Why Social Media Are Not a Strategy

Are you in business to be popular? Connected? Engaged? You are, or at least you should, be in business to make profit. Because that is what business is about. You may have chosen to be an entrepreneur for many reasons, but if you don’t have a profit you don’t have a business. It really is that simple.
There are many compelling blog posts and snazzy videos that strongly promote the notion that social media are imperative to the success of business. These posts usually incorporate something along the lines of “Social Media, can you afford not to?” Well, I want to put it on record that yes, many businesses can absolutely afford not to “do” social media. In fact, I would go so far as to say that for some businesses, engagement in social media is actually damaging.

The Personal Hygiene Analogy

If personal hygiene were an analogy for marketing, then social media would be perfume. To put this bluntly, perfume is no substitute for the fundamentals of personal hygiene. You need a 365 bathing plan, and perfume is no substitute for that.

What are social media?

The answer is partly in the question. Media, being the plural of medium, are ways to store or communicate information. There are many flavours of media:

• Newspapers ~ print
• TV stations ~ broadcast
• Social media ~ digital

Social media can, like any other media, be used to achieve certain personal or business objectives. And used wisely, these media can work very well for business, but only as part of an actual marketing strategy. It will not work for every business and it is time to be honest about that. A radio advertisement will not work for every business, and it is ridiculous to presume that social media will work for every business. You need to pick the media that is most relevant and appropriate for your business. Sparkplugs on Facebook? I don’t think so.

What Social Media is not

1. A Business Plan
   There are many components to a business plan, but frankly some businesses are so busy faffing around with social media that they’ve lost sight of the bigger picture.  How does your business make profit? What products or services should be sold to optimise profit? These are some of the big questions that need to be answered before you can develop a business plan or a marketing plan or even dream of engaging in social media. For a business, there are really only two business numbers that matter – Cash and Profit.
2. A Marketing Plan
   You need to define your brand and identify your customer before you even begin to draft a marketing plan or select marketing media.
3. A substitute for relevance
   The number of followers you have in any social medium is not an end in itself. Neither is building a community, engagement levels or indeed, (social media aside), the  number of website visitors you have. So many businesses focus on their social media metrics that they forget about the cost of acquisition of a customer or about the profit margin that they should be making. Social media needs to be relevant to your business objectives. There are many worthy and relevant business objectives for social media other than sales, such as brand building, awareness marketing and customer service. These all contribute indirectly to profit. What you and your followers do when they engage with you or visit your website is what is really relevant, not the number of followers that you have.
4. Free
   Social media are not free. Even if you do not allocate an employee or outsource this function, it takes time to create and collate content, to broadcast it and to engage with your community. Time spent on social media can have a massive opportunity cost, if it diverts a business owner from focusing on making profit.

The Social Media Mantra

The bankers’ mantra is well known:
“Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity but cash is reality”.
Here’s my adaptation for social media, which I’ll call “The Social Media Mantra”:
“Followers are vanity but profit is sanity.”

What do you think?

Social media are not a strategy. They are, well, a collection of mediums. It seems likely that social media are here to stay. The popularity of individual social media networks may wax and wane, but people have an inherent desire to be connected and social media fills that personal need. However, when it comes to business, relevance is the name of the game. What do you think? Is it really relevant to every business to be using social media?

How Should I Contact You?

What’s the right way to contact clients, colleagues and friends, and for them to contact you? Is offering a multitude of options really the best way forward and will certain tools begin to become acceptable for certain types of communication?
This post is a little like crystal ball gazing because this change is continuing to wind its way along. But for now, here are my predictions:

Email is not dead, long live email

For certain scenarios, traditional email is still entirely suitable. This includes most client B2B contact, a lot of inter-corporate communications, and some B2C contact, particularly opt-in newsletters and special offers (though many of these are migrating to Facebook). If you need to make a lengthy and involved communication, where structure is important, then email is still your very best option.

Facebook will become the dominant player in social emailing/messaging/’chatmail’ (Watch out Gmail!)

Although Facebook messaging isn’t true email as it lacks some of the features of email, it is very well suited to social, informal contact. Now friends don’t have to worry whether they have your up- to-date email address, because they know you’re active on Facebook. If someone wants to reach you on the weekend, Facebook is probably a better option, because you may check Facebook more often than email (depending on how much of an addict you are). Regardless, Facebook will send the recipient an email with the contents (depending on setup options). Facebook is also quite unique in that it collates SMS, IM and emails within a message string. Facebook says this is ideal for a typical family scenario – where a grandparent is a strict email user, a teen prefers SMS via their mobile and a parent prefers to use Facebook – Facebook messaging allows converged contact with all of these whatever the medium used. What’s evolving is that the means of communication is now less important than the conversation itself. Of course, this is particularly relevant for social, informal messaging, but not so for business communication.

Skype is super for instant messaging

Instant messaging is a beautiful thing, in my opinion. I rarely use it to contact clients but for colleagues and friends it can be time saving, easy and effective. By its very nature it’s instant, so long as the other person is online (which you can normally see), but it’s also short. It’s difficult to see how anyone could object to it. After all, if you don’t want to be IM’d, you can set your profile to view ‘Away’ or ‘Do not disturb’ and then you won’t be bothered. I hope and expect that it will soon become more acceptable for business use. Facebook does of course have IM (or chat) as part of its offering, but I prefer to keep Facebook for personal/social use only. And I feel that the Skype interface is superior to Facebook chat and to Google chat. The also-rans are:

LinkedIn useful for business networking

You probably don’t have the email addresses of many of your linked in contacts, so this gives you a way of messaging them without getting too close by asking for their email address.

Twitter has limited value

You can send contacts/followers a public tweet, which is only really useful if they’re currently online. You can also send them a Direct Message and even if they’re not online they will receive an email to say they’ve received a DM. With the 140 character limit however, Twitter is only really useful for contacts for whom you don’t have another means of contact.

So, in short, the killer communications’ apps are:

• Email for B2B, B2C and some corporate
• Skype or similar for rapid response and short messaging.
• Facebook for most social emailing/messaging

Perhaps shortcuts on our smartphones and computers should now use generic terms: Quick Message (QM) or Friendly Message (FM) or Business Message (BM), and link through to the apps that you favour for each. There’s so much I haven’t talked about here including functionality, privacy issues, technology issues, video contact, the growth of mobile internet and how it will affect all of these. Overall, would you agree? What does your crystal ball tell you?