketing have aligned your brand with your employees’ online behaviors, even after you’ve figured out how to reach a relevant target audience in their media; you need one last item to activate your social media strategy. You need to find your social spark.
Time and again, we see overzealous companies trying to ignite a fire, but with no real spark. They’re trying to build a bonfire that can be seen all across the social web. They want to attract as many people as possible to their brand, their product, their service. They’ve amassed their best content and product information (the wood for that bonfire); they’ve even stacked the cards in their favor and dumped a little kerosene into the mix with some blogger outreach and paid blogger programs; yet things just aren’t igniting as they’ve planned. They still don’t have any fire.
We’re finding that the answer can be different for different organizations. For Zappos, it was a Twitter aggregation model. For Siemens it was a focused Info-Center for employees to channel their social power. Dell lit a fire with IdeaStorm and @DellOutlet. Starbucks lit several raging fires starting with mystarbucksidea.com and then adding a blazing hot Starbucks Fan-page. Blendtec lit their fire with a viral youtube series Will It Blend? It takes a little creativity to find your spark, but it starts with a mindset change.
We see traditional corporations that move into Social Media adopting a defensive posture. They take the standard PR position of trying to manage the message. They might hire a PR Social Media Agency. This is the mindset change that needs to occur. You don’t want to manage the message, but engage the conversation. Think of it as a party with a room full of people. Don’t worry about the two people in the corner talking trash about you. Get the rest of the room to look to you as the conversation catalyst. Have everyone else want to get into your conversation. There will always be negative noise in the digital world. Don’t focus on snuffing it out. Focus on building the positive, collective voice so big that any negativity gets drowned out.
Sure moderation needs to occur, but it’s not the focus. Every time I see a job posting for a ‘Social Media Moderator’, I wonder how much different that organization would be if they hired a ‘Social Media Catalyst’ or a ‘Social Media Evangelist’ instead.
In the book, Groundswell by Charlene Li, Charlene lays out the requirements for sustaining a social networking site. She suggests that to be successful the site must:
- Enable people to connect in a new way
- Be effortless to sign up for
- Shift power from institutions to people
- Provide an open platform that facilitates partnerships
These points are all true, but they alone are not enough. Twitter had everyone one of these, but that fire smoldered along for over a year before igniting when Ashton Kutcher competed with CNN for the most followers. That event brought Twitter’s bonfire to life. Of course, the answer isn’t to go out and engage a movie star for your strategy, but asking these questions may help find your spark:
- How do you monetize all of the user-generated content out there about your products/services?
- What will spark the conversation?
- What’s your ‘pick up’ line? What do you hope the response to be?
- How will people even know about your conversation to begin with?
In your quest for the answer to these questions, you will hopefully discover your Social Spark.
