There’s no doubt the development of social media has created an environment for creative activity and campaigns, but it’s also brought its far share of challenges too. The evolving channel has created a saturated marketplace for both agency and brands including bandwagon jumping, which can expose businesses to poor management of their brands
Evolving channels (digital marketing, mobile, online PR, social media et al) bring both challenges and opportunities to brands and the agencies that represent them – there is no doubt in this. However, there needs to be balance. Both social media bandwagon jumping and at the opposite scale a fear of adopting a new medium can fuel ignorance and produce activity that results in brands not meeting objectives, or worse yet that can even be unlawful.
Social media has brought new challenges for marketers that are either obsessing about it creating tunnel vision, or not it embracing it fully maximising its potential – integrating it effectively throughout their businesses. Unfortunately, with social media blinkers on, the channels can become disjointed where at times cohesion should work to its advantage. We worked with a brand that had a call centre and customer service support with a means to integrate learning across different social media mediums that their audiences were using. Instead of trying to advise their audiences of the social channels that they had available, striking up that conversation with them, it was left to email marketing and limited social media channels to try and do this. It’s was a missed opportunity to really have one-to-one more personable conversations with an audience and firstly see if they have social channels, what they use them for and the value that they associate with them.
From what we’ve experienced with the adoption of social media marketing, brands can be lead by a view of traditional media no longer has a role to play and that it is unfounded and way off track, when the advantages are to understand how off and online behave and work together.
Many brands tend to look at competitors and try to emulate what they are doing – diving head first into the shallow end (as in ouch, broken feet and ankles!) without any solid guidelines, processes, platforms or an understanding of their own brands. In particular, this includes what it can to with the tools currently available. It’s new thinking (which is admirable) without real thought or understanding of what is transpiring in a space that can be the problem when the development of a brand is not managed correctly.
Social media channels work better when there is great content and the means to produce it consistently and at good quality. Far too frequently we have seen there aren’t timelines for activity, good marketing concepts, ideas and direction. When there are issues in delivering what is required to support the brand e.g. a decent blog, website and supporting platforms this is what can create bottlenecks and limited means to manage social media as effectively as it can be.
Not only are there challenges with understanding social media environments, the psychology of audiences using them; there are also the platforms, resources, technologies and tools that evolve at a rapid rate. There are many factors that continue to have an impact upon this developing medium, not least the recession. Budgets are declining, brands expect the same level of intensity, which can be at odds with the expectations that are set and maintained. There have been redundancies creating more freelancers and start-ups, particularly social media agencies. There has been an increase in these types of agencies and roles to match both agency and client side. As with digital marketing many years ago, there has been a shortage in expertise and a steep learning curve and it has produced the perfect climate for a gold rush mentality. This focus on social media is quite astounding with some social media ‘practitioners’ (the gurus, mavens, experts) riding the wide as long as they can, creating an already saturated and superficial market.
It’s an important channel, but some industries adopt and integrate it differently and more quickly (or slowly) than others, so dependent upon the sector, brands should keep this in mind, especially when seeking representation. As with selecting any resource, service provider or vendor, brands need to undertake due diligence to ensure that they’re approaching and inviting the right agencies to pitch and award work to.
~Business Game Changer Special Promotion~
Tim Gibbon
This is a sample chapter taken from the book Insiders Know-How: Public Relations. Pick up your copy from Amazon
