Dear Rubi

Rubi Says…

Dear Donna,

Thanks for your question, which was very timely. Social media is the hottest topic among marketers these days. That is actually a bit disturbing to Rubi, because there’s an element of trend-following to some of the interest in the subject. A couple of years ago, the hot topic was viral videos, and it seemed like everyone was trying to create a viral video – whether they actually needed one or not.

So the first thing I do when someone asks me about social media is to ask them why they want to do it. What’s your overall marketing strategy and goals, and does social media support those goals? Are your customers the sort of people who participate in social media? What is your overall positioning, what are your core messages, and how can social media help you deliver them? What else are you doing in your marketing campaign, and how does social media integrate with those other deliverables?

If you don’t yet have good answers to those questions, then you need to get them before you start work on a social media program. And by the way, especially for a B2B company, it’s okay to decide that social media doesn’t actually have a large role to play.

But let’s assume you have determined that social media is a good part of your overall marketing approach. How do you get started? Social media is a very broad topic - technically, it includes almost everything you can do on the Web other than advertising and your own home page. We can’t tell you what to do specifically without a lot more information on your products and markets, but here are a few general guidelines. The first thing you need to decide is whether you want to focus on employee-led or customer-led media. Employee-led media can include things like employee blogs or answering customer questions on message boards - a very effective technique as long as you give your employees some good training, and permission to post things without the fear of getting fired. Customer-led media can include things like discussion sites and social networks. Those things tend to organize themselves, but there’s a lot you can do to help them along.

(We won’t mention the third option, which is paying some agency to post nice things about you online while pretending to be happy customers. Aside from the ethical problems involved in lying to your customers, and the potential permanent damage to your reputation, Rubi finds those campaigns to be endlessly tacky.)

Once you’ve decided whether your focus will be on communication through customers or employees, pick a forum that you want to start with. Pick one that is a good fit for your business and customers. For example, if you sell to IT managers, creating a Facebook page is probably not a good use of time. You’ll need to run some experiments to see which forums and sites work best for you, but make sure that you devote enough staff time to follow through. Nothing is sadder than a company blog that has only four posts, or where customers submit questions but never get answers. Whatever you do, the most important message you’re delivering is that you’re engaging with customers. You can’t do that in a half-baked way, and once you start engaging with people, you’re required to keep up the conversation.

Sincerely,
Rubi