I’ve been in the social media space now for quite a few years and I meet with at least 5 companies each week who have understood the importance of utilizing social media for their businesses but are still afraid of entering their brands into the new media age.

What are they worried about? Here are the top five concerns that I’ve heard from executives and my response to them:

1) They’re afraid they’ll lose control of their brand and open themselves up to negative feedback – When you open a business and start marketing your services and exposing your brand to others, people will start talking about your brand. And this is what you wanted right? This is why you exposed them to your brand in the first place.  People are going to be talking about your brand no matter what. The question is: Do you want to be a part of the dialogue or do you want to just play ostrich and ignore what people are saying? If a person is dissatisfied with your services, do you prefer he opens up this discussion in a “I hate <your brand>” group opened up by another hater or do you prefer that he come to your page and post the complaint there allowing you to respond appropriately and even perhaps win him back as a client?
Social media didn’t create the dissatisfied customer – it only allowed him a platform to express his frustration. If you don’t give him the stage to speak, he will do it elsewhere and believe me, it will cause a great deal more damage to your brand if you’re not there to respond and open to criticism.
When we speak of social media, we speak of conversational marketing – listening before selling, opening a dialogue with the user and not just throwing a blinking banner in his face. Brands need to make that switch in their heads and understand that social media is SOCIAL. Many conversations will be positive and you will have these nice messages recorded for everyone to see publicly – your bosses, your investors, your customers and potential customers:

Some conversations may be negative but these conversations should be seen as welcomed opportunities to gain back customers. If you utilize social media effectively and are alert to what people are saying about you online, then you can also respond in a timely and intelligent manner. When you’re dazed and confused and too afraid to see what people may be saying about you, that’s when the conversation can get out of control and your branding and positioning can go out the window. Companies who understand social media know that by using social media they are increasing the number of positive responses to their brand and making sure to control and decrease the negative responses by showing people that they actually care about what they have to say.

2) They don’t understand it – Companies fear social media because they don’t understand what to do with it, what to talk about, who to turn to. They often time try to do it in-house without the appropriate guidance, fail miserably and then say that social media doesn’t work. Don’t hire your friend’s son who is very active on Facebook to do your marketing strategy for you. Just like you wouldn’t fix your car in-house or do your PR in-house, neither should you start doing social media on your own without having a social media guru at your side. And when I say guru, I mean someone who has had a good track record in creating successful social media campaigns for other companies in the past. Once you have such a guide at your side and you begin to understand what social media is all about, then you will not be afraid of it anymore and you will start to recognize the infinite number of amazing opportunities that social media will open your brand to.

3) The effectiveness of social media is hard to measure - Since social media is still in it’s diapers, it took a little while for tools tracking the ROI on social media campaigns to emerge, however today we have a suite of different tools that allow companies to track even the most minute details in the effectiveness of their social media campaigns. Tools like Google Analytics which allow us to track the traffic coming into our site as well as where it’s coming from has existed for years. Google alerts which allow us to see the blog posts and other sites linking back to our site have also existed for a long time. And we are now seeing an influx of services that not only allow you to easily monitor what people are saying about your brand but also see who are the top influencers, opinion leaders in your industry and more. There are numerous services that allow you to see the top influencers on twitter such as: Twitter grader and twitter analytics services such as Twitalyzer . Facebook also provides its own insights to page admins and enables admins to view information regarding the demographics of their fans and also how many interactions, comments, wall posts, etc. were found on the page. The more we learn about social media, the more tools we get to measure it. Not only are our efforts in the social media realm measurable but social media campaigns also allow us to target specific campaigns to specific niches like no other media today.

4) They’re afraid that employees will be on Facebook and twitter chatting all day – Facebook today has around 350 million users. If Facebook was a nation, it would be the world’s third most populous after China and India. Your employees are there anyway. Why not utilize the fact that they are there to help your cause? When you need to spread the word on Facebook, why not enable your employees to help you or when you finally open that fan page on Facebook, why not allow your employees to become fans and encourage them to take part in your social media activities. Dell for example, who is well known for their great twitter strategy (a strategy which has earned them $6.5 million to date), has around 200 employees working its twitter account, responding to people.

In addition, not allowing your employees to have access to the vast amount of information that can be found on social networks as well as not enabling them to use these networks as research tools nor to network with people in the industry also puts your company at a great disadvantage to your competitors who do allow their employees (and even encourage them) to use social media tools.

5) Social media is costly – This last fear is not only something that companies should not fear but it is also not true. If you consider the millions of people that you can reach using social media as opposed to the cost of buying an ad on TV or buying a banner, you’ll see that social media is one of the most cost efficient ways of reaching your target audience today.

To anyone who still thinks social media is a fad, WAKE UP. It’s not. Social media is here and it’s here to stay. If you took a look at the latest report that came out of Davos regarding social networks, you’ll see that Facebook is now the second most popular site on the internet after Google and that according to Nielsen since February 2009 people have been spending more time on social-networking sites than on e-mail, and the lead is getting bigger. The question for your brand is no longer whether to be there or not to be there. The question is WHEN will you be there and the longer you keep your head in the ground, the more you’ll lose touch with what’s happening out there in the real world.

Great Ostrich pic credit: http://blog.karmona.com

When Blonde 2.0 began to assist HP Israel’s Personal Systems Group with their social media marketing efforts, we found they had no representation in the social media world. A community had not yet been built for the group and their customer base did not have a proper network to turn to for questions and answers. Over the course of a few months’ time, Blonde 2.0 and HP quickly exposed HP Israel’s PSG group to the social media world and began engaging with customers and potential customers in order to increase the group’s brand awareness in the community.
When you build a community from scratch, the target audience you primarily want to attract are community leaders, early adapters and other “movers & shakers” in your industry in order to gain some momentum. Blonde 2.0 launched HP Israel’s Facebook Fan Page in September and started with 0 lonely fans. Since close to a third of Israel’s population has a Facebook profile – 2.5 Million Israelis and the demographic groups we wanted to target were found on Facebook, this social network was a great place to start building a community around HP. We also turned to twitter to reach out to HP’s community, as no other network allows for real-time message updates nor engagement with Israeli industry leaders from the high-tech and digital marketing worlds as Twitter does.
By the end of first month, HP’s fan base on Facebook grew to 150 fans and we noticed an exponential growth each week. By the end of October, HP had 619 fans and by November we reached 810 fans. This quick growth was based on the interesting content we uploaded and our engagement with the fans on the page. We discussed computers, laptops and provided assistance with HP products. We also created all types of interesting activities and contests for the fans to take part in.

Providing incentives for fans and followers to take part in the community is a must when brands take a part in the social media world. A brand should be ready to compensate fans who promote its name both by social incentives as discussed in this post and also by giving fans prizes. In the end of November, early December, we unleashed HP Israel’s first giveaway campaign, asking our fan base to participate in a creative contest that would offer them a chance to win a new HP Mini laptop (the Mini 110c). We wanted to emphasize the product’s easiness of mobility and asked our fans to tell us where they would take their laptop if they won it. We encouraged fans to be as creative as possible, giving them the option to upload videos, sound clips, photos and graphic materials to the fan wall as their contest submission. The response rate was overwhelming and we were amazed at how much fans invested in their creations in order to win. We received over 630 entries within 3 weeks time. The winner of our competition was a creative song writer Nadav Harel who wrote an enthusiastic song about HP: HP song: Cute Little Computer. Nadav received recognition and praise from the community (social incentive) and a new laptop. The HP laptop contest did wonders for our activity and growth of the HP Facebook Fan Page. Our community grew to over 2,580 fans.

Campaigns held on twitter also encouraged HP fans to become more involved in our community. We asked our followers to tweet us a personal experience they had with an HP product. The creators of the three most creative tweets of personal experiences they had with HP products were awarded a bluetooth mouse known as “The Dragon.” During the two weeks of our twitter campaign, HP Israel’s twitter community grew by more than 140 followers.
With twitter, we continually monitor what people say about HP PSG’s products and provide assistance in real time. Below, a user complained that he had not received his computer from the service lab on time. HP Israel quickly intervened to fix the problem and everyone came out of this story happy.

It is always exciting to build a brand’s community from the ground up and watch our marketing efforts and activity grow within the social sphere.

We have learned a few lessons along the way and continue to learn daily from our valued community members.

A few tips for the newbies who haven’t yet led any social media campaigns:

1) Listen to what people have to say about your brand and be responsive to their needs. Don’t be defensive. Be attentive.

2) Always remember to be transparent and honest with the members of your community. Make sure that if you promise something, you make it happen. Don’t be afraid to admit when you’re wrong – people appreciate that from a brand.

3) When creating contests, make sure the rules are loud and clear. There’s nothing worse than bitter fans angry after a contest’s rules weren’t made clear in advance.

4) Remember that building a community takes time. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is an online community. Enjoy each one of the phases you go through when building your community and learn from them.

We live in a wonderful age today where brands can interact and have an open communication channel with customers and potential customers. I am happy to share our experiences with the building of one such community. An online community just like an offline community needs to be nurtured with delicate care and fed with content, activity and live discussion at all times in order to keep it buzzing and this is what we aim to achieve above all.

(Guest post by Dorine Sinigaglia)

When talking to clients about social media and its effects on increasing sales of their products and increasing traffic to their site, the most asked, common question is: “That’s great – but what will social media do for us? Show me the money!” – and their point is rightfully valid. For those who still don’t quite understand the long-term effects that social media has on their company, it is rather difficult for them to understand the true purpose for setting aside a budget directly for social media, as they don’t see the monetary effects and gains that social media has on their organization. Even for those few who do understand the purpose for utilizing social media tools,  tracking monetary gains and effectiveness of social media it is still not an easy concept to grasp.

If you found yourself questioning the immediate monetary effects social media efforts have on your company’s growth after reading the above and you too exclaimed in your head “Show me the money!” – I highly suggest you check out Olivier Blanchard’s clever and entertaining presentation on the Basics of Social Media ROI. In short, Blanchard notes an important point to remember about social media: “Social Media is not free: it takes people, it takes technology and it takes time – all of which are limited resources.” Read on.

We already know that social media takes people (often a whole department) to manage a successful community. We also know there are a number of resources available for ways to reach out to a community using social media tools – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube – the list goes on and on. And then there’s the major factor of time. Most people think and practice the popular phrase “time is money.” Yes, time is definitely money, but it is important to remember that  most social media campaigns take some time to develop and spread virally. Managers in corporations often feel the need to “pass” on social media campaigns and jump the gun too soon because they don’t see immediate gains or increase in product sales. They think that the campaigns must obviously not be working. This way of thinking goes against every aspect of social media marketing. Embarrassingly enough – 84% of respondents in a survey taken said that they don’t currently measure the ROI of their social media programs (survey taken in August 2009 – noted in a Mashable article). How can one be so certain that social media doesn’t bring in a return on investment if they don’t even measure it?

As Blanchard notes in his presentation, there are many types of non-financial impacts that when glancing from a distance, one can’t see the immediate effects of in terms of money. Types of non-financial impacts include website visitors, impressions and blog comments, customer complaints, positive press & negative press, Facebook friends and Twitter followers, social mention and retweets, positive WOM and negative WOM, employment applications and coupons distributed. All of these impacts have a direct impact on the financial gains of the company – but they do take time to occur and is not something that can be rushed.

According to Christina Warren in her post HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI, “finding trends and tracking them back to their point of origin is the key to measuring ROI.” It is important to know where you started before you know where you are headed in social media. One cannot state that social media tools aren’t “working” for their company if they didn’t even know whether they had a community before they started. It is important to make clearly defined goals and then track progress along the way. There are numerous helpful tools used to track quantitative results and analytics including Google Analytics, PostRank Analytics and eWebAnalytics (check out more ways to track website traffic here). It is not enough to measure solely quantitative results, as qualitative results are also important measurements of tracking success of social media efforts. Before tracking these, it is crucial to determine what it is you want to measure – is it conversations about your products? If relationships were built with your customers? If customers are happy with your product or are they providing complaints? All of this is important to track but one must first understand their organization’s social media objectives in order to know what results should be expected.

According to Aaron Uhrmacher from Mashable,”statistic-based metrics seems to be the primary way communicators feel they can secure approval and budget for these programs from their management teams” in his post How to Measure Social Media ROI for Business. Measuring solely statistics can be problematic,  as social media ROI is based on several factors that lead to an organization’s sales’ bottom line (as mentioned above). Aside from the numerous social networking sites available, there are also insights that come from an organization’s company blog, their participation in other blogging sites, their PR in the blogosphere and any other viral way of virtually mentioning the company’s brand — and all of these  come into play when measuring the effectiveness of social media. This is why it is almost dangerous to assume that immediate returns will show up from your investment in social media.

Measuring ROI is key to assessing the true impact your social media efforts have on your business and your gross margin. However, measuring it is one thing – knowing what to do with those results in another story. Look for specific trends and user behaviors before and after posting status updates, blog posts and promoting discounts and coupons for the holiday season. Every move counts and its success (or lack thereof) can be tracked with numerous sites and analytical devices. Remember the time factor also. Don’t assume your social media efforts are worthless if you’ve only spent 2 weeks promoting a new product. Large-scale marketing campaigns in social media can take up to 6 months for them to come into full-effect and start driving profit to the company’s bottom line. So take a look at your current community and track what has been done and make attainable goals of what needs to get done in order to grow. Continue to engage with your community, track progress along the way and have patience – as this process will take some time – but is definitely worth the wait.

Dorine Sinigaglia is the Account & Content Manager at Blonde 2.0.

(Flickr image courtesy of Arisey)

If we look back in history , we will find that much before Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, there was ICQ. For anyone who doesn’t know, ICQ was created in 1996 and is now wholly owned by AOL. ICQ was THE pioneer of social media and real time updates. It introduced us to instant messaging and a revolutionary new way to communicate with people instantly in real time. ICQ could have been Facebook or Twitter a long time ago. It’s taken ICQ quite a long time to get back to its status as a social pioneer but now with it’s new client, ICQ is getting back to what it was about all the way from the beginning – a place to interact with your friends everywhere. Everybody Everywhere is after all ICQ’s slogan and being an ICQ veteran myself, I am very excited to announce the launch of the new ICQ 7.

ICQ 7 is a client that brings together all your social interactions from across the Web. Instead of having to open a few different pages and applications to get my friends’ status updates on Facebook, to read tweets of my favorite people and to follow what’s happening on other sites as well such as Youtube, Flickr, Digg and Delicious.  ICQ 7 allows me to use one personal communication tool to integrate all my online social activities.  I am able to syndicate my updates to all of my social networks with a single click and get status updates & tweets from all my friends in my networks in one single platform.

ICQ 7 enables real-time updates from content sharing sites and top social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg and Delicious and will soon announce the integration of local social networks. Found side by side with the ICQ Contact List, users can find a separate tab of real time feeds and updates from their friends from their various social networks. Users will no longer need to open up a new browser and log in to separate networks that they’re members of each time they want to comment on their friend’s updates. From now on, consider ICQ to be your social networks’ one-stop-shop no longer will I need to search for content on different platforms – the content finds me.  ICQ 7’s interface is also improved with software that is fully compatible with all versions of Microsoft Windows, including Windows 7.

My Status: Status updates I make on ICQ can be automatically posted in my other supported networks as well.  I can also easily share pictures and links.

Feeds from Friends: Updates made by user’s friends on leading social networks and content sharing sites appear in real time in the “Feeds from Friends” tab on the contact list.  The user can comment on these updates directly from his/her ICQ and the comment will appear also in the relevant social network/site.  ICQ users can see updates from all their friends in the various social networks – not just from friends that have ICQ.

My Box: The “My Box” tab on the ICQ Contact List is the place where ICQ users get all notifications of their personal online activity – who commented on my status and in which site, who liked the photos I uploaded, etc.

New User Profile: ICQ 7 presents a more enhanced user profile – both within the client and on the Website.  The user profile is the place where users can display who they are by sharing pictures and personal updates on their page.  The new user profile is now offered in color schemes that are fully customizable to suit the user’s mood. Additionally, the new user profile allows ICQ users to view their friends’ contact lists and add new people to their own contact list, thereby increasing their circle of friends.

Picture-Sharing Tool: A new, quick and fun application for sharing pictures with friends:

Faster, Lighter: ICQ 7 performance has been vastly improved with installation time reduced by nearly 50% and requested space for installation reduced approximately by 30%.

ICQ 7 offers a Social Messaging client that enables quick and easy communication friends from across networks, ability to view real-time updates from: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Digg and Delicious. ICQ’s Managing Director, Eliav Moshe, says:

“ICQ 7 brings Social Messaging into play, integrating users’ online social world with their personal communication tool.  The new version answers users’ needs for a quick and easy communication tool that also helps you be up to date with everything that’s going on in multiple social networks and content sharing sites.  With a loyal community of over 42 million users worldwide, we are working on the upcoming integration of local social networks into ICQ 7 as well.”

It is only fitting that the company that was the pioneer of the Web 2.0 era has now integrated this Web 2.0 world into one manageable space in the best possible manner.  Try it out for yourself and let me know what you think. In my opinion it offers the best solution we have today for one platform which integrates all my social interactions into one convenient platform.

Become an ICQ fan on Facebook

Check out their Twitter

(Disclosure: Blonde 2.0 is ICQ’s social media firm)

Starbucks has over 705,000 followers on twitter and over 5,428,000 fans on Facebook. I guess you could say that they’re doing something right on the Web. What is it about Starbucks’s social media strategy that makes it so successful?

Let’s analyze Starbucks social behavior across the Web:

1) Starbucks on twitter – Starbucks engages with customers on twitter, answer questions, retweets what people are saying about the brand and creates an open communication channel to speak with the public.

2) Starbucks on Facebook – Starbucks uploads content to their Facebook page such as: Videos, blog posts, photos. The company also invites people to events. Fans have a place to open discussions and comment as many of them do.

3) Starbucks on YouTube -Over 4800 people subscribe to Starbucks YouTube Channel. They upload videos of commercials as well as informational videos explaning the origins of the different coffee blends and some of their charity work videos. They also upload videos showing their history thus enabling people to relate more to the brand. This video showing the beginnings of Starbucks received over 11, 800 views:

Starbucks is also allowing people to embed its videos anywhere they like on the Web. Many companies don’t allow this because they’re afraid that their videos might be places on sites that they don’t want to be associated with. However, from Starbucks’ experience as well as the experience of other brands (such as Dell), this strategy has proven to only increase the positive exposure of brands that allow embedding and not the opposite.

4) My Starbucks Idea – Starbucks’ own version of a social network where customers are asked to share their ideas on anything related to Starbucks. The site gives users the ability to see what others are suggesting, vote on ideas and check out the results. This site is a brilliant and important aspect of Starbucks social media strategy. Users who are part of this network feel that they have some role in the decision making process of the company and it makes them feel a part of it.

5) Starbucks Blog entitled “Ideas in Action” – This blog is written by various Starbucks employees and talks about what Starbucks is doing with the ideas given by users on the My Starbucks Idea site. The blog keeps customers in the loop and in the know regarding what’s happening with their ideas and increases their sense of loyalty to the brand.

Overall Starbucks’s social media strategy integrates many different elements into the mix and combined together, these elements create a social media plan that works beautifully to create millions of fans for the brand and keep them involved in the brand’s doings. The brand has created a digital dialogue with its customers, enabling people to give their feedback and receive a response back from Starbucks addressing their concerns/comments. Starbucks is showing its customers and potential customers – “hey, we care about what YOU have to say.”

I am certain that if each one of these elements was done alone then the strategy would not have been as successful and complete as it is when done like this in integration with the rest of the elements on board. Many brands can learn a great deal from the way that Starbucks conquered the social web. It is really all a matter of priorities. Starbucks put communicating with their customers and potential customers as a top priority. Do you?

10. May Google Wave turns out to be a lot more convincing than what I’ve seen so far

9. May people stop giving relevance to terms like Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 and start giving relevance to what those terms mean

8. May advertisers finally admit the fact that that they cannot do without social media playing an integral part in their campaigns

7. May Web entrepreneurs start thinking more about the type of Web tools that people have a need for rather than being so concerned about replicating what’s already a huge success

6. May information on the Web really lives up to the dream and starts finding us instead of us needing to search for it

5. May people begin to understand that conversational marketing is about having a dialogue with people and not about who had the best monologue

4. May data portability between various platforms become more simple and efficient

3. May bloggers finally get the respect they deserve from the community

2. May email turn to twitter – each mail cannot be longer than 140 characters (that’s including attachments)

1. May more tools focusing on citizen journalism and real time updating services enable us all to be more aware of what’s happening in the world around us and bring us all closer together

I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy 2010. I hope that at least a few wishes in each of our lists come true in the upcoming year.

Image credit: Oliver Widder

Many B2B companies ask me whether Social Media is right for them. This post is all about why social media and B2B go hand in hand. Social Media is all about conversational marketing and this is why it works so well with B2B strategy.

Social media is not about the masses. It is about reaching your target audience. Listening before selling and hearing before talking. Oftentimes businesses like to measure a social media campaign’s success by the number of followers its twitter account has or the number of fans their facebook page has, however, these measures are not necessarily the signs to a well-executed social media campaign.

Social media is all about the few rather than the many. The community you build up is ideally made up of the people who are most interested in your brand. If we apply the 80-20 rule here, we are speaking of the 20% who make up 80% of your business.

B2B strategy, just like B2C strategy is all about networking, conversing with the right people,  at the right time. The more in tune you are to things that are happening in your network, the more you increase your chances to be at the right place, at the right time.

According to eMarketer in 2010, these will be the results for online marketing spending:

As you can see, Website spending is forecast to rise 71% and social media spending will increase 60% in the next year.

It is apparent that companies are understanding that they need to: 1) Create a social presence within social networks and 2) Create a Website and/or blog that reflects an active online presence.

As to the reasons most B2B companies are using social networks, emarketer had the following results:

As you can see, companies turn to social networks to show their leadership in their field, to find new potential customers by communicating with the community, to receive customer feedback and give customer service. There’s no better tool these days than twitter to handle real-time customer service issues and many brands do this beautifully, including ComcastCares, Dell, and Starbucks. They also advertise and do market research via social networks.

What about the reasons that companies use social media?

The top reason B2B companies (just like B2C companies) use social media is to generate awareness about their brand. Second top reason is to engage with customers on an on-going daily basis. As you can see, the 3rd top reason that companies use social media is to engage with top influencers on the Web.

Monitoring online conversations and responding to feedback is an extremely important element of social media which only 14% of companies seem to understand.

B2B companies that are not utilizing the social tools they are given today, will find themselves at a major disadvantage to other B2B companies that are using LinkedIn, twitter and other such networks to extend their reach and create better communication between the brand and their customers and potential customers.

Next time you doubt whether social media is right for B2B companies, think about what B2B strategy is all about – it is about the relationships and partnerships you build with your colleagues and there’s no better way to do this today than through social media.

Image credit: StickyMessage

These days we live in an era of a historian’s wet dream. We are consistently recording history through all our social tools. Our actions, feelings, thoughts, our everything, constantly being recorded. From where we are eating to what we are annoyed about to what it is that makes us tick. Not only are we recording the “big” things but we are recording EVRYTHING. It’s history without hiccups.

Ben Parr wrote an excellent post on Mashable on the topic. Parr: ” For the first time in human history, the day-to-day interactions between people are being permanently recorded and formatted in easily organizable segments of information.”

Millions of us are publicly recording our daily activities on our twitter feeds for the world to know for the rest of time. All details are recorded from who we were with and what we were doing to when and where. Historians in the future will not need to guess any details. They’ll have all the information right in front of them.They’ll actually probably know more than they care to know. With pictures on flickr and videos on youtube and texts on twitter and links on facebook and top it all of, personal blogs, historians will have all the info they need and more about each and every one of us and our interactions with one another.

I can already see future museums displaying this era as an era of communications galore when everyone (well, almost everyone) was about transparency and openess – kind of like the 60’s but digital – free social love for all. We cannot share enough of our daily doings with one another and we cannot hear enough. We long for the feedback from our surroundings and the immortality of our souls by recording everything we do. We feed on the interactions surrounding us.

It is not a coincidence that today Reality TV is one of the most (if not THE most) popular TV genres. People like to watch other people’s lives. For this same reason social tools are also so popular – people like to see what others are doing and interact with them while they’re doing it. People are looking for ways to connect more with one another no matter what geographical location they’re at. In what other age was it so easy to interact with someone two continents away from you?

We are learning more about each other’s cultures, actions, relating more to one another. Perhaps world peace will be achievable? Perhaps we’ll learn to get along? Social media tools are definitely changing the face of history. I cannot write such a post of course without mentioning the story of how the U.S. State Department reached out to Twitter and asked them to delay a network upgrade that was scheduled in June 2009 in order to allow Iranians using the service to protest the presidential election that took place on June 12. Twitter moved the upgrade to a later time. Lev Grossman from Time.com writes: “Twitter didn’t start the protests in Iran, nor did it make them possible. But there’s no question that it has emboldened the protesters, reinforced their conviction that they are not alone and engaged populations outside Iran in an emotional, immediate way that was never possible before.”

There is no question that social tools are changing the face of history. The real question is: Are we fully ready for the change and its future consequences? Are we all ready for an era of total transparency?

Picture credit: Andrew Long

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:

1) Misconception #1: Social Media is only right for certain brands – Often time 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 time 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.

2) 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.

3) 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.

4) 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) 2/3 of the global internet population visit social networks and time spent on social networks is growing at 3x 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?

5) 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

Guest Post written by Ahuvah Berger