In the years that I’ve been involved in social media, I have heard so many mis­con­cep­tions and myths about social media that I am cer­tain this arti­cle is long over­due. Here is a list of the top five mis­con­cep­tions regard­ing social media:

Mis­con­cep­tion #1: Social media is only right for cer­tain brands

Often peo­ple ask me: “Is social media only right for web ser­vices or for ‘cool’ prod­ucts?” The answer is no. Social media is right for every brand as long as the brand is able to find its tar­get audi­ence within a cer­tain plat­form and converse/interact with it in an effec­tive man­ner. Of course it may be excit­ing to do a mar­ket­ing cam­paign for Apple than for Charles Schwab but for either one of those brands a tar­geted social media cam­paign within social net­works and the blo­gos­phere can bring amaz­ing results as far as: Brand aware­ness, Over­all buzz around the brand, traf­fic, cus­tomer loy­alty and ulti­mately revenue.

In fact, often it is the “duller” brands that expe­ri­ence the most growth out of social media cam­paigns because they expe­ri­ence a more sub­stan­tial change in pop­u­lar­ity between their start­ing point A and their end­ing point B than the “cooler” brands. Take for exam­ple Mint which is an online per­sonal finance ser­vice and was just bought by Intuit for $170 Mil­lion. Not the most excit­ing of star­tups per­haps and yet Mint is a fine exam­ple of a com­pany that did a great job in using social media to max­i­mize the buzz around its brand, mak­ing its blog magazine-like with arti­cles about tips for young par­ents and other inter­est­ing con­tent. Mint made their con­tent so inter­est­ing in fact that users/blog read­ers pro­mote the brand on their own.

Mis­con­cep­tion #2: Social media is all about get­ting traf­fic — and quickly

Social media mar­ket­ing is a long term process that takes time. Once a brand enters any net­work such as Face­book or MySpace, it takes time to build that brand’s com­mu­nity. Rome wasn’t built in a day and nei­ther is a com­mu­nity on Face­book. If you want to do social media mar­ket­ing right and not just spam the hell out of peo­ple, you must use con­ver­sa­tional mar­ket­ing to engage them. Con­ver­sa­tional mar­ket­ing is all about con­vers­ing with your com­mu­nity. Learn­ing more about their likes and dis­likes, lis­ten­ing before speak­ing and react­ing based upon the cus­tomers’ feedback.

Who­ever thinks that he will open a Face­book page and reach tens of thou­sands of site vis­i­tors on the first day, is dead wrong. Brands that use social media to pro­mote them­selves will see a steady growth in traf­fic to their sites over time as their brand names become more and more viral within the net­works — due to the increase in num­ber of fans, num­ber of tweets, expo­sure in blogs, etc.

Sure there are dif­fer­ent ways which will increase the rate of a brand’s viral­ity on the Web. For exam­ple, cre­at­ing strong social incen­tives for peo­ple on your site which will increase their urge to pro­mote your brand is def­i­nitely a fac­tor which will heighten the public’s aware­ness. You can read more about social incen­tives in this post I had writ­ten last year. How­ever, don’t expect to get thou­sands of vis­i­tors to your site before you’ve been able to build 1) a strong loyal online com­mu­nity 2) a strong incen­tives sys­tem to increase brand aware­ness. Both these goals take time to achieve. From my expe­ri­ence, it usu­ally takes about three months to start see­ing effec­tive results when using social media tools.

Mis­con­cep­tion #3: “By using social media we will lose con­trol of our brand’s image”

Exec­u­tives (espe­cially in big com­pa­nies) often think that their employ­ees will go wild and start telling every hor­ror story imag­in­able regard­ing their brand because the com­pany will open a Face­book page. So here’s the scoop: Peo­ple will talk about your brand whether you like it or not. Open­ing a Face­book page is not going to change it and not open­ing a Face­book page is not going to make it go away. The ques­tion is: Do you want to be a part of that con­ver­sa­tion or not? By hav­ing a pres­ence in social net­works and blogs, you as a brand show your cus­tomers and employ­ees that you care about their feed­back and that you are there to lis­ten and sat­isfy their needs.

I’ll give you a real-time exam­ple: My host­ing com­pany is Net­work Solu­tions. For a few days my blog wasn’t upload­ing and I started to get very pissed off. I tweeted “Net­work Solu­tions Sucks” and specif­i­cally addressed @Shashib — the guy who han­dles Net­work Solu­tions’ social media efforts. A few moments later I received a tweet back from Shashib. He wanted to hear what’s wrong and help me resolve the prob­lem. He promised a Net­work Solu­tions agent would call me soon. Within a few moments I received a phone call from an agent who helped me fix the sit­u­a­tion and upload my site. At that moment, Net­work Solu­tions won my cus­tomer loy­alty for­ever (or until the next time they screw up :-)). Real time cus­tomer care is some­thing that brands can uti­lize social media tools for (specif­i­cally twit­ter) like no other mar­ket­ing tools they have had till now. We’ve already seen amaz­ing exam­ples of cus­tomer care from Zap­pos and Dell. Brands should not be afraid of engag­ing in hon­est and trans­par­ent con­ver­sa­tions with their clients online but rather they should be very afraid of ignor­ing their cus­tomers’ com­plaints and pre­tend­ing that everything’s fine when it’s not.

Mis­con­cep­tion #4: Social media is just a fad

I often hear peo­ple who say that social net­works are just a pass­ing fad. This is what I have to say to them: Social media is an inevitable dig­i­tal evo­lu­tion of our desire as humans to com­mu­ni­cate with one another. It is a desire that we always had and will always con­tinue to have as long as we are human. I had writ­ten about this topic in the past. To say that social media is just a fad is to say that com­mu­ni­ca­tion is just a fad. Here are a few stats that might help to change the mind of those who are still apprehensive:

1) Two-thirds of the global inter­net pop­u­la­tion visit social net­works and time spent on social net­works is grow­ing at three times the over­all inter­net rate, account­ing for ~10% of all Inter­net time.

2) Vis­it­ing social sites is now the 4th most pop­u­lar online activ­ity — ahead of per­sonal email!

Care to change your mind?

Mis­con­cep­tion #5: “I don’t need a pro­fes­sional to do social media for me”

Many exec­u­tives think that they don’t need a pro­fes­sional to help them with their social media activ­i­ties. They’ll just take a stu­dent who has a few hours a week and get him to sit on the social net­works and play with their company’s brand­ing. It’s incon­ceiv­able to me how on one hand com­pa­nies can be so cau­tious regard­ing begin­ning to use social media and on the other hand they’ll give the work to a mere stu­dent who could ruin their brand­ing in a few hours just to save a few bucks. In order to engage in social media cam­paigns that are effec­tive and suc­cess­ful, com­pa­nies should use social media expert ser­vices at least in the first few months just to under­stand the spe­cific rules of each com­mu­nity. One must remem­ber that Face­book, twit­ter, Mixx, Bebo are all com­mu­ni­ties with their own set of rules and it is cru­cial for brands to respect the community’s rules in order to sur­vive. Just like a com­pany wouldn’t take on its PR on its own with­out con­sult­ing with a PR expert first, a com­pany should not delve into social media with­out con­sult­ing with a social media expert. After a few months of train­ing, I believe brands can take the work upon them­selves, but they must not forgo the train­ing period as they could do more dam­age than good for their branding.

These are the top five mis­con­cep­tions I’ve heard regard­ing social media although I’ve heard many more. I would be delighted if you guys shared in the com­ments sec­tion some of the mis­con­cep­tions that you’ve heard.

Photo credit: Gary Hayes and Lau­rel Pap­worth
Ayelet Noff is founder and CEO of Blonde 2.0, a con­sul­tancy spe­cial­iz­ing in help­ing brands use social media tools such as social net­works, the blo­gos­phere and social soft­ware to cre­ate brand aware­ness, recruit employ­ees or achieve any other goal. See her busi­ness pro­file, con­tact Ayelet, fol­low her on Twit­ter or leave a com­ment below.

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