I know social media; so do you and the individual you are apparently six degrees separated from. In this modern era, it is safe to say a majority of us who have access to the Internet are participants of social media. Social media even has a role to play in the way businesses are conducted-they can affect your business strategy. If you are thinking of employing the help of currently unemployed “techy” Joe across the street from you to apply social media to your business, you will be doing so irrationally. My friend, the news is that you are one of the many misinformed people and have become a victim of one of these six myths as according to this article:
1. Social media is cheap, if not free. The concept that social media is totally free is false. The real deal is that it is cheap from a marketing perspective compared to the traditional forms of advertising. You can doubt this and utter “...but Facebook, Twitter, Youtube Flickr, StumbleUpon, etc are all free; I can promote whatever I feel like without a cost.” Yes you’re absolutely right, as these are the tools available for free to socialize. However, to run an effective social media marketing campaign for your business will require a lot of time. And time is money. On the average, it will cost you about $50,000 to implement a two-three month campaign. Some businesses can spend more or less. The best practice to approach social media marketing is to create a simple microsite that will be the hub of your business’ online community and can provide links to the facebook, youtube, or twitter groups created to help distribute the content. Depending on the level of interaction desired for potential customers and existing ones, this task can be exhaustive. Implementing social media interactivity requires skills in programming and in developing some complex functions like creation of e-commerce and user-generated content. Skill, experience, and time will be additional costs incurred. Be prepared to budget around $50,000 to $100,000 for a full-fledged interactive microsite. Toss in additional tools like Google’s AdWords to generate traffic to your site and you pay more.
2. Anyone can do it. In fact, people claim to have in-depth knowledge of social media and wrongfully refer to their expertise using misleading titles. From a simple twitter index of a group of people following renowned blogger Rober Scoble, there are claims of: 4273 internet marketers; 1652 social media marketers; 513 social media consultants; 272 social media strategists; 180 social media experts; 98 social media gurus; and 58 internet marketing gurus. Now I wonder how many of these self-proclaimed whiz kids have success stories or even real campaigns. I can blog. I know how to update statuses on facebook. I can tweet, follow and retweet comments. I’m pretty good at uploading pictures online and I understand geotagging as well. And yet I have no expertise in marketing, advertising, or public relations. Just because we all can utilize social media tools does not mean we can successfully run a campaign for a business. Mere opinions or theories are not substitutes for experience. 10-plus years of online marketing incorporating user-generated content, blogging, posting on forums, and interactivity are qualifications worthy of such glorified titles. Now tell me how many of the 7046 twitter users above following Robert Scoble can make such claims?
3. You can make a big splash in a short time. It is misleading to discover that once a marketing campaign has been taken enlisted through the tools of social networking it immediately becomes poplar. This myth is proven to be longer than the average social media marketer believes. In expressing this point, people who use social media have a longstanding use of tools like twitter. Take for example Ochman’s newly launched business, pawfun.com which sells customized t-shirts. As an avid social media user, Ochman was able to direct more traffic than he would have ever imagined through his 7 plus years of blogging and his 4000 followers on his twitter account and an additional 120,000 readers of his blog. Also, Zappos.com CEO, Tony Hsieh, was able to build a huge number of followers and shoe enthusiasts through his Twitter account. He has over 32,000 followers. Also, Melanie Notkin, owner of Savvy Auntie was able to successfully use Twitter to help find investors, suppliers, and products for her community of godmothers, aunts, and “other women who love kids”. Traffic generation was of importance to her, and did so accordingly years before her business was fully incorporated. Social media will favor any business idea that people find unique or interesting, but the key thing to remember is that it cannot happen overnight.
4. You can do it all in-house. Doing it in house is tougher than one might expect as there are certain essentials needed to perform a successful social media marketing campaign. Resources needed are contacts, tools, strategies, and a lot of experience. In-house personnel, often try to reinvent the wheel or apply the wrong tools in certain instances. It is also rare to see an in-house staff with all the possible combination of those resources. Activities that implement blogger outreach, blog advertising, Google ads, and so on should be left to experts. Hence, it is recommended to outsource your social media campaign attempts.
5. If you do something great, people will find it. This assumption is a false as it gets. You need to raise awareness in order to get recognition for a well-structured social media marketing campaign. Using tools like Twitter, Digg, and StumbleUpon to drive traffic and create buzz about your new social media campaign is the goal. In essence, your social media marketing campaign has to serve its purpose—spreading the word through the provision of adequate information through multiple sources.
6. You can’t measure social media marketing results. Non-experts would assume that the results attained from the efforts of social media marketing are non quantifiable. This is notion is wrong, as there are instruments, web based, that provide statistics on how well a microsite, for instance or blog is performing over a period of time. One can refer to Google trends, twitter search, Google analytics, backtype or even compete to provide such data.
Remember, there are a growing number of self-proclaimed social media marketers, but only a few experts really exist in this field and are not victims of these six social media myths.
