A tech services PR specialist takes issue with the role some SMBs are giving to home-grown Facebook & Twitter campaigns.
By Andy Marken
So, you’re one of the thousands of newly anointed social media PR experts, are you?
You must be.
After all, you manage your company and personal Facebook pages. You have your company and personal Twitter accounts, and you update them constantly.
The boss has got to love you when you tell him/her Facebook just surpassed 500 million users, and Twitter has 120 million users.
“OMG, U R SO AWESOME!”
EXPERTS ARE EVERYWHERE
A recent article in the Wall Street Journalnoted thateveryone is promoting their social media marketing/communications expertise. Or, as Forrester’s Sean Corcoran is quoted as saying, “You can’t walk out your house without bumping into a social-media expert today.”
And over the summer, there was a Business Week article that took a look at a hot new job: social media director.
Reading all the noise surrounding social media, you might think it’s a Brave New World for individuals and agencies alike. It must be time to entrust our companies to a new generation of professionals, right?
MYTHS ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA PLANS
Most seasoned public relations professionals, however, will tell you that customer relations management, marketing, and sales are all difficult to do via social media.
Social media can be hard to integrate into business operations. Moreover, if you don’t understand your customers (or your audience), it’s tough to develop a social strategy that makes sense for your organization.
The templates that social media experts offer just don’t work for everyone. The problem is that you can’t try to control the conversation in social media environments.
In a recent survey, only 40 percent of businesses reported having a strategic social media policy or plan. The rest were shooting from the hip, inventing as they go.
Either way, it’s professionalism–not just social skills–that will be key.
MORE PROFESSIONAL THAN SOCIAL
Maybe one of the reasons there are so many social media gurus these days is that social media isn’t all that challenging. All you have to do is know when and how to engage with other people, and you use various social media platforms to do it.
Of course, it would be neat if could sell products/services, become more productive or efficient, or handle a customer relations issues via social media, too. That, however, takes a bit more skill.
Your social media plans, programs, and efforts should be aimed at stimulating and driving customer loyalty. At the end of the day, that will count a lot more than the number of page readers you have or the number of Tweet followers.
Satisfied, repeat customers keep businesses’s doors open. They’re the ones who will talk up and support your company and its goods or services.
Of course, when an issue arises or unhappy people write all over your company’s Facebook page, you can’t pass the buck. You have to deal with the problem immediately–in an effective way.
No matter how you look at it, social media is about customer service and customer relations. And that’s not so much social as it is professsional.
You may not put a bubblegum-snapping, pimply-faced kid out on the sales floor to close a big deal. Instead, you may opt for the experienced professional sales manager to do the job.
The same is true of social media.
So, how professional are you being about who manages your customer relations online?
ANDY MARKEN is president of Marken Communications Inc.
