Manas Datta

Right, so social media is THE thing to talk about in marketing these days – irrespective of whether you’re ito B2B or B2C marketing. Now I have a gripe about this, especially when a lot of marketers talk about the power of social media in the B2B arena. A few fields like IT and other onlinesy areas of work have professionals spending a lot of time talking to each other online, and social media as an instrument to get in contact with these people and then use a push or pull mechanism to create brand awareness or generate leads makes sense.

But what if you’re not in one ofthese fields, and what if you’re not a huge brand? What kind of a social media strategy can you adopt, and what should your expectations be if you’re not British Airways, Microsoft, Adobe or Aviva?

Let’s get one thing straight here. “Social media” as far as I am concerned is a “tool”. I still cannot see the word “strategy” being strongly linked to social media. Even when you talk of “social media strategy” – doesn’t it really just boil down to “using social media to achieve your business goals” ? i.e. it’s part of your business or marketing strategy (just my point of view, don’t send me hate emails about it!).

So you’re a small or large company, but you may not have a big brand whih everyone knows about. And also, you’re in an industry where probably not a lot of people are on Facebook or Twitter or Myspace or whatever else decides to spring up one day. What do you do to jump on this bandwagon?

#1: Clarify your business goals

Why do you want to use social media? Generate sales or leads? Get user-generated content? Get closer to your customers? Get new customers? Upsell? Cross-sell? Launch a new product or service? What you do will depend in part on what you want to do, and what all these lovely tools out there will allow you to do.

#2: Find out more about your customers

Finding out more about your existing customers will allow you to find out more about potential customers. No brainer. Talk to them, ask them nosy questions, visit them if possible, try to understand what makes them tick. If you cleaned up all your marketing messages but had to keep just one, what would resonate with your audience best?

#3: Find out where your customers are

This is quite crucial. It’s not unheard of to see people seting up networking sites and LinkedIn groups and Facebook fan pages and tweeting away to high hell – but nobody really giving two hoots about it. And why aren’t they? BECAUSE THEY DON’T USE THESE TOOLS! It’s tempting to dive straight into these things because the folks at LI or Twitter have made it so easy to set up profiles and start talking to people. But it’s no point talking to an empty room. So go where your audience is. If LinkedIn is their thing and there are a lot of industry folks on there, think about professional networking as a route. If tweeting is their thing, then think of how you can use Twitter to spread the word, serve them faster or better, create awareness or even generate responses.

#4: Set up a measurement mechanism

That’s he great (or horrible) thing about the internet – everything can be measured. And more often than not, you don’t need a lot (or ANY!) money to find some free online tools which will enable you to measure what kind of activity you’re generating. That becomes the subject of another post altogether, so I’m going to skip that for now. At the very basic level, you have free tools like Google Analytics and www.bit.ly which will help you get a better idea of how much reward your efforts are generating for you.

#5: Plan and execute

Not much more to it – is there? You know what you want to do, you know where your customers are, you know what they like to hear, and you’ve figured out a way to check if they’re hearing what you’re telling them. Now go ahead and do it.

I just realised that there’s a burning question that I wondered about for a while, and I haven’t answered that.

Does social media mean “Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn”?

My answer is a very vociferous NO. These are by far themost popular tools – but if youbreak it up into two parts, and focus on the first part – SOCIAL – you can see that anything really which causes groups of people with a common interest or objective to congregate can form the basis of social media. This could be a photo sharing site, a customer review website, a discussion forum, a site to complain about something (or someone!), guidance and advice websites or any other kind of user-generated-content type website.

If no such forum exists, it might even be something as basic as an email newsletter which then causes people to get in touch with each other and be…wait for it…SOCIAL. Keep in mind – sometimes conversations about your brand or industry don’t just start by themselves. If that is the case for you, think of what you can do to get your business community together.

As a marketer in a company with a relatively unknown brand where people are not sharing photos and updating wall posts , you need to know what you want to achieve, and what kind of creatures your customers are. Once that part is done, you can google your way out of the next part which is figuring out what you can do with all these great social media tools.