The Truth
Today’s web audience can smell bullshit a mile away. And I thank them for it. Companies are lucky to have them for so many reasons outside of being paying customers. Their low attention span and ability to talk to their trusted friends before making a purchasing decision can squeeze the accountability out of companies like a ripe grapefruit in a vice. They help make our world and the companies that run it, a better place. My opinion of course.
At the core, my philosophy on social media/marketing (and in life really) has always been: “Be unapologetically genuine, truthful and transparent.” I’ve really tried to stay true to this my whole life, in all my business endeavors and I try to keep those traits as mainstays in everything else I do.
The challenge with social media is that it’s so vast and enormous and noisy. Because it’s so huge, we need to get more calculated and efficient. As we grow our efforts and things start to take off, new opportunities and scenarios are unearthed.
I’m sure this scenario sounds familiar: You are trying to maximize your ROI with a big campaign push. You are trying to pull out all the stops by seeding relevant key influencers, implementing a solid social media strategy relying on the most extensive outreach and syndication plan possible with the budget and manpower you were given. You realize you are ready to go bigger. You are ready to step up your game and numbers on a grander scale. Unfortunately, the size of your golden revolutionary game-changing campaign vision is WAY bigger than your allocated tangible means.
So how do you go big with way less headcount and budget than your vision requires? There are a number of ‘services’ that exist out there now that would like to help you. But while their technical abilities are sound, I’m concerned that the needle between real and ‘payola’ will get pushed too far in the wrong direction.
Here’s what I’m talking about……
The Proposition
I was approached recently by an agency recently about hiring them to do ‘targeted, sponsored outreach’ utilizing paid blog posts, tweets, et al. The process is pretty simple. You have a kick off meeting with them to discuss the following:
- Your product or service and brand
- Your business objective with the particular campaign or initiative you are hiring them for
- The demographic(s)/market segments you’re trying to proliferate
- Known subject/demographic (and very specific) key influencers (so they can research all of their conversations, posts, etc.)
Once you establish some of these basics with them, they then move forward with profiling bloggers, tweeps, and others from a pool of hundreds of thousands (so they say) of authorized content creators that have gone through a review process. This process interviews bloggers to find out what they normally write about, their hobbies, their focus, knowledge level, etc.
Example
If you were selling a new camera for instance, they would work with the bloggers they’ve profiled that are photographers, or are at least enthusiasts on some level. Then, they would orchestrate a blog post idea/concept by each of these bloggers that would all go out at the same time (roughly), mentioning your product, your company, with all positive commentary when the launch happens. There would be a HUGE amount of link love, exclusive content, and thousands of people that were advocates of your company and this new camera……………at least algorithmically. 
The Concerns
If you were to go down the path of basically the modern day payola version of social media, and savvy consumers saw or recognized the pattern and sudden onslaught of blog posts/tweets about you that came in at a volume that was NOT part of your track record, would they lambaste you for it? Would they start to write their own blog posts about your company paying for synthetic blog posts instead of ones that were written organically by people that actually do know/follow/buy your company’s products or services? Would it turn into a PR nightmare and make your company look shady?
Would you be the coveted winner of the “Social Media Used Car Salesman” award?
The Questions
I’m curious to know what others’ experiences have been with sponsored outreach, blogs posts in particular. Maybe hundreds of companies are doing this and no one notices, or even cares for that matter. I already know why it *works* from a technical and human behavior level, but is it the right thing to do or is it better to just continue to grow everything organically….or a combination of both? Did I leave the iron on?
Onward.
Does Your Company Have a “Reputation” for Engagement?
There are lots of new companies that were born into the era of social media. They have a full-on reputation for customer engagement and interaction. It is expected of them by their customers/audience and has been since they launched their website(s), blog(s) and Twitter account(s) and their company was spat out by the venture capital womb for all of us to check out. Social media influenced the initial business plan before they even launched. Hooray for them! Hooray for social media! Hooray for organic engagement! Hooray for BBQ sauce!
Training Day
However, SOME companies were not born in the age of social media. They make the best products *still* and are the leaders in their respective industries, have been around since the dawn of time, yet *still* offer a product or service that is relevant and in need. Just like you need to train your big ol’ company to shift to a culture of customer connect, engagement and transparency, you also need to possibly train your long time customers to start looking at your company along the same lines. In high tech, some of the original gangsters of silicon valley that still run the technological show on the back-end with less glamor and more of a solid backbone than almost any other tech company around (Oracle, Intel, etc…) may or may not have had a reputation for direct customer interaction over the past couple decades. So for those that haven’t, while their products or services are best-in-class and their customers know it (these custies show these brands decades of loyalty), these customers still have established an engagement status quo with them when it comes expected direct communication and involvement. If you are a long running big company trying to stay at the forefront of the new customer culture, there’s a chance you may have some work to do. There may be some serious re-shaping and molding of the minds and hearts that needs to take place.
Give The People What They Want
If you have a good product or service that fills a unique void/gap, you’ve already won the battle. To win the war in today’s landscape, you need to leverage social media channels to embrace your interactions with your customers in a way that makes them not only invest in you when things are good, but also want to work with you on improving your reputation when your company is at a low point. They need to have some sort of incentive that drives them to want to be along for the full ride as a customer (an investor, really).
Here are some ideas that I or someone else has thought of to stir the proverbial customer pot a little bit to help get your audience more involved:
Contests/Giveaways
Feedback
Events
Recycle Your Customers
If your customers aren’t used to you using social media or engaging them directly, it doesn’t mean they don’t want to and that you can’t change that. You don’t need to trade them in for new ones. After all, more often than not they’ve invested in you so anything new you do for them, or any new amount of time you invest in them, is all gravy, which makes switching to your new customer relationship from the old, pretty painless. Recycle them for use into the next chapter of your company.
Onward.