John Bat­telle at Open Forum decon­structs the myth that social media and mar­ket­ing don’t mix. Excerpt:

As I’ve argued (over and over and over) social media “assets” don’t look like pack­aged goods assets, and nei­ther should social media mar­ket­ing. As McConnell rightly pointed out, you can’t barge into the mid­dle of an inti­mate social sit­u­a­tion, yell “buy my stuff!” and then leave. A brand that does that will cer­tainly be remem­bered – as a clod.

And that’s the point. No mat­ter how good the tar­get­ing, mar­ket­ing in a social envi­ron­ment will not work if it fails to grasp the nuance of a par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion. Algo­rithms do a great job of find­ing a tar­get, but they fail mis­er­ably at decid­ing when to pull the trig­ger (see my rant on ad net­works here). So far, there’s sim­ply not an algo­rithm for under­stand­ing the nuance of con­ver­sa­tions between humans, and con­ver­sa­tions between humans are what dri­ves social media. …

So what do I mean when I say a con­ver­sa­tional approach? Well, let’s break down what makes for a great con­ver­sa­tion. First, all par­ties involved are in the con­ver­sa­tion because they’ve cho­sen to be – not because they’re been tricked or cajoled into it. Sec­ond, there’s a strong value exchange – a give and take between par­ties which makes
every­one feel like they are gain­ing some­thing.  Crit­i­cal to this, of course, is the value of lis­ten­ing, inter­nal­iz­ing, and respond­ing. Third, each par­tic­i­pant under­stands who the other par­tic­i­pants are – there’s trans­parency and integrity in the conversation.

In order to mar­ket con­ver­sa­tion­ally, then, a brand must not sim­ply insin­u­ate itself into the media oth­ers make … but rather cre­ate [its] own valu­able con­ver­sa­tions, and/or under­write organic con­ver­sa­tions that con­tex­tu­ally make sense for that brand to sup­port. There are scores of exam­ples I could point to where this is already hap­pen­ing (check out Intel’s Pop­URLs Blue, for exam­ple, or even this site, Amer­i­can Express’s Open Forum Blog, a longer list is here).

In The first law of social media, Terry Heaton at AR&D applies this to tra­di­tional media.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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