This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the third pillar, Engagement.

According to the Business.com Social Media Benchmarking Study in businesses who are implementing social media marketing strategies, in over 66% of these businesses it the marketing department driving the initiatives.  Most likely there’s been some word handed down from on high to the marketing department saying “we need this social media stuff” or “we need to be talking about ourselves out in social media, now!“  If it were only that simple right?

Of course companies want to talk about themselves, their brands, their services.  They want to push their very carefully crafted messages out to the social media communities because they think that’s what’s going to win them kudos in these communities that are talking about them that they’ve found through buzz monitoring tools.  Here’s the thing that marketers most of the time completely miss the mark on:

It’s Not About You.

Really, honestly, I’m not lying here – it’s not about you, your brand, your company’s product or services.  It’s about them.  It’s about the community member’s experience.  It’s about what the community member is sharing.  At the time they could be experiencing something with you or sharing something about you, but at the end of the day, it is purely about the experience the community member has had.  That’s why marketers need to check their egos at the proverbial door when they enter into the world of social media marketing.

That’s a pretty tall order to do, as marketers we want to promote our company, brand, product or service.  We want people to listen to us, we want people to “want us”.  That’s why we’re in social media marketing, that’s why we’re here, right?

Wrong.

Social media is about sharing and engaging.  Sharing experiences, engaging in conversations, giving knowledge, tips, information and items of value.  Value isn’t determined by the company or the marketer putting the information out there.  It’s determined by the person in the community who’s consume that content.  As much as you think there’s value in some piece of content that’s put out there on your blog or in your video channel, if the audience doesn’t find value in it, it really doesn’t matter what you (as the marketer) think.  That can bruise even the more sturdy egos out there.

Determining what a community is going to find of value requires engagement.  It also requires companies to let go of preconceived notions of what they think people view their products or services as.  Having an open mind and letting go of that death grip of control over your brand can help you immensely when you are engaging in social media.  By opening the doors to your customers to define value, you can open the doors to a much more successful social media marketing strategy.

I get a lot of questions about how I approach Social Media Marketing. The team here at Serengeti Communications has a very methodical approach, we like to ensure a solid foundation for every strategy that we put in place for our clients. In doing that there’s four fundamental ideas, or as I call them “Pillars” that help stabilize any efforts taken into social media marketing. As a team here, we decided that we’d like to share some of our experience and knowledge with the 4 Pillars of Social Media in a series throughout the month of June. Each week, we’re going to have 2 to 3 posts on both Social Conversations and on Endless Plain about each week’s Pillar.

• The first week we’ll be discussing the first pillar of social media marketing: Research. Those posts will be published between June 1 and June 4th, 2010
• The second week we’ll be discussing the second pillar of social media marketing: Strategy.  Those posts will be published between June 7th and June 11th, 2010
• The third week we’ll be discussing the third pillar of social media marketing: Engagement. Those posts will be published between June 14th and June 18th, 2010
• The fourth week we’ll be discussing the fourth pillar of social media marketing: Measurement. Those posts will be published between June 21st and June 25th, 2010

We’ve also designed specific training around the 4 Pillars of Social Media Marketing, with two areas of specification:  B2B and B2C.   These two types of businesses take rather different views when it comes to each one of these pillars, that’s why the training we provide to our clients addresses the specific needs of these two very distinctly different types of business.

So stop by next week when you’ll get the first edition of our Four Pillars of Social Media based around Research.

Trust us when we say, that bite is truly avoidable! How? Understand your market (from their viewpoint) and plan well. 

It’s not enough to ‘think’ you know your market. While primary and secondary research tends to give marketers insight often both can be skewed or biased by asking questions that the researcher knows (in advance) will provide the answers required internally to make a case for releasing a new product, service or campaign. As for secondary research, we urge you to ask yourself two questions before using the findings: “What was the methodology and is it sound?” and “How do these research findings help the company sell more of ‘their’ products and services (i.e. is it self-serving)?” At the end of the day, the key is to understand your audience, especially where they live on-line and why/how they interact. Doing so will provide you with a true sense of the culture and community that might have developed.

Why plan? Well that should be obvious, but a lot of marketers still struggle with planning. In the social media space knowing the audience first and planning accordingly should be your top two priorities.

We have seen over and over examples of companies that may have missed the mark in both areas and as a result may have felt a bit of a social media bite (Southwest Air,  Tropicana, Pepsi, Motrin and more).

In time organizations will learn, hopefully, that doing social media to be cool or to push messaging just doesn’t work. Using social media as a channel is a legitimate marketing endeavor and it’s important to understand that the channel is full of people who hear you and talk back.

Now, I know what you are thinking… Social media might be dangerous for your brand. But in reality, you can’t stop people talking about your brand online. At the end of the day is a negative reaction in the social media space truly a bad thing? It’s can be an opportunity to turn around a situation that without social media you might never have known about. In the past you would have just lost a customer or ten (word of mouth is just as powerful as social media!).  If getting feedback helps a company learn what their market wants, identify their true evangelists and perhaps even develop new products/services is it worth it? Forrester thinks so.

What do you think? Time to take a few steps back before diving into social media without audience research and a smart plan?

[Image: www.natgeoprogramming.com]

If you’d like to get just a taste of what Charlene Li spoke about at SES San Jose in August of this year, SES has just released a video full of snippets of her keynote, an interview with Charlene and interviews with people who attended the keynote. Also in this video piece, Pattie Simone of WomenEntrepreneur.com has some really great points of why Charlene Li’s keynote resonated so well, “anyone can be a publisher now and it’s important to get those people on board with you.”

Charlene also goes into a bit of detail around the engagement pyramid she spoke about in the keynote,  so take a little time and have a listen.