The recent explosion of Social Media - Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, in particular - has probably caused enough head scratching and unease among marketing directors to last them a lifetime. How does Social Media actually work? Who does it reach? How influential is it? What happens if you ignore it? How should it be used? And how much time should be devoted to feeding it? Nobody seems to have clear answers to these questions, and the few that do, speak a language that most ordinary human beings struggle to understand.
Marketing heads at large professional organisations, by which I mean commercial law firms, accountancy firms and financial services companies, are as concerned about Social Media as anyone else - which, on the face of it, is surprising, because traditionally these outfits have relied upon a relatively discreet universe of mainly corporate clients. Their business relationships are built on face-to-face contact (not Facebook to Facebook contact) and often long histories of proven service. Nevertheless, the perception exists that Social Media is an arena in which every serious player has to be visible, as if to be invisible there would mean being invisible everywhere - an unforgivable capitulation in this age of mass communication. Just such preoccupations drive much of the current interest in Social Media: a fear of missing out, of seeming out-of-touch, rather than excitement at the arrival of a new marketing opportunity. So is the promise really there? And are the fears justified?
The first thing to remember about Social Media is its name: not Marketing Media, but SocialMedia. The reason sites like Facebook caught on in the first place was not because people saw an interesting new opportunity to go shopping. They saw it as a way to keep in touch with friends old and new, and to reach out to people with similar interests. Though discrete retailing of one kind or another has crept on board, most users says they don't like it. The exception here is cultural product: music, films, books and (to a lesser extent) video games. But even here - very much at the mass consumer end of things - the amount of promotion users will tolerate is limited. Any marketing that firms do attempt must be discreet, as well as useful, readable and current. Achieving all this is easier said than done.
That brings me to the second point: if Social Media is to enhance the image of a professional firm (or any firm, for that matter) it must be fed constantly. Social Media accounts that are left dormant for weeks on end, or which apparently have nothing new to say, are more of a liability than an asset. For better or worse, such accounts become the on-line face of the organisation - at least as much as a straightforward web site. Consequently if the account seems dormant, the perception may arise that the firm is dormant too - very possibly a perverse reversal of the truth where key personnel are simply too busy to Tweet, post or update their 'status'. So before taking the plunge, a firm should be confident of having a steady stream of news and useful information going forward. In the case of a law firm, for instance, this means more than tasking a junior in the marketing department with 'taking care of Social Media'. Content has to come from the professionals themselves; it is only their expertise that will (or might) be of interest to a potential on-line audience. These key individuals must be on board for the campaign, and clear about what is expected of them.
A third aspect of Social Media not widely appreciated, is the degree to which it often operates as a kind of closed circuit, in which everybody is talking (or selling), but very few people are listening (or buying). Take Blogs, for example. Bloggers, like people with Twitter accounts, like to collect 'Followers'. The number of followers is the standard measure of how successful and popular a blog is. But in order to follow a blog, you must first open a blogging account yourself. More importantly, as bloggers will tell you, the fastest way to win followers is to become a follower of other people's blogs, adding comments to their posts and generally befriending them. Increasingly in person-to-person Social Media environments notto reciprocate a 'follow' is almost rude, unless the person on the receiving end happens to be a celebrity. It's the same story on Twitter. To gain followers, one must first follow others: not just a few, but hundreds or even thousands. Eventually you may have thousands of followers yourself, but how many of those followers are following you because they find your Tweets interesting; and how many are following you just so that you will follow them?
Which leads me to my last point about Social Media: the sheer volume of posts and Tweets being produced. Twitter currently boasts about 144 million Tweets per day, with 460,000 new accounts being added every month. Only a year ago, the former figure was just 50 million. Though the total on-line population is probably rising too, it is not rising anything like as rapidly as that, which can only mean one thing: that the total volume of Tweet readers is being spread ever more thinly. Or to look at it another way: if you have a Twitter account and follow, say, one hundred people: how many of their seven-a-day Tweets are you actually going to read? If you read them all, and obediently followed the links, how much time would you have left in an average day?
The unpalatable truth about Social Media from a marketing point-of-view, is that it's both time consuming and over-crowded. This is only to be expected, given that the barriers to entry are negligible, and the formats standardized. The only way to way to achieve an exceptional profile is to provide exceptional content - and nothing is guaranteed even then.
So how can professional firms use Social Media to their advantage? It helps to take a step back and remember what Social Media was invented for and what it's best at: namely, keeping people in touch with each other. Professional firms today frequently straddle continents and time zones. Social Media sites make it easier than ever before for colleagues in different offices to update each other and maintain personal contact. This can prove valuable in many ways, not least in contributing to esprit de corps. Well-established internal networks can then be extended to include valued clients, associations, alumnae, universities, sections of the press and trusted individual journalists. Such communities, and the good will they help to generate, are the bedrock upon which many successful public relations and marketing strategies are built. They can also provide the means by which a wider audience is directed towards selected on-line content, such as expert articles or stories of special interest published in newsletters or briefings.
In short, Social Media, if handled appropriately, can be a useful servant. Handled blindly, it all too easily becomes a rather unrewarding master.
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