Highway to Hale

Why is social media so scary for traditional marketers? Because social media acknowledges that consumers are getting smarter. Smarter consumers means that marketers have to get smarter. Not a comfortable thought for the people who are currently considered marketing pros.

It is no longer enough to get your product in the right place for the right price with the right promotion. Of course those things all help (a lot), but social media gives the ability to join the right conversation. Consumers have been doing their best to avoid marketing messages for quite some time now, but the goal of social media is to provide a forum in which consumers want to engage. It doesn’t take a leap of faith to agree that engaging consumers is more beneficial than shoving a message in the face of an unwilling listener.

Another scary aspect of social media is that it often includes a waiting game. Consumers do not want their lives (conversations) intruded upon, but they do welcome answers when they pose a question. Prior to even pitching a social media plan, you have to listen to, analyze, and track conversations about the product. After you’ve listened, you better become the expert, because you need to jump head first into the communities that discuss your products. By “jump head first” I do not mean START SELLING! I mean be a member of the community. Add value, answer questions, be transparent.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of social media for traditional marketers to grasp is the idea that (before engaging) they must ask whether they are contributing to the conversation or selling. Selling is going to lead to avoidance, contributing value will lead to engagement. Transparency is one of the keys here. People will talk about your brand (both positively and negatively) whether you are there to hear it and engage in it or not.

The difficulty that comes with engaging customers is what draws me to social media. It’s an art of sorts. If traditional marketing is a blacksmith (forcing metal into unnatural, yet strong, forms), then social media marketing is glass blowing (strategically forming glass into an organic form with intelligent persuasion). Like blown glass, no two social media plans are exactly the same.

Agree? Disagree? Like to add? Looking forward to your comments.

As more and more students around me begin seeing the Twitter light and joining one of the most useful tools on the Web, I see a need to shine some rays on the idea of hastagging. Hashtagging is a great example of community-driven usability on Twitter that allows users to search and follow a term easily. It’s easy to do: simply add a number sign (#) in front of a key term in your post. Twitter will do the rest, making the term a link to a search feed for the word following the hashtag. Groups have taken hashtagging to the next level by creating a tag related to their subject and adding it at the beginning or end of tweets to signify involvement in a conversation (#journchat, #blogchat, #mnclassics…etc.). During the hotel crisis in India this past summer, users created a hashtag to efficiently share information from the site about family and friends in the area.

There are even applications that allow specific users to hashtag a username (often a company or brand account) and that post is automatically posted to the joint account*. I don’t see this type of app being used very often yet, but look to @hughweber for a good example.

While hashtagging is easy, there are some nuances and helpful hints to consider. First, anything can be hashtagged, but not every term is worth following. One of the most widely used hashtags is #followfriday. On Friday, begin a tweet with the tag #followfriday and then let the Twitterverse know who you enjoy following**. On Friday, you can watch the posts pour in via search.twitter.com (soon to be on the Twitter homepage) and choose which users you need to be following. Or, you can check in with the apps that aggregate the most popular #followfriday-ed users.

You can find the trending topics on Twitter nearly anywhere you choose (TweetDeck allows the option of make a column dedicated to such), so pay attention to those topics. Popular hashtags often show up during impotant conversations. For example, #blogchat on Sunday night is possibly the single most valuable hastag I know of and #journchat is not far behind on Monday nights. Join these types of conversations. The ability to tap into the thoughts of some of the most intelligent people in PR, marketing, journalism, and advertising allows you to learn faster than any other method I can imagine. And better yet, they are willing to answer your questions and discuss your opinions.

As you can see, hastags are pretty great, so use them. Create them, participate in them, and track them. While using hasthags, remember that they are case-sensitive (I just learned that). Also, there are multiple hastags used for the same conversation/event (some people use #ff instead of #followfriday). These various hashtags do not lead to the same feed even though they are basically synonyms. When hashtagging, make sure you do not use spaces. A space indicates that the term has ended (“#follow friday” is actually a hashtag for #follow).

This is just the tip of the iceberg, so use your creativity with hashtags. For the veterans, what hastags do you follow? Other than those mentioned, in what ways do you use hashtags?

*There are a couple of these apps and they could actually be very useful, let me know if you would like more info.

**@ScotMcKay just posted a video about Follow Friday that was pretty well done in his Unchained Office. My note of advice is to add a description or justification about why somebody else should follow the people you mention. Give a little hint about the nature of their tweets as a courtesy.