Is the focus of your online social media campaign Facebook or Twitter? Our approach to online reputation management (ORM) and search engine optimization (SEO) always begins with the relationships within the organisation. It’s not services or products that keep business alive, it’s relationships.
Social media is first and foremost about people.
In a recent blog, Mike Saunders makes an excellent observation that so often goes awry when devising communication strategies.
“Social media is about the people, well at least it should be. Approaching social media strategy with a “platform mentality” is like focusing our attention on the which {sic} bike we need to ride when we should be concentrating on our fitness levels to win the race.
Fitness in social media is the ability to understand our consumers. Social media allows us to engage, communicate, question and observe our customers. This should give us a wealth of information to better understand our customers and better meet their needs. Regardless of the platform, their communication over these platforms should give us insight into their lives, their vales and their needs.”
What Saunders says is not actually a new concept; it’s the age-old concept of defining your target audience before you package your message. The foremost task in approaching a communication campaign has always been to define your audience and then to choose the best medium possible to reach them. The options have not changed; they have just expanded.
I was in a strategy meeting last week with the CEO, CFO and IT-guru of a major international group and they have come to the point where they have decided that they need to be present on the social media platforms that are popular in South Africa – Facebook and Twitter. This is great – they are right, they do need this. However, with a staff of over 60 000, they wanted to know how their people, the ones without computers or smartphones, would interact with the online social media.
We discussed notice-boards and in-house newsletters, which they already have in place. I then posed the question; “Who are you trying to reach with the social media available to you?”. It was this question that allowed them to better understand where we would be headed with the social media campaign and the type of messages that we would use them to communicate.
Developing an online social media strategy is not an IT exercise, it’s not a marketing ploy, and it’s not an advertising campaign. It’s stock standard Public Relations Management.
