As any true expert will confirm, social media marketing (SMM) campaigns require a lot of courage, know-how and determination. Even with these necessary virtues, their success is never guaranteed. I am currently involved in a sizeable, six-month SMM campaign for an expanding fashion business and would love to share the 10 most important ‘don’t's you ought to consider before venturing into what for many businesses – and, if we are honest, digital agencies - is still uncharted territory.

1. Don’t start without objectives. Make sure you put pen to paper before the start of the initiative and substantiate a realistic yet achievable goal list.

2. Don’t ignore the importance of training. When running a campaign for somebody other than yourself, it is imperative to conduct organization-wide training for the success of the project, as I have argued elsewhere .

3. Don’t underestimate the amount of time and effort involved. So many people out there believe that the social media are ‘free’. While it is true that the various applications are often free to sign up to, the social media are time and labour intensive and demanding. And time, as we all know, is money.

4. Don’t press ahead before all your bases are covered. Before engaging in SMM, it is important that your online presence and online strategy are firmly set in place. You don’t want to be referring people to a webpage that is poorly designed and reflects badly on the business or individual in question.

5. Don’t work without SEO support. SEO and SMM must work hand in hand to ensure that you make an impact in the search engines. This is particularly important now that applications like Twitter are being ‘googled’.

6. Don’t delegate unless absolutely necessary. You may be vey knowledgeable in engaging the conversation, but the sad fact is that many people aren’t. I have learnt from painful experience that the wrong person can cause a lot of damage to an otherwise well-run campaign. Only delegate to individuals that have received appropriate training.

7. Don’t engage the competition. Going on the attack in the social media can backfire and get you into a lot of trouble sooner than you think. Just leave your competitors alone and concetrate on your assets.

8. Don’t oveburden your audience. An information overload or a hard-sell approach are big ‘no, no’s here. Make sure you post at regular intervals without saturating your audiences.

9. Don’t forget flexibility is not weakness. Stay flexible along the way. Some approaches may not work for specific niche audiences or cultures. Be ready to change course when necessary and make sure that your flexibility is not misunderstood.

10. Don’t stop until your objectives are reached! Persistence and steadfastness pay. While it would be wonderful to ‘go viral’ in the early stages, you often need to reach critical mass before your efforts pay off.

I look forward to your comments and suggestions in the comments section and wish you great success in your social media engagement.

© Oscar Del Santo for THE ONLINE STRATEGIST, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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In recent years, the elusive search for online ‘Viral Marketing’ has become the Holy Grail of marketeers everywhere. Seminars, presentations, conferences and e-books on the topic abound: some of them adding great value - those of the celebrated world wide ravist David Meerman Scott’s come to mind – while others manifestly below par.

With this state of afairs, it is refreshing to come across examples of ‘genuine’ social media viral marketing that epitomize the best Web 2.0 practices, philosophies and attitudes. If as Anthony Robbins is fond of saying ‘success leaves clues’, we have much to learn from the case of Spanish (don’t be fooled by his English-sounding name) up-and-coming pop-star Graham Newey. Graham’s results are so remarkable that he may be rightfully regarded as a textbook case of how to go viral with a very limited budget but tons of creativity and a passion for what you do.

In a recent interview published in Spanish in my Tweetblog, Graham told me how he went from absolute scratch to becoming a budding pop-star in less than two years by creating quality home-made multimedia content with virtually no sponsoring and subsequently uploading it in three key high visibility social web sites: Myspace, Facebook and YouTube.

There is no question about Graham’s talent, a talent that underlies all of his artistic endeavours. If this twenty-something Barcelona-based composer, arranger and live performer has become a sensation is due in great part to his catchy electro-pop lyrics and the stylized ‘camp’ aesthetics of all his multimedia creations.

The figures speak for themselves: hitherto there have been more than 17,000 downloads of his videos and 60,000 views of his home-made Myspace profile. As I mentioned earlier Graham is also very active on Facebook, where his fans exceed 1,100. Surprisingly Graham hasn’t got a webpage yet – one is in the works he tells us – and it is only recently that with a little prodding from me he signed up for Twitter and started what I hope will be a very promising Twitterland adventure. His online philosohy so far can be summed up as follows: quality content first and foremost, free distribution via selected social networks, not to worry about ROI or statistics and enjoy what he does with the support of his loyal followers - who through sheer word of mouth take care of promoting his quality content all over the social web.

Having performed a string of live gigs all over Spain and on the verge of recording his first album, Graham is ready to sign up a lucrative contract and become the greatest example of zero-budget viral marketing Spain has yet to witness.

© Oscar Del Santo for THE ONLINE STRATEGIST, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Graham Newey, Viral Marketing

“It’s the buzz; We have to jump onto the bandwagon; All my friends are in it; Our competitors have this brilliant Facebook page; It’s free advertising …”

These are some of the most recurrent reasons why we professionals are called to the rescue of many a decent-sized company eager not to be left behind and ready to implement some kind of half-concocted social media strategy in record time – which usually entails having a modicum of a presence in the social networks to begin with.

Happy as we are to be of assistance, the reasons above denote a lack of understanding of the new realities the company or organization will be facing as it joins the social side of the Web 2.0 that should set our alarm bells ringing. ‘I want to join the social networks to have a better communication channel with my workers, customers and the community’ or ‘I want to be able to offer information of true value to my customers’ are reasons I have never come across in pre-sales meetings. Little surprise if events take a disheartening but expected course after a while.

Time and again I have seen the same story unfold. The pros are called in; the strategy is implemented; all the IT applications and the web design & development phase is completed; the company builds up a budding presence in the social networks … and then, after a few months, interest dwindles, enthusiasm wanes and no one is able to name any tangible benefits in return for the time and the effort invested in the first place!

I want to argue here that we professionals are often to blame. The single, most damaging mistake that internet consultants of every guise make when implementing any social media plan is this: lack of previous adequate training beyond the technical side of the initiative.

As Jennifer Korell noted in a recent article worth reading in full, the social media means that “dialogue has replaced monologue and narrowcasting is replacing broadcasting online.” And yet companies are still operating under the old marketing and PR tenet of “remaining on message” and using the novel social platforms as just another means of monologuing and broadcasting. Unsurprisingly customers (and even staff) fail to be persuaded and tune out once the novelty wears off.

This sad state of affairs is to be expected unless we expose our clients to ‘the new rules of marketing and PR’ (to use David Meerman Scott’s felicitous phrase). Any project undertaken without previous training in the new philosophies of transparency, optimized content generation, soft and viral marketing, online democracy, etc. is doomed to failure – no matter how slick or glossy the application or network in question. The shift in perception needs to predate the actual implementation phase and must engage all the parties directly and indirectly involved.

I am a strong advocate that, whenever possible, training should reach the whole company in one way or another. Engaging outside stakeholders is a risky enterprise unless enough critical mass has been reached at home. We want employees of every department to understand what increased transparency is going to mean to their everyday working lives, we want them to become evangelists for their company in the social networks, we want them to generate enthusiasm and exchange ideas and even constructive criticism via blog comments and other means beyond the official line. And we want everyone to be of one mind when it comes to editorial and content generation policies.

My advice to my fellows and my clients is straightforward: never implement a company-wide social media policy without securing as much as this is practicable company-wide training in the philosophies that are being embraced. Training should come at the start of the project, and be particularly thorough for anyone remotely involved in the key areas of communication, marketing and PR.

It has been stated hundreds of times and it bears repeating: a Social Media Plan is not an IT issue. It is a company-wide issue where the involvement and the sharing of values by all according to established guidelines will be of true and lasting benefit. 

I look forward to hearing your experiences with social media plans, social media implementation and training in the comments section.

© Oscar Del Santo for THE ONLINE STRATEGIST, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Online Strategy, Social Media, social media training