Crimes against social media

In 2012 we pledge not to:

1) Bribe people to ‘like’ or follow our brands. Engagement with a brand must be driven by affection or admiration and if the truth is that you are short of either its not a social media campaign you need it’s something rather more fundamental.

2) Accept or set social media metrics as the KPIs for a campaign. We must demand an end to briefings that include arbitrary number of likes, views or followers as campaign objectives. While these are indicative of popularity they are only a means to an end and can never be the end in itself, we need to prove the value of these relationships.

3) Ask people to do something that we wouldn’t ourselves want to do or that requires effort far greater than the reward. It sounds bleeding obvious but how come we so very rarely learn this lesson and continue to ask people to confess, upload and create for us?
4) Desperately try and start online conversations with vapid inanities - you know the kind of thing ‘we love lemon cupcakes, what’s your favourite cupcake?’ If this were the conversational style of a real friend we would punch them repeatedly in the face.

5) Collude in the idea that social media campaigns provide a cheap or even free way to have a constant dialogue with customers and prospects. Providing constant content of sufficient quality is extremely difficult to pull off and it’s rarely cheap – though we need to develop new production models in order to deliver this and ensure that the task doesn’t fall to the PR agencies for reasons of cost.

6) Create mediocre content hoping that it’s going to ‘go viral’ – even worse paying someone to seed mediocre content. People only engage with content that is either useful or utterly delightful and delivering this takes a set of skills that we possess in spades but need to learn to deliver more consistently.

So let us commit ourselves to eradicate these and many other crimes against social media and help ensure that in 2012 social media marketing not only comes of age but grows up.

Common sense really.

Read the whole article on adliterate here:http://www.adliterate.com/archives/2012/01/crimes_against_1.html#more