Social Media Participation Doesn’t Mean Success

Courtesy of Flickr.com xtracycleinc

Social media has proven to be a spectacular tool in many marketers’ toolboxes. The power of the interaction of brand and cyclist on a personal basis has created some great levels of brand loyalty, advocacy, and even rider acquisition. There are many conversations happening every minute of every day on many social media platforms…Twitter, Facebook, TheVeloist, Tumblr, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, etc.  However, there are also some tremendous missed opportunities by some companies “participating” in social media. Simply being “on” Social Media doesn’t necessarily mean success.

strategy.

First and foremost, a company, organization, cause, or brand needs a strategy and a plan for their social media conversations.  During the strategy phase you need to:

• Identify where cyclists are online, listen to rider conversations, wants, and needs
• Identify the various rider segments (MTB riders, road racers, urban cruisers, weekend warriors, and the like)
• Develop a strategic social plan for each rider segment (goals, objectives, tactics, etc) and each social media platform to interact
• Create unique interactive tools for different cyclist segments

engagement.

Now after the strategy is developed and you have your brand all set up on the various social media platforms, you can now begin to engage in personalized conversations with cyclists where they are. This is a complete change from what we, as marketers, are used to. In the past we have “pushed” messages to our cyclists whereas, now, cyclists are “pulling” information from our brand, wanting to engage in a conversation. This is where I see the most need for improvement in the cycling industry. The majority of the cycling brands on social media are still trying to “push” messages to cyclists with little engagement and little conversation. We need to begin to treat our “Brand to Cyclist” relationships as we do our own personal relationships.

relationships.

After several conversations and interactions, your brand will begin to build positive relationships with certain cyclists. These relationships will grow the rider from brand aware, to brand loyal, to brand advocacy, to, the pinnacle of all, evangelism.

success.

Social Media success is very easy to attain…if we change our mindsets. We need to begin by identifying where cyclists are online and develop a strategy for the different rider segments for our brand. We then need to actually talk with these individuals…empower them with information, tools, and conversations so they can begin to build your brand the way they want it to fit in their life. This is the way to social media success.

thoughts.

What social media strategies are you involved in? Do you see the transition from “push” marketing to the “pull”? What are your overall thoughts?

Consolidation of Social Media

I was recently at a conference with Higher Education marketing and fundraising professionals that had a huge interest in social media. I scoured each breakout session that pertained to social media and social networking for advancement and fundraising. I was a little disappointed with what the so called “professionals” were saying and had a great epiphany about social media while sitting in one of the sessions.

I attended a great presentation about a small college in Iowa that has had tremendous success in engaging alumni and current students on a social networking site that they built for their school. The story goes like this…we built a site, a lot of people came and signed up, and now we see our traffic declining; we need to identify a way to get people re-engaged.

Why is this happening? Take a look at any major industry. With the popularity of a product or service come a lot of providers. And as we’ve seen in these industries, only the strong survive and the industry consolidates. This is going to happen in social media. There will be a massive consolidation of the social networking channels. Some might merge, some might just die, but within the coming years we will see the social media industry have only a handful of players…not the hundreds we have today.

There was a post yesterday about Dunbar’s number which is “a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.” The reason for the decline in this small Iowa college’s social networking site is just this. The demographic that is participating in this home-grown social networking site, most likely has accounts on other, more popular sites like Facebook or LinkedIn. First of all, they can’t take on any more social relationships. Secondly, the visitors have probably already found and engaged with the people they want to engage with on those other sites. So the question then becomes, “If I’m already connected with Bob on Facebook, why would I connect with Bob again on your site?”

Do you see consolidation in your world? How will this effect the future of social media?

Social Media FAIL. A Social Communication Experiment.

Over the past couple of weeks, I was commissioned with a very difficult task…Setting up a gathering of old college track friends at a local watering hole. We had a group of people coming into town and wanted everyone to meet up. As you can imagine, I imagined this to be easy. I mean, they were all friends of mine on Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. All I would have to do is send out an email or post on their walls, right? Wrong.

I sent out an email and got little response. “Some people are too busy to respond,” I thought, “but they wouldn’t miss out on this.” The response I did get was from those individuals I keep in close contact with. So I trudged through, set up a time, place, day, etc and sent out another email with this information. Still, very little response. The time came for the gathering and the only people to show up were the out of town group and my contacts that I keep in close contact with. I would call this a social media…FAIL.

I began to wonder what happened and came to a conclusion. It wasn’t the fact that nobody liked me (at least I don’t think) or the fact that nobody wanted to meet, we had all been wanting to meet up for the past few months, but never have. It was the fact that the communication source was from someone with little communication over the past few years. The people who showed up were the people with “Brand Loyalty” to me. The people that didn’t show up had no “Brand Loyalty” to me…and why should they? I haven’t had any communication with them for months or even years.

The Lesson

This is a very important lesson as we move farther and farther into a conversational marketing environment. We need to keep conversations going. We need to engage as much as possible. We need to give the consumer what they need out of our brand. Look at my example…Had I stayed in better communication with these ex track athletes, we would have had a better turnout. Keep brand loyalty alive with communication, whether with your own network of friends or with your consumer constituency.

Do you have a story like this you would like to share? What do you see as similarities between personal and consumer relationships?