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You Can’t Tell a Facebook by Its Cover: The Case for Facebook Marketing

Brian Carter evaluates which social media approaches are worth doing, which ones it could hurt us to neglect, and which ones are risky to even attempt.

This excerpt is from the Rough Cuts version of the book and may not represent the final version of this material.

From the Rough Cut

Facebook is part of social media, and there are a lot of conflicting voices in social media. Some social media gurus suggest that social media will turn your business inside out and change everything. This kind of talk gets them attention but creates anxiety for business owners, CEOs, and CMOs. And these attention-grabbing pronouncements might not even be true. So let's examine whether there's substance to these social media theories and then evaluate which social media approaches are worth doing, which ones it could hurt us to neglect, and which ones are risky to even attempts.

Later in the chapter, we look at how Facebook can best fit in with your other marketing and advertising campaigns. My contention is that social media shouldn't cause a messy revolution in your existing business but should help empower you to do even better what you're already good at. We also discuss how to plug it in to get those results.

How Is Social Media Supposedly Changing Business?

People have been tweeting, blogging, conferencing and writing books about social media for the last years. That’s long enough to develop myths and sacred cows. Bloggers and authors say social media is changing business in four main ways:

  • Conversation
  • Transparency
  • Availability
  • Marketing

Conversation

Social media bloggers say the following:

  • We're switching from selling to relationship building.
  • We're switching from monologues to dialogues.
  • We're switching from large campaigns to smaller actions and brief conversations.
  • We need more interaction between departments and business units.

Are they right?

Because of Twitter, Facebook, and third-party review sites, consumers really do have a louder and more public voice than ever before. There are more of these voices, and companies are interacting with them more. Your relationships with your customers are critical. I explain how to use Facebook effectively for customer interaction in Chapter 11, "Talking Till You're Blue in the Face," and Chapter 12, "FaceMessage."

But we don't need to eliminate revenue generation just because we're building deeper relationships with customers. Consumer interaction in social media will not always lead immediately to a sale, but we don't need to give up on profit strategies. Ways to use Facebook to increase revenue are discussed throughout this book.

Thousands of miniature conversations can be very time-consuming. Personal conversations with all your customers can be impractical for you. Fortunately, it can be more effective on Facebook to start conversations than micromanage them. Asking 10,000 people a question to get them talking to each other is easier than you trying to talk one-on-one to 10,000 people. All this has to work at scale, so leveraging customers' desire to interact with each other is a smart way to go.

For those of you in larger companies, because social media crosses so many traditional departmental lines, departments must communicate more frequently and effectively. Without improved communication, your Facebook results will be significantly reduced.

Transparency, Honesty, and Trust

Social media bloggers the following:

  • We're switching from controlling the brand image to being honest.
  • We need to make brands less formal and more human.
  • Employees can now just be themselves.
  • More people can talk about your brand online, and you have to monitor that because bad news travels faster and farther.
  • The balance of power and control has shifted to the consumer.
  • You can't hide anything from consumers.
  • Consumers need to trust you.

Are they right?

I saw companies trying to hide facts from the public before social media became mainstream. Certain hotels had serious quality and customer service issues, made public by unhappy hotel guests in TripAdvisor reviews. Their first instinct wasn't to improve their product. These companies saw reviewers as a problem to be silenced. Often the resort's head of marketing was the first to hear about these reputation issues but had no control over hotel management and customer service—the best place to solve this sort of problem. It's perceived as marketing's job to get guests to book rooms, but management's quality control issues blocked their success.

It's best to have a quality product that makes customers happy; then social media can turn this into a lot more sales because positive testimonials and reviews help sell you to fans who are still just potential buyers.

But some of the social media bloggers' points mentioned previously are ridiculous. Yes, certain companies can be more personal and give public faces to employees, but other companies cannot. If you have a formal kind of customer who wants a professional relationship—if, for example, you're a bank or an investment firm—then cool surfer dude talk is inappropriate. Do financial services customers want to see an update about their investment advisor getting and watching football? Does a defendant want to see her defense attorney goofing off? Does a grieving widow want to work with a funeral director who tweets about how he's out singing karaoke? There can be an advantage to being quirky, but it also limits your appeal and revenue.

Take it from me, I know: I have a background in comedy, and I found that I have to be very selective about how I "get personal" and let my hair down.

When I began to promote myself and my services with social media, I used a lot of humor and quirkiness in the marketing that people saw first, before they knew anything else about me. I thought it would disarm them and make a stronger connection. But I found that some potential customers took it differently—they didn't believe I take my work seriously and they assumed I wouldn't take their marketing seriously either. In fact, some people seem to believe that funny people can't be effective at anything but humor.

So I switched it up and now start with a serious professional image. People are reassured by my expertise and earnestness, and they hire me. Later, if some of my humor comes out, it enhances the connection. Authenticity becomes a value added. This makes sense because relationships grow and deepen individually. Every real relationship is unique.

But you can't really do that same variable response in public social media because a personal response to one customer might look weird to another one who has yet to connect with you. On the public stage of social media, there might never be a good time to reveal your inner goof because new/potential customers will always be watching you interact with the established folks.

It's a tricky tightrope to walk if you want to be informal. There will probably always be a level of formality in social media. We're never going to be BFFs with our customers. Sure, maybe a surfboard company should be informal with each of their thousands of customers, but it doesn't work for all businesses. And besides, if you treat everyone with the same informality, isn't that just a different way to be impersonal? Somewhere, in a big city (probably in California), I know someone is disagreeing with this. They're wrong.

Availability and Responsiveness

Social media bloggers say the following:

  • We're switching from hard-to-reach to available everywhere.
  • Customers and businesses are easier to reach.
  • We need to eliminate the excuse that just because an employee isn't in customer service, he can't help the consumer.
  • We need to increase the percentage of employees who talk to the public.
  • We must "go real-time".
  • Companies are expanding the staff they've devoted to social media; there are now dozens of employees in Fortune 500 social media departments.

Social media is definitely a communication tool that's here to stay, and it does require a different approach and often new employees. But it's foolish to think that any and every employee should speak to the public on your behalf. Some employees just don't communicate well in any context, and some who are very effective in person don't communicate as well in a written format.

Customer service personnel receive specific training on how to deal professionally with a variety of situations, and public relations people are steeped in the company's brand and have spent hours planning how to represent the company. Any employee who's going to do social media publicly should have both of those types of training. Some social media employees can reveal their personalities to a degree, but that personality shouldn't be at odds with your brand.

It's important to respond to customers in social media quickly, but if "going real-time" means making communications mistakes, you're creating a bigger problem than you're solving. Social media employees need to know when to delay a response and talk it over with the appropriate co-worker or supervisor. We've seen social media representatives with several big companies reply in the heat of the moment and the brands suffered negative media coverage as a result.

Marketing

Social media bloggers say the following:

  • Consumers spend a lot of time in social media and you have to be there to get their attention—it's a new place to market.
  • In social media, it's easier to get customers to sell your ideas.
  • Start-ups with no funds for marketing can instead leverage labor and time to get business from social media.
  • Social media means we don't have to advertise anymore.

There are a lot of people using social media, and Facebook is the most popular social website. It is without question one of the most important places to market online. The word-of-mouth advantage listed is just one reason.

Some marketers have a strong anti-advertising bias. Should you do Facebook marketing without advertising? In my experience, that's a difficult road to take. Businesses often underestimate the cost of that labor and don't realize that fans who come from free tactics might not be qualified as good potential customers. Facebook advertising is very affordable and highly targeted. Social media means we don't have to do advertising anymore? It would make as little sense to say that now that we have such a powerful advertising platform in Facebook, we don't have to do PR anymore!

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