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Faris Yakob"You can’t make friends and ask to borrow money in the same breath — you will fail at both. Relationships must come before sales. #IPAsocial"
The trick to social media is in the name - it is inherently SOCIAL. So, if you want to operate in social media, you have to act socially.
Herein lies the problem.
Companies are not social. Companies are commercial. They have explicitly, and some would argue exclusively, commercial objectives:
The social responsibility of a business is to increase its profits. [Milton Friedman]
However, any introduction of commercial grammar into a social grammar situation, the social grammar norms are overwritten. The mere mention of money changes the framework of the conversation.
[Try offering someone who has just cooked you a lovely meal 10 dollars as a thanks you and see how quickly market norms supersede the social norms you have been operating within thus far.]
There is, therefore, an inherent contradiction here: commercial entities wish to operate socially to further their commercial objectives.
This is possibly why companies seem to find it so hard to act socially and, by extension, in social media. You have to do it without any thought to immediate financial return, which is simply not how companies act.
Relationships require building before they can be leveraged. You can't ask someone you just met to help you move, or to borrow money. You need to build the relationship first. This is why the spamming of trending topic hashtags undertaken by furniture maker Habitat was treated with such antipathy.
So, looking at a short term ROI when assessing the value of social media is antithetical to the emerging reputation and gift economy that operates there. You need to take a longer- term view.
Brands need to pay it forward in social spaces.
But this is difficult to implement when markets require quarterly results, and financial directors want to see dollar for dollar returns on their ‘social media’ investment.
Instead of shallow short term sales response measures of ROI, we need a more robust understanding of value, that factors in customers service call volume that is lessened by social outreach, increased customer satisfaction that is delivered, and the lifetime value of customers to have developed genuine relationships with brands over time. Carphone Warehouse using Twitter as a customer service channel, P&G’s BeingGirl.com helping teenage girls give each other advice, ideas gathered from Mystarbucksidea.com — all these initiatives will build long term customer satisfaction, advocacy and value — but won’t show short term ROI.
Although, to contradict the title of this section, social media activity is also much faster and more responsive than deploying traditional communications — so if you have a sudden problem that needs addressing, social spaces are great for quick fixes too. Just ask Motrin, who had a response to the mom’s who were up in arms about an ad that challenged people who use baby harnesses — they had a response up and socialized over a weekend.
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