March 28, 2009

Social media done in a silo is social media done wrong

There are tons of self-appointed “social media experts” out in cyberspace. There’s also a growing backlash against same, usually focusing around ideas such as:

I wouldn’t go out of my way to argue with all that. 🙂 But I think there’s also a more fundamental reason why specialized social media “experts” should not be taken very seriously:

Social media done in a silo is social media done wrong.

Advertising is only a shallow part of marketing. Classic PR is only a shallow part of marketing. And for the same reasons, the same is true of isolated social media initiatives. Marketing efforts need to span multiple channels, and use them to tell an integrated story.

To see why, please consider two of my major themes in this blog. First, successful marketing requires telling a multi-layered story. In principle you can do that entirely through social media, specifically a blog. But if you try, you have to be very careful to sound — Buzzword alert! — authentic. And for most sets of marketing messages, it’s very hard to simultaneously stay authentic, drive traffic through techniques that social media “experts” favor, and lay out the whole story.

If your whole business is selling Make Money Online! advice to fellow cyberschmoozers, please feel free to disregard the prior paragraph. In that realm, thinly-veiled inauthenticity is the message.

Second, marketing needs to reach many different kinds of people. It is rare that one channel is a good way to reach them all. But your communications with different groups, through different channels, of course have to be managed for consistency.

Anyhow, I’m not a “social media expert.” I’m just a guy who:

With that as background, here are some of my thoughts on how enterprise IT companies and other businesses should pursue social media.

As for gimmicks and glitz — well, do they have a large role in how you market through other channels too? If so, then it might make sense to get cute in social media as well. Otherwise, play it straight.

Comments

34 Responses to “Social media done in a silo is social media done wrong”

  1. Where I think the information ecosystem is headed | Text Technologies on March 29th, 2009 4:09 am

    […] of news. Vendors with stories to tell will take increasing responsibility for telling them deeply and well. Their economic motivation is obvious. And sometimes it goes beyond money. One of the most […]

  2. What Good Are “Vendor Blogs” Anyway? « Kevin Closson’s Oracle Blog: Platform, Storage & Clustering Topics Related to Oracle Databases on April 1st, 2009 4:57 pm

    […] had the following to say: Presenters of news. Vendors with stories to tell will take increasing responsibility for telling them deeply and well. Their economic motivation is obvious. And sometimes it goes beyond money. One of the most […]

  3. The horns of the “social media expert” dilemma | Strategic Messaging on April 4th, 2009 6:57 pm

    […] expertise are (in most cases properly) pigeon-holed as low-level tacticians.  As I recently noted, social media should not be done in some kind of silo, let alone in a whole collection of […]

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