Everyone
seems to be getting sucked into social media. At the same time a large
percentage of companies are using it wrong or using it without defining
clear objectives.
Stephen Baker writes in Business Week: Beware Social Media Snake Oil
“As millions of people flock to these online services to chat,
flirt, swap photos, and network, companies have the chance to tune in
to billions of digital conversations.“
“But the same tools carry risks. Employees encouraged to tap
social networking sites can fritter away hours, or worse. They can
spill company secrets or harm corporate relationships by denigrating
partners. What’s more, with one misstep, one clumsy entrée, companies
can quickly find themselves victims of the forces they were trying to
master. Thousands of bloggers attacked Motrin last year because of an
advertisement from the Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) brand they found demeaning to mothers.
Over the past five years, an entire industry of consultants has
arisen to help companies navigate the world of social networks, blogs,
and wikis. The self-proclaimed experts range from legions of wannabes,
many of them refugees from the real estate bust, to industry superstars
such as Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk. They produce best-selling
books and dole out advice or lead workshops at companies for thousands
of dollars a day. The consultants evangelize the transformative power
of social media and often cast themselves as triumphant case studies of
successful networking and self-branding.
The problem, according to a growing chorus of critics, is that
many would-be guides are leading clients astray. Consultants often use
buzz as their dominant currency, and success is defined more often by
numbers of Twitter followers, blog mentions, or YouTube (GOOG)
hits than by traditional measures, such as return on investment. This
approach could sour companies on social media and the rich
opportunities it represents. “It’s a bit of a Wild West scenario,”
blogs David Armano, a consultant with the Dachis Group of Austin, Tex.
Without naming names, he compares some consultants to “snake oil
salesmen.”
Can We Finally Change This Conversation?
It seems that online and off line conversations are consumed with measuring the ROI from social media. Much of the dialog is a waste of time and focused on the wrong thing.
Yet organizations seem to be demanding a measure of ROI from this thing
we all call social media. We’ve devoted a whole series to this
discussion about ROI here
Using social media effectively demands mind-sets and
capabilities that are unfamiliar and sometimes even counter intuitive
to many business managers. It requires building trusting
relations with your market, internal and external, rather than
enforcing top-down out dated policies. Business managers should allow
themselves and the entire organization time to unlearn and rethink
everything before they “jumping into” social media. Most are following
those who haven’t unlearned and rethought how, where, when,who, why and
what they communicate which ultimately produces results, good bad and
indifferent.
Results are the end result of how well and what people and processes
communicate. You shouldn’t use social media until you know how well and
what your people and processes communicate to all markets, internally
and externally. Using it without knowing this is like jumping out of a plane with no parachute. Splat!
An ROI from social media doesn’t come from the tools rather the
skills and knowledge on how to use them for a specific purpose, value
creation. How much value do you create from use of your cell phone? Your email? and last but certainly not least your mouth!
Snake oil salesmen are known for avoiding questions during
conversations, or flipping questions into other subjects. The reality
is that any company wishing to measure the ROI from social media is
asking the wrong question and avoiding the real issues. Just like a snake oil salesmen.