Don’ t throw out your playbook.
Start with your brand promise and let it guide all your actions in social media. Don’ t get distracted by the abundance of options.
Use social media primarily for insight.
Companies can and do sell things via social media, of course, but their real value at this stage lies in learning about customers. Facebook in particular has such tremendous reach that it can provide detailed quantitative analyses of communication flows between consumers. Increasingly smart natural-language-processing technology will, over time, help marketers extract further insights from the content of those discussions. At the other extreme, company-sponsored online brand communities can generate immediately applicable insights from direct, smaller-scale interactions.
Strive to go viral, but protect the brand.
The few brands that have substantially improved sales by using social media have done so with communications that convey authenticity and relevance— and are so entertaining that they go viral. Consider Blendtec’ s inspired“ Will it blend?” YouTube clips, in which Tom Dickson, the company’ s founder, demonstrates its blender’ s power and robustness by pulverizing everything from golf balls to an iPad. Since the campaign launched, four years ago, the videos have been viewed more than 100 million times, and sales have increased by 700 %. Sony, on the other hand, stumbled badly when it paid an agency to create a supposedly authentic blog and YouTube video hyping the latest gaming PSP for Christmas 2006. Hit by a storm of criticism when word of the deceit leaked out, Sony was forced to own up, withdraw the video, and post a contrite apology on the blog. The debacle surely didn’ t help sales; 2006 holiday shipments were down 75 % from 2005.
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