Decoding online social media marketers mind

There’s been this immense interest towards social media marketing for most brand managers/marketers. Everyone wants to know about SMM however don’t know either where to start or how to measure and hence have loads of unanswered questions! Very intriguing to know that everyone now knows and believes that SMM is a must though

First question that comes to your mind is what are the tactics to be used in a SMM campaign? Which are the proven methods or best practices and how do I establish strategic alliances or partnerships to have a successful social media marketing campaign. Is social media about blogs, Twitter, Facebook and will help me market my brand? Is it true that I will not get any immediate effect from a social marketing effort and it’s just good for a branding purpose!!! Yes, these are the thoughts in any marketer’s head – very relevant questions I would say however some of them don’t really have any answer in black and white! Every SMM exercise is unique in its message rendering which is based out of the marketing objective of the exercise we are undertaking at that point. If you have a sales driven motive, then not only your choice of tactics or social media practices would be different but also the messaging would be more action oriented. Yes, the current objective will determine the tools, practices and messaging for your SMM campaign

Second most boggling question is how do I measure effectiveness of a social media campaign? How do I measure success? Are there any benchmarks available? First of all SMM is a new way of marketing and then asking for benchmarks as per category, well am I shooting in dark! What are my returns on investments? Well, yea I know that social marketing is a brand campaign so there shouldn’t be any question of ROI, but what do I do – it’s online marketing, management wants to know how does this translate into sales for us? Can we measure brand impact or increase in brand evaluation through our social marketing campaign?

Well, yes I come across all these questions raised by brand managers. Very relevant concerns and echoes the sentiments of ‘sitting on fence’ audience who want to tread paths very carefully. Well, the answer to all these queries is simple, let’s define what we want to achieve, define who we want to reach, and what is the messaging we want to relay. Once we have these 3 basic facts in place, we would be able to monitor the performance of the medium as per what ever deliverable metrics available in there. Today, there are new developments happening in tracking technology on a daily basis and arriving at metrics should not be a problem

A very simple yet profound question we face is ‘how do I maintain social balance’ I represent an organization/brand, where does my persona attributes end and where does the marketing starts? How do I respect the medium and what are the standard etiquettes to follow? I am a beginner, are there any unspoken rules of the medium?,

again I would say these are valid questions, this happened to me when I started using Twitter – I was a late adapter of the medium and I felt as if there are some unspoken rules in there and I must know all of them to be part of this community! Well, I was wrong! Yes, you should know the basic information or knowledge on what the medium stands for, how to use it and maintain decorum and etiquettes of the medium. Believe me, it’s the content which is the king! If you have a great content, way of presenting it, you are on a roll! Just maintain the basics of the medium

Here’s to a socio digital life!

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