frankly speaking

Why Not Having a Social Strategy is a Mistake

My friend Jake wrote a really interesting blog the other day entitled “Why Your Best Social Strategy Might Be Not Having One”. In the article Jake goes on to outline a few very valid points why companies may want to consider not being in the social space. 

Jake’s an incredibly smart guy, a good friend and a wise mentor, but (with all due respect) I think he misses the boat here. Let’s face it, the #1 job of any marketer is to be where your customers are. Facebook has over 500 million users now and the odds are pretty good that a majority of your customers has a facebook profile. The question then becomes how do you leverage facebook to your advantage? Fortunately, there are a number of ways to do so. 

I’d like to go through Jake’s points one by one and help him where he may be a bit misguided: 

- ROI is Hard to Quantify

This used to be the case, but quite frankly, is a little bit out of date. There is tons of data available to you as a marketer about how much value a facebook fan, a twitter party or a blog post can bring to your company. For example, at a recent company of mine, we KNEW for absolute certainty that every time we shared a link on Facebook, it would drive $XX in sales. Measure this against the promotional cost, and you have a basic ROI measurement. 

Taking this to the next level, by leveraging Facebook Connect and allowing your consumers to login, shop and purchase under with their Facebook Credentials allows you as a marketer to determine how much value Facebook Fans are. 

-Your brand is out of your control

Jake makes a good point here in the fact that with social media it’s much more difficult to manage your brand, after all, what company wants their brand showing up next to a bunch of frat boys doing keg stands (collegehumor.com notwithstanding). This is where having a good community manager comes into play. The job of a community manager is to live and breathe your brand online. Part of his or her job is to find out the public perception of your brand and help manage it. 

To Jake’s point, when you’re advertising on Facebook, it’s difficult to understand where your ads will be shown. This means you as a marketer need to take charge and understand who it is that you’re targeting. If your target market is the 18-30 crowd, the probability is high that your ads will show up in some places with questionable content. The question then becomes are you and your brand ok with that? If not, you may need to reconsider who you’re marketing to. 

-You’re handing over your hard-earned customer data and relationships

In this section Jake implies that you’re forcing your consumer to make a choice between you and the social network they’re on. This isn’t necessarily the case. The consumer is a consumer of yours AND the social network. That is, Facebook probably has as much data on your consumer as you do.

Yes, it’s more difficult to identify a customer’s click stream when they’re on a social network, but there’s enough tracking information available at the URL level and the cookie level to identify where users are coming from and what will keep them loyal.

- You can’t protect your users’ privacy

Let’s face it, the web is becoming a more open environment. Every day people are sharing stuff about themselves that 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago they were loathe to share with their next door neighbor. As an advertiser, user privacy should be one of your utmost concerns, you should only share that data with their social network if the user explicitly grants you permission. There have been momentous strides by retailers to find a happy medium between what remains private versus what they allow users to share on social networks and it will only get better as time progresses.

UPDATE - I don’t disagree that Facebook has been in the news lately because of a lot of privacy breaches, but don’t forget, there are plenty of retailers and credit card companies that suffer privacy breaches all the time. In fact, I would argue that the breaches suffered by retailers and banks are more dangerous, because the often include the theft of Social Security information or credit card numbers.

At the end of the day you have to make a decision as to whether or not social media is a sandbox for you to play in. If done correctly, it can be very effective at driving high quality traffic both online and offline.