Get prepared to scale social media

Haphazard social media adoption is putting your brand at risk

A report earlier this year from Altimeter raises some interesting questions around how well brands are prepared to control social media as it proliferates throughout the organisation. It's an interesting and important question, since unlike any other marketing tactic, social media isn't actually about marketing first and foremost, it's about customers and their adoption of technology is changing the landscape for marketers every day. This change means that multiple stake-holders within an organisation are motivated to leverage social media, whether it's sales, customer service, product development or marketing, leading to a silo'd, poor customer experience.

Varied risks, the same solution: orientate around the consumer

Research and recommendations from Altimeter are heavily based around large, enterprise clients (Adobe, Avaya, Cisco, Hallmark, etc.) with an equally very heavy weighting towards B2B. It's easy to dismiss the insight if that's not your brand. However, the considerations are still relevant for a B2C SME in the UK, for example. Large scale organisation are simply the first exposed to this challenge since they're so big that they're more likely to have consumers using the Internet, and therefore social media, to interact with brands in any meaningful volume. Big brands are simply exposed first to such challenges, as smaller businesses we can use common sense to draw what we need and plan ahead much more easily.

It's easier to think 'real-time' not 'social'

Let's not get hung up on the world 'social' - David Meerman-Scott talks about the 'real-time' mindset and the need for businesses to recognise the shift in marketing towards real-time dialogue with customers. If people in your organisation are choking on the social world then follow his advice and stop using it. The interesting thing here is when you say real-time and not social, it's suddenly a case of not if but when you'll need to address these challenges.

Major risks plage businesses using social media

1. A lack of planning. We hear this an awful lot, and it happens to the big corporations too with only 43% of brands (in Altimeter's report) stating that they have a formalised plan as to how social media will help achieve business goals
2. Operational realities. Whereas global corporations struggle to manage their on average 178 social media accounts, it's equally as common for them as with smaller businesses that no social media training is given to employees, leaving disparate accounts in the hands of the untrained, without a plan. Whereas similar problems have existed before with websites, content and even CRM, it's now on a different scale with social media.
3. Integration challenges. The free and easy nature of social media tools means that they're not hooked into established processes or systems, such as a CRM platform or brand monitoring tool. Less of a problem to small companies, since any form of integration is more often perceived as fairly advanced, we can see that the challenge is getting greater due to social media.
4. Poor customer experience. Your brand reputation is at significant risk, the silo'd nature of software selection, usage and training means the customer experience is ad-hoc. This rings true for SME's as it does global corporations, it's possibly a large advantage for very small companies where the personal touch is all you can get.

A two-step solution

1. Define the use case for social media. Altimeter provide a straight forward two-step solution which starts logically by defining the business requirements, the use case, for social media (or real-time) marketing. Altimeter provide a useful perspective through their simple definition of 5 use cases, these are in turn aligned with step 2.

2. Use appropriate software to manage social media. This more often than not does not mean one piece of software - if only it were that easy. Of course the smaller your business the less critical this is, today at least. Yet even small businesses will benefit from low end tools like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite. This useful list from Altimeter also grades the software for 'small' and 'large' organisations.

There isn't one software solution, and I cannot see how it's possible to ever achieve that given that software in the social media space will have to work within such a diverse range of businesses, varying system integrations and so many variables where business processes are concerned. Yet the clear take-away here is to get ready to address the risks, plan now for how you're going use tools to best serve your customer and your business.

The full Altimeter report is here.