How to avoid social media crash landings

If, in the early years of the 20th century, the Wright Brothers had set out to build a machine that would carry hundreds of passengers across the Atlantic, with toilets fore and aft, they would have failed.

Instead, they focused on the short-term goal, which in their case was to prove that it was possible for a self-powered, heaver-than-air machine to fly. The distance was unimportant, they wanted to see if it worked.

So when the Wright Flyer bumped back onto the Kittyhawk sands after its maiden flight - a distance of a mere 120 feet - they had achieved what they set out to do.

Whilst reluctant to drag the reader away from aviation pioneers and back into the 21st century world of social media marketing, the parallel is an important one: you cannot expect to go into social media marketing and achieve everything at once. You have to learn to walk before you can run. Or, to extend the earlier analogy, if you want your brand to really fly, you've got to do the basics first.

Here's why - and what you can do about it.     It's a really a question of time, expertise and focus.

Time, because social media marketing unavoidably takes up a lot of your time - or the time of key, expert people within your company. So if you leap into every available social media channel, you will end up doing them badly - because there are simply not enough hours in the day.

The second reason is that, while you have expertise in your field, you do not necessarily know the social media world quite so completely. You will therefore make mistakes, and it makes an awful lot of sense to make small mistakes early on, rather than big ones.

And it becomes impossible to manage. The infrastructure required for a well-managed and effective social media strategy takes time to build and to mature. And of course, who has time to manage the project - to take an bird's eye view of the whole social media operation - if your every waking hour is spent furiously blogging, tweeting and commenting.

Don't take unnecessary risks
There is an additional point in that, as marketers, we need to get buy-in from the purse holders and senior decision makers. And the best way to cajole budget from them is to show early successes. Reduce risks into risklets. Take on small projects and set small, achievable objectives. Prove the principle. 120 feet of sand doesn't sound much, but it's the only encouragement the Wright Brothers needed.

The reason for writing this blog is that I have recently been talking to a client about 'starting out' in social media marketing. He recognises the potential, but is understandably wary of something he hasn't done before. I realised that the best way was to talk through the gradual steps he might take, which were as follows.

1. Advertising. Yes, that's right advertising. This was a client that had always used traditional industry press to gain brand awareness, generate leads etc. In the technical, niche market in which the client operated, this had proved successful. Our conversation had begun with a request that we help him with his next campaign, at which point I realised he could gain a lot from social media marketing - just as long as we didn't try to run before we could walk. So we planned a campaign and presented creative concepts - but also introduced the second step towards social media marketing.
2. Content. Again, this is perhaps nothing new. But the role of content has changed dramatically We talked about the call to action in the ads and recommended replacing the "call 01234 56780 for more information" with "download our latest whitepaper" and offered an intriguing and focused piece of content that was relevant to the target audience.
3. Content development. The next point to broach was that this piece of content could not be a one-off. We wanted to show to the target audience that it was worth their while to begin engaging with the brand. As Jason Van Orden puts it in his excellent podcast Mastering New Media, it is about a value exchange. A customer will only give up their valuable time and attention if you offer something valuable in exchange. And if my client's brand became known as a source of valuable information, we start to get somewhere. Also, by planning the content in advance, you can tell people what is coming up, therefore giving them a reason to give you their email - much more likely to succeed than inserting a huge data capture obstacle in the way of every visitor.
4. Channel development. This is the point where it is easy to look at the sweet trolley and tell the waitress you'll have a bit of everything. Resist the temptation. My advice to my client was first to look at blogging as a channel. To introduce a regular, personal angle to the presentation of the content described above - rather than simply publishing the content to the corporate website - and to get used to contributing on a weekly basis. A bit like going for the profiteroles and only trying the treacle tart if you have room afterwards.
5. Twitter. If the appetite is there, Twitter is next. To open a Twitter account and to use it as a means not only to get feedback from content readers, but also to help get traffic coming through to the blog. It takes more time, but we would help train the client and help them to do it effectively.
6. Repurposing. The next step - if all has gone well thus far - would be to consider non-text content. For some people, this would be an earlier stage. For us, we felt it was best to start with written content and work our way up. This of course opens up the world of YouTube, Vimeo and further channels for content 'distribution'.
7. Syndication, extension, world domination. If the previous steps have been followed in order, with measurement of success versus [sensible] objectives, we should have a pretty good social media presence by now. This may be 6 months away or two years away. It doesn't matter. But at this stage there will be a host of options open to the client because there will be a thoough understanding of what social media is doing for them, of the time an resource it takes up, and of what they can expect to gain from it. This knowledge was not there at Day 1, and it is only a gradual planned process that helps a company to exploit it properly.

Of course, my client is only just starting out. But I look forward to sharing news as his journey pogresses. And although right now he is just preparing for take-off, he knows that each flight will prepare him to go further with the next one.