Let’s set the scene, tastefully designed meeting room, inspiring brands and phrases on the wall, spectacular views from the 15th Floor, it’s the monthly marketing meeting.
“I’ve got a great campaign idea”, says the marketing manager. “It’s brilliant, unique and sure to hit home with our customers and prospects.”
“Brilliant”, exclaims the marketing director, “but what social media channels does it embrace? Is there a Twitter api element? How does it tie in to our Facebook page? How many more followers are we going to get?”
“Well we don’t really need social media integration with this idea, I was thinking we’d leave it up to the customer to decide whether they’d engage via social channels”, the marketing manager sheepishly replies.
Queue dumbstruck colleagues and looks of bewilderment around the table.
New campaigns from companies big and small today are awash with references to social media, “come find us on Facebook”, “for latest news, see our Twitter page”, “To find out whether we decide to change the colour of our logo from red to burgundy watch our Youtube video”but is this relentless pursuit of today’s marketers to embrace social media actually having a detrimental effect on the quality of the marketing campaigns as a whole?
Too often social media is used as part of a campaign framework without thought to what it will bring and who might engage. It requires careful thought, and methodical execution to get it right, yet we continue to see countless examples of the social media after thought from brands who should know better.
For some brands there is no doubt, that campaigns with a social media focus have delivered impressive performance. Look at Whopper Sacrifice or The Streets new mix tape release as a great example of how to embrace social media as part of your marketing campaign. But for every success story there are countless let downs, fan pages abandoned after a month, twitter feeds that never get past the first 5 messages, and Youtube channels with nothing but an old advert on auto play. Be it content, delivery, or execution, creativity is important for all elemnts of campaign activity, a brilliant advertisign campaign will only extend to social media if the thought has been given to how it’s executed in these platforms, who it’s targeted at, and why they would want to engage with it.
But if the creative juices for social media just aren’t flowing, there is another solution.
Why not leave it up to the fan to decide. Coca-Cola’s ‘fan made’ Facebook page is testament to what can happen if you leave the fans in control. So if the campaign idea is brilliant, you think your target audience are sure to want to engage with it, perhaps the social media element should simply be to sit back, relax and allow others to share your content with their peers?
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