Stop with the High Level Social Media Speak

February 6, 2009 – 2:45 pm

by Dave Snyder

The “social media guru” has become a self propelled parasite of our online industry.

I am not talking about the true experts in the social media space, I am talking more directly about ever Twitter account holding blogger who claims social media ___________ as their occupation.

I will provide a litmus test.

Have you driven 100s of thousands of eyes to a piece of content in the span of a few hours?

Have you successfully shaped an opinion about a Fortune 500 company using social media?

Have you ever put out a fire for a Fortune 500 company that started on social media, before it could make the main stream?

If the answer is no to all of those, please do not call yourself a social media guru, social media expert, social media deity, or center of the social media universe.

It’s silly.It’s like me calling my self a movie critic because I watch movies and have an opinion.

Or a food critic just because I am fat, and obviously love food.

The Anatomy of a “Social Media Guru”

The self proclaimed “social media guru” loves to speak at a high level about social media.

Here are some words they often use:

• Social Web/Graph
• Widget
• Enterprise 2.0
• Social Media Optimization
• Meme
• Mash-Up
• Social Media Monitoring
• User-Generated Content
• Web 2.0
• Social Networks
• Blogosphere
• Viral Marketing
• Micro-Blogging
• Transparency
• Engagement

They live off the use of these words. The terms are like crack;addictive, and lifestyle changing.

They are also, for the most part, nonsense.

These terms often represent social media at a high level, a level where no one can properly create a campaign.

The issue with Social Media

Social Media is a sub-channel of the larger marketing medium the Internet.

It is akin to Basic Cable Television’s relationship to Television.

For a bit of SAT nostalgia:

Social Media is to Internet as Basic Cable Television is to Television.

No one says “I am going to watch Basic Cable Television tonight.”

“Did you see Basic Cable Television last night?”

“I love basic cable television”

Their allegiances are on a more refined level. They love channels like MTV, or shows like one of the 500 reality shows that “music” channel shows.

That is the same reality as social media.

I do not use social media.

I use Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Reddit, Stumbleupon, and Myspace.

Each channel is different.

When an ad team goes into place an advertisement on a basic cable network, they do it based on the demographics of the channels viewership.

The same goes for the social media campaign.

What are your core metrics for a successful campaign? How can those be achieved?

The “social media guru” that approaches a company with:

“We are talking enterprise 2.0. You must be engaging your customer through social media optimization, social networks, and the blogosphere. They in turn will create user generated content through channels such as microblogging, and expand your social web. We must practice transparency. We can utilize tools such as memes, widgets, and mash-ups to complete our viral marketing goals.”

is basically speaking about concepts they only have a basic user’s understanding of.

Social Media Breakout

There are several reasons to market through social media, and sure engagement is one of them, but that is the lazy answer.

Here are the three broad reasons to market via social media:

• Traffic - Getting eyes to content that is important, and creating engagement on your site that can help other marketing channels
• Branding - Creating and sustaining a brand identity online
• Links - Sure for search equity, but before search engines, links were the roads we used to navigate the web. They still hold a ton of potentional from a traffic and conversion standpoint. And yeah, they are good for SEO too.

These are basic concepts that can be broken down more.

Branding for example can mean utilizing your social media campaign as a way to test consumer groups, or even reputation management.

Each social media channel offers a different attack for one of these three broad goals.

Like every effective marketing campaign, goals must be set first, and then the campaign can be effectively designed.

A brand that has not yet been established is going to build a facebook fan page? They don’t have any fans. The metric for branding for this company is building brand recognition, a job that can be completed by building major buzz through social voting sites which then grows exponentially amongst niche bloggers that feed off Digg or Reddit front page content. Now instead of a few hundred hard fought Facebook “fans” you have unleashed the new brand to thousands to hundreds of thousands of eyes.

If it is a need for you to suppliment your SEO link building campaign with social media link building, then building a Youtube channel is not going to get that job done.

If you are a huge brand you should think about cultivating your brand with a Twitter account, or else someone else will do it for you (wink wink Amazon)

The point

My basic point is that the broad approach to social media isn’t an approach.

The people pushing that nonsense don’t understand the medium anymore than my three year old.

“I will help you go viral.”

It’s an empty promise.

It’s akin to the SEO that guarantees top search engine results.

And if you buy into these people, because they have a few thousand friends on Twitter, you deserve to go down the road they lead you.