Prior to my most recent reunion activities I very rarely made any contact with some of my old classmates.  It’s not that I didn’t like them, it just that it was too cumbersome to reconnect.  I’ve written about the soul of marketing before and what it takes to connect with your audience or target market (more on that here), but what still fascinates me is that many marketers still attempt to use traditional methods on social media platforms. Todd Defren, principal of SHIFT Communications (as quoted on SocialMediaExaminer.com), put it this way “You are in the findability department. The marketing department is dead.”

So, how are you connecting with your audience?

Both memorable content and memorable moments are needed, but if I had to choose….

How about you?  Are you creating memorable moments?

I often talk about being authentic or “having a soul”.  I don’t mean that cliched form of authenticity, but a genuineness that comes from the soul and being truly human.  Last time I checked most companies were still made up largely of human beings.  If this is true, then why do so many businesses find it difficult to engage their customers, clients, partners or whatever label they might prescribe to in meaningful ways online?  Having been a part of some of those businesses I would say the single biggest factor is fear.  Fear of saying something stupid, damaging or can we say even illegal or in violation of some industry or government regulation.

At some point we must all drop our fear and our proverbial guard in order to trust one another.  When we do this great things happen, businesses grow, new markets are developed, products are improved and countless many other things.

So, can I trust you? You can trust me.  I promise.

During my adventure racing days I learned at least four valuable lessons that I think can apply to any social media marketing effort.

1. It’s harder than it seems – Sure, riding a few miles, running a few and paddling down a river, that’s easy. I can do that in my sleep. But, no one told us about the 100-degree heat and humidity of 75% and stinging nettle that shredded our legs and arms half way into the race. In social media things usually just don’t happen overnight. It takes time to build an audience, followers and relationships. It’s like planting seeds; they don’t germinate overnight either.
2. You will get lost – Even with the best plan or strategy it’s still easy to get lost. At night everything looks the same on the map. You can’t see any contours of the land and you have to go by strong visual cues like roads or streams and rivers. Social media is the same. Of course, there must be a strategy, but things happen and unless there is extreme focus and knowledge of exactly where you’re at on the “map” it’s easy to lose course. Expect to get lost, because you will. Have a plan for it and you can make adjustments quickly.
3. Stuff happens – One race that our team participated in was in the winter in North Georgia. The temperatures in that region of the U.S. are usually in the mid 40’s that time of year. Our team was from the Mid-West so that was fairly warm for us. We packed light and “expected” normal conditions. On our drive there a cold front moved into Georgia and the temperatures plummeted. Race morning the temperature was -4 degrees with wind chills around – 40. Needless to say, my teammate and I were the first cases of frostbite ever recorded in the local hospital. Lesson learned? Always expected the unexpected. I doubt Nestle expected the firestorm of negative publicity and attention on their Facebook fan page earlier this year as evidenced by their initial response, but had they expected to deal with such scenarios they could have mitigated much of the reaction and helped to diffuse the situation rather than adding fuel to the fire.
4. Giving up is easy – It’s easy to do, give up, especially when you don’t see any results for a long time. There would be races that my team would be at the back of the field, but I knew that races often had a very high attrition rate and that if we merely finished we’d be in the top finishers. In adventure racing finishing is often the goal. In a social media marketing strategy the objective is likely to be to develop relationships and convert those relationships into revenue or customer service opportunities. Another example to illustrate this point is a few species of bamboo will develop a small shoot the first year of growth and that shoot will hardly grow any height in the next 3 years, but in year 5 that plant will grow to be over 100’ tall. The previous 4 years were spent in preparation, building a strong root system to support the extremely rapid growth that was about to come. I’m not advocating that businesses spend 4 years of marketing dollars to build social communities, but many businesses become impatient with their efforts and give up right before they might have experienced passing many of their competitors because they simply gave up too soon.

I hope you will find some of my life lessons useful. Do you have any life lessons that apply to social media marketing? Let’s discuss.

To thine own self be true. Very profound words for a post about social media strategy and yet they are the foundation for developing any strategy that we may pursue regardless of marketing channel. The phrase is simple yet very difficult to achieve. When I consult with clients that state their interest in developing a social media strategy I always start with a simple set of questions. Like the phrase the questions are simple and difficult to answer, but it is essential that businesses answer them or any marketing efforts that they undertake are likely to be at best less effective than they could be and at worst a complete waste of money and potentially damaging to any branding that they’ve been able to achieve in the past.

In keeping with our good friend Polonius’ words I’ve grouped the 7 steps into 3 distinct categories: Know thyself; Know thy customer and Know thy plan.

Know thyself (Brand)

1. What differentiates your brand?
This is the essence of your brand. When people hear (Your Brand Name) what do you want those people to think? You should be able to distill it down to 1 word or at most a single VERY short phrase. Think: Mercedes = Quality, Nordstrom = Customer Service, Apple = Innovation.

2. What’s the message? The 30 second infomercial is dead. Think 140 characters or less.

Know thy Customer

3. How will you be authentic?
Let’s face it companies, no matter how big or small, are just soulless entities? How will you engage your audience to provide that human touch to your business?

4. What is your current relationship with your target audience?
• Nothing
• Aware of you – Not yet a customer
• Customer – Single action or very low frequency
• Repeat customer – Loves product/service, loyal customer
• Advocates – promotes product use to others

Select two or no more than three that are next to each other to achieve focus of the program or campaign. For example, it is too difficult and disjointed to try to message to those customers that are only aware and to those that are enthusiasts.

Know thy Plan

5. Where does your audience hang out in the online world? How do they use social media?
Marketing 101 – be where your audience is. It’s important to understand your audience’s behavior and disposition toward certain social media technologies and platforms. Do you have a retail establishment and is your target audience younger? If so, mobile platforms like foursquare, Gowalla and Twitter might see high usage among your target population. Are they stay at home moms with two toddlers? Video, facebook and blogging may hold their attention.

6. What is the purpose of this campaign? Why use social media? Why will this strategy be pursued?
• Awareness (brand recognition and recall)
• Lead generation
• Sales
• Loyalty (repeat sales and brand advocate)

7. How will you measure success?
What are the key success factors (KSF’s) or metrics that you are going to measure in order to know if your actions are working? Lead generation? Increase traffic to website? Increased revenue? Customer base is shifting from new to repeat customers?

There you go, simple, difficult and hopefully helpful.

Do you have any strategies that you use or have found helpful? Let’s discuss.

Credit where it’s due. I’m firm believer that there is truly nothing new under the sun. Every generation we repackage things of the past with our own twist on it. The seven steps that I outlined above are definitely not my original ideas. Sure I’ve put my own twist on them, but there are others that have gone before me that deserve the credit. So, thank you to Lisa Qualls, Jay Baer, Oliver Blanchard, Chris Brogan and many others for pushing this industry forward and having such a great impact on my thinking.

So, how does this apply to marketing and social media strategy you might ask? Well… I’m glad you asked, you did didn’t you? As much as I love data and this holds true in my marketing practices as well, there is a human element to marketing that the numbers will NEVER represent. We as marketers can drag up an unbelievable amount data, especially in the interactive/online world and much of it is beneficial and needed. But, what about the soul of marketing? I used work for a large national wireless carrier and it drove me absolutely crazy when we would sit around the strategy table with the executives from the key business units and terms like subscribers, subs, MINS, NAI, customers, pops, etc were used to describe those individuals that were our bread and butter. Not only were they that, but they were our sisters and cousins and our aunts (sorry to my Gilbert and Sullivan fans I couldn’t resist). I always found it a little disheartening to talk about the customer experience and use a term like “sub” in place of a more genuine term. Sure, I understand that it was part of our corporate culture to shorten terms and use more generic descriptors, but I also think we as businesses and marketing strategists can begin to look at our target audience as simply numbers and if the target market is reduced to numbers then we have lost the soul of what we do and our audience.

Do you have an opinion or a similar experience? Let’s discuss.