For many brands social media is still a relatively new concept, and something that their campaigns must have; falling into the “everyone else is doing it” trap. And so they turn to their agencies to give them “some social media”. There are two problems with this.

“Please set up a Twitter account”

Firstly, some agencies will literally give them what they want. They will simply set up a Twitter account for the brand, explaining that the brand needs to have a presence in this social space, to be engaging with consumers, entering into conversations. All that bunk. The problem is that they don’t explain why. Why should this brand be on Twitter? Why does this add value to the brand, and why will this offer value to users? Agencies fail to contextualise Twitter in terms of the brand’s communications efforts and their brand strategy. It’s just something they’ve rolled out because the client asked for it, regardless of whether or not it’s the right thing to do.

“We want to make this campaign more social”

Secondly, because the marketing industry is still playing catch to the huge potential that social media brings to the table many agencies resort to seeing social media as the gimmicky add-on to a campaign. To them social media is a tactical addition to an already developed campaign, rather than as integral to the broader marcomms strategy. Either they or the client have already developed a campaign and now they just want some social media sauce to go on top.

Like the brands in the first case, these agencies see social media purely in tactical terms, as checkboxes that need ticking. Have we spoken to bloggers? Did we set up a Facebook Page? Are we on Twitter yet? The danger is that agencies roll out the same checklist every time social media is mentioned by one of their clients, as opposed to strategically considering what role social media can play in their campaign.

Simply setting up an outpost on Twitter (or Facebook or YouTube) isn’t necessarily the right thing to do. In fact, without proper planning and being placed in the right strategic context it’s the wrong thing to do. So don’t listen when an agency throws a Twitter at your brand. Even if you asked them to.

There is this feeling that in order to convince people you know what you are talking about, you need to make common sense sound complicated, by wrapping up seemingly simple concepts in obscure jargon. It’s got to the point where any randomly selected impressive sounding words put together in a sentence are being passed off as “strategy.”

There is an aspect of Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome about the whole thing. We go to these events where impressive sounding phrases are banded around and everyone nods in agreement. Hollow meaningless sentences are met with responses such as “Yes that’s exactly right” and no one points out that the phrases don’t really mean anything because they are scared that they’ll be branded as someone who “doesn’t get it.” And so we are all drawn into this pseudo intellectual speak, forced to speak this fake language where we all feel clever by saying a lot without ever saying anything.

This fancy language also enables people to hide their lack of knowledge and expertise in the area. A person can add a few buzzwords to a sentence and give the veneer of experience and intelligence to the lay man, but in reality have no real idea what it actually means. It’s bad enough that people do this intentionally, but the really alarming thing is when people have convinced themselves that they actually know what they are talking about simply because they can string these impressive sounding sentences together.

There is the argument that we have to add a certain amount of lingo to our language to ensure that clients know what we are talking about. But in reality all we are doing is talking to clients in a language they will not understand, demonstrating that we speak the language, and since they don’t we had better do the talking for them.

It’s a shrewd business model; after all, as Andrew Davis said, “Where there is confusion, there is money to be made.” It’s this fear that clients will see what we do as simple that is driving this desire to make the problems that we solve for clients sound more complex than they actually are.

At the end of the day, the problem we try to solve, the real aim of marketing, be it digital, social or otherwise, is to talk to people, and hopefully, on occasion, get them to talk back. That’s it. It’s not a complex problem. But this doesn’t mean that the solutions are easy, of course they aren’t. The solutions are the brand planning, the communications approach, the strategy, and of course, great tactical executions. Looking at advertising in particular as an example, the specific problem they are trying to solve is to get awareness of a message, be it about a product, a service, or a brand. That is a simple, easily understandable problem. The difficulty comes in getting the right ad to deliver that message. It’s a complex and difficult thing to get right, which is why truly great brands and campaigns are rare. We shouldn’t be spending time trying to make the problem sound more complex, we should be demonstrating that finding the perfect, tailored solution to the problem is where we add value.

As an industry we are so focussed on intellectualising what marketing is trying to do, rather than actually doing it. If we spent as much time developing strategies as we do trying to come up with new definitions for things, and clever ways of saying simple things just imagine how the world of marketing would progress.

Note: @alasdairgray came up with the much better name for this post – The terrible tale of Jason and the Jargonaughts. Go and congratulate him.

It’s scary but there are countless numbers of people working in social media, be it specialist social media agencies, digital pr agencies or traditional marketing agencies that clearly have no clue social media. And the reason is mind numbingly obvious, the reason they have no idea what they’re doing is because they aren’t active users themselves. It’s no surprise that people that don’t actively participate in social media struggle to come up with ways to engage users, or worse, do things that make active users cringe in disbelief.

If you aren’t involved in social media then you will lack a fundamental understanding of what it is about. Planning a campaign is all about trying to get inside the heads of your audience, understand their motivators and behaviours are to ensure that you deliver a campaign that is relevant and compelling. But developing a social media strategy without being actively involved is like trying to be a priest without believing in God, or knowing what religion is. (thanks to Darren for the metaphor)

When trying to figure ways to engage with bloggers the best tool at your display is firsthand knowledge of bloggers. The best way to get into the mindset of a blogger is to actually become one. Want to understand Twitter users? Then use Twitter!

Sure ideally we would want firsthand knowledge of all of our user groups when developing a strategy, but a lot of the time it’s unrealistic for a planner to have a deep understanding of everything the audience has experienced. But there really is no excuse for not being active in social media. It’s easy to set up a blog, write a few posts, and get a feel for the medium. Then when you ask the question “why would bloggers be interested in this campaign?” you can answer it, because you are to some extent, a blogger.

The concern is that so many people seem to be “working in social media”, with only a basic understanding of what social media is. Until you started actively getting involved, living in social media, then you will nearly always fail to understand it. Chances are you will see social media merely as a set of tools that some people use, without really knowing why.

If you work in social media, talk about social media strategies or try to sell social media campaigns to your clients, then you need to be actively participating in it. At best you are a liar and will only be able to deliver mediocre tried and tested campaigns, at worst you are a conman and will end up damaging the brands of your clients.

Social media allows brands to communicate with new ways and on new levels with their customers. Facebook for example allows you to create a brand presence in a social space, allowing fans a deeper connection with the brand than ever before.

However, this new opportunity also brings with it challenges. What if fans of your brand speak more than one language and live in more than one country? Obviously you can’t communicate with people in a language they don’t speak, and also, it’s difficult to be relevant to users when you are trying to talk to users of multiple territories at once.

More and more it seems the default response is to completely separate the communications approach. Many brands choose to create completely separate accounts and pages for different territories and languages. On the face of it this solves the problem; different accounts solve any language barriers and ensure the content is relevant to each of the different territories.

There is an issue with ensuring that every communication is on brand and on message, but there is a bigger issue. As a fan of Product X people don’t want to communicate with Product X UK, they want to communicate directly with Product X. This can be seen from the fact that brands with one single page will have more fans than competitor brands with different pages for each territory, even when you combine the totals for the territories. Customers want to know they are talking to THE official brand page, and territory specific pages get in the way of this.

As Facebook has evolved, the need for separate accounts has diminished. In particular, targeted wall geoposting and location specific tab content allows the end user to get the tailored content the brand wants them to see, in a language they can understand, but with a brand identity they want to connect with. Using these features you can do away with the need for separate pages for the territories and have a single destination for your global brand on Facebook.

A note on other platforms
Of course other social media platforms are a way off this, with the notable example of Twitter, which does not allow this kind of targeted communication.

I don’t care that your Twitter profile has thousands of followers or if your Facebook fan page has thousands of fans. Until you can show the value of those users they are just meaningless numbers.

Social media marketing is full of metrics that can impress clients such as follower count, but until they are put in context they mean absolutely nothing. If your Twitter account has 1000 followers that may seem good, but when you some research and find that all of your competitors have at least 3,000 followers, the sheen wears off.

These numbers are used to agencies to show their work as being successful. It’s largely a runoff from the social media industry being co-opted by the PR world, obsessed with hollow figures such as opportunities to see. They see the number of followers a brand has a direct translation to opportunity to see brand messages. They promise that they can get a Facebook fan page X number of followers in X amount of time, and because it’s relatively easy to do so, they can deliver. And so they give the impression they’ve been successful because they’ve delivered what they told you they would. This does not mean that it’s been a successful social media campaign though, far from it.

If they aren’t engaging with users, having conversations, learning what consumers think and want then ultimately it’s a failure. So what if every time you put out a message 1000 people have the opportunity to see it, if no one cares about, understands or wants to see the message, then it’s pointless. Just as pointless (and potentially dangerous) as getting PR coverage about a new burger in a vegetarian magazine would be.

Social media isn’t just about reach, it’s about engagement. Until you start putting follower numbers into context, and showing the value of these followers then they’re just meaningless numbers.

Social currency is a term that is gaining popularity in the social media community, but as a concept it is not a new idea. Social currency simply refers to the value that information has when it is shared between individuals, something has a good social currency if people want to continue to share it.

A good example of social currency is gossip, people will share rumours with their friends, who in turn will share with their friends, which is why rumours can spread like wildfire. But the key to understanding social currency is to understand the psychology behind sharing, why do people want to share? Ultimately people share when it benefits them, when they get some personal value out of sharing. The single most important component of social currency is personal value.

Basic human needs

Personal value itself is typified by fulfilling two basic human needs, the need to belong and the need to feel significant.

Humans are social beings; we are compelled to identify ourselves as belonging to groups of similar people. This need to belong is the most important element of personal value – people share content to show that they belong to a certain group of people. People will join groups on Facebook to show that they belong, quite literally, to that group of people. Just as people will tend to dress themselves according to quite specific social groups, the things we share and advocate are just another way of identifying ourselves with a group.

Within these groups individuals want to feel valued in that group; they want a feeling of significance. People who share content do so to get recognition from others in that group and in doing so give themselves significance. An offline analogy is an individual in a group of friends who always wants to be the one telling jokes; they gain significance by sharing jokes with their friends.

Social currency therefore not only provides value to the end users, but also provide additional personal value as a form of currency when shared.

Four further types of Value

Personal value can be broken down into four further types of value: Utility, Knowledge, Entertainment and Monetary.

Utility

This is literally something useful, be it a piece of useful content such as a “how to” guide or a fully fledged branded utility. Branded utilities are where brands create something that provides a tangible, useful benefit to users, such as banks providing applications that allow users to compare the various interest rates

Knowledge

A different kind of value can be gained when people share knowledge within their group. This can start from people who remind their friends that a mutual friend’s birthday is approaching right through to thought leaders in industry, who produce white papers and innovative new methods of working. The personal value is a reward for individuals who share their knowledge; they are valuable members of that community.

Entertainment

Probably the oldest and certainly one of the most common, types of social currency that provides personal value from entertainment is the joke. People tell each other jokes to make members of their group laugh, just as they share funny videos with their social networks and email each other funny pictures. Providing entertaining social currency to your peers gives you significance within your peer group.

Monetary

The final type of value a user can receive from social currency is monetary or financial value. A good example is the online coupons that brands encourage their customers to share with their friends, entitling them to a discount. It is of value not only to the end user, but also to the sharer, as their community gives them kudos for sharing the discount.

Multiplying the effect

These values are not delivered in isolation however, the types of value can be combined to provide stronger social currency, with common examples including useful financial knowledge in the form of “How to live on a budget” guides or entertaining information, which explains why infographics are so widely popular.

At the end of the day, if your brand doesn’t have social currency, if the content it produces isn’t entertaining or useful, if it doesn’t share knowledge or provide a monetary benefit to users then people won’t share it. So what social currency does your brand have?

Social media is no longer new territory. Gone are the days where we are impressed by a brand interacting with users in social spaces. Social Media is tried and tested, with case studies from Starbucks, Dell, Wallmart and many other huge brand names.

Now attempting to create a social media campaign is outdated. Now is the age of integration. Creating any element of a campaign in isolation is not only the sign of a poor strategy, but it’s a wasted opportunity.

Social media should now be considered in the brainstorming sessions of fully integrated campaigns, and no longer reserved just for seeding or tacked on to the end of a larger campaign.

Just like any other medium, social media works better as part of a fully integrated offline and online strategic approach to campaigns, with each element complimenting and amplifying each other.

Just having a Twitter a page doesn’t cut it anymore. Having an isolated social media campaign is a stupid idea.

A handy set of guidelines to help to navigate the social media ocean without being a dick

Very nice concept from IKEA taking advantage of the hype of the general election, showing their taking on the candidates in kitchen form, with a great follow through call to action to use their kitchen designer so you can create your own.

Whilst the concept is ingenious, (I really liked it) it’s a little upsetting that there hasn’t been much thought given to using the site as social currency: there’s not even share buttons on the site. Whilst I’m sure that people will share it anyway, and it will do well on Twitter, it’s a good example of how with a little extra thought as to social seeding the concept could be expanded to a more integrated approach, rather than the now dated microsite silo approach. Especially upsetting coming from IKEA, who have had some great social media campaigns in the past

Contrary to popular belief it is not a good idea just to jump in to social media. It’s not important to “just be there” – you need to know why you are there. You need to have a clear understanding of what you want to put into your online presence, and what you want to get out. In other words you need to have a clear strategy for your online activity.

Having a Facebook page or a Twitter profile isn’t a means to an end. And simply stating that you want to “engage with your community” doesn’t count as a strategy. Engagement isn’t a strategy. It’s barely even an objective.

You wouldn’t just create a website for your brand. You wouldn’t start an advertising campaign without knowing first why you are advertising, who you are advertising to and what effect you want your adverts to cause. And you certainly shouldn’t start an advertising campaign as a silo; it needs to belong to a wider strategy that considers brand, tone of voice and long term goal. The same needs to be true of your ventures into social media, you need to plan for success.

Facebook and Twitter are channels, tactics, and you need to understand their role and place these tactics in your broader communications strategy. Until you are ready to do this, you probably should not set up a Facebook page or a Twitter profile