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As more marketers get involved in social media and it becomes less of an exploratory space, we’re starting to see commonalities amongst the unsuccessful.  Here are a few we’ve noticed:

1.  Focusing on social media without fixing brand problems

A broken brand will have a broken social media presence.  The criteria for success in social media are the same success criteria for any brand: have a good product, with good customer service to support it, and an emotionally compelling reason why a customer should pick you over your competition.  If any of these things don’t work in the real world, exposing your brand to social media will only compound the problem rather than mask it.  A bad product with bad customer service will get negative conversation; lack of an emotional angle can result in no conversation at all.

One example is @RogersHelps, the Twitter account for Rogers customer service.  Despite a valiant attempt to provide customer service via social media, Rogers as an organization has so many systemic customer service problems that many people who reach out to RogersHelps end up complaining about them.  It has nothing to do with their social media acumen – the account is well-supported and maintained – the conversations just expose what are ultimately organizational problems.

2. Developing a Facebook/Twitter page for a campaign with no long-term management plan

Marketers are used to working in quarters and campaigns, things that have a definitive start and end.  But social media properties are always on.  So if someone wants to put up a Facebook or Twitter page for a campaign, the first question to ask is - What happens to these pages when the campaign is over?  Building up a fan base just to let it die doesn’t make much sense – the advantage to social media is being able to build long-term relationships.  Even YouTube, which can successfully be used for campaigns, is much more effective when it’s built up as a permanent property.  It’s not that you can’t start a page with a big campaign, the question is what happens to it once that campaign is over.

Problems tend to arise most often with contests and characters.  If you set up a Facebook page for a contest or a character in an ad, Facebook has very stringent rules that prevent you from renaming that page or transitioning your fans to another page, which means you either have to maintain that page as a separate property, or pull it down and lose the fans.  The same applies to YouTube – view counts and subscribers cannot be moved from one channel to another.  This is why big brands with successful characters – like Old Spice and Dos Equis – have used those characters to support their brand pages rather than setting up separate pages just for the characters.  As a result, both brands have over 1 million fans on Facebook.  On the other end of the spectrum is Progressive Insurance, who has two Facebook pages – one for their product, with just over 27,0000 fans, and one for their spokesperson, Flo, with just over 2.8 million fans.  Rather than using her equity to build their brand, Progressive is now stuck with a page with a limited purpose and, if they ever decide to veer from the spokesperson route or choose another spokesperson, a limited shelf-life.

3. Not having the right resources to support social media properties on an ongoing basis

This is a corollary to Mistake #2.  Social media properties require permanent maintenance - either starting or maintaining conversations, content or both.  Depending on the size of your audience, your industry, and whether you’re creating content or just conversing, the resources required can vary. Make sure you’ve done that evaluation before you get started.  Since the real value of having social media properties is growing a long-term relationship, you need to think about how you’re going to continue to both maintain and grow your audience.

If you take a look at the top Facebook pages in Canada, the top 50 all post regularly and respond to people’s posts.  But Air Transat, who get questions about the services they offer posted to their wall, will have very different needs from Bud Light Lime, who regularly run contests, and are maintaining a page where fans regularly come post about their love for the product.  What types of content you post, who needs to respond, and how often varies significantly by industry, which means the resources required to upkeep a page will vary depending on what industry you’re in.  Suffice it to say, there’s a bare minimum of entry, which requires at least one active poster/responder.

4. Confusing tactics for strategy

Facebook/YouTube and Twitter are channels: if your use of these channels is not supported by a brand strategy, all you have is a tactic.  Strategies like, “Reach key influencers in our audience by providing engaging content on our Facebook page” or “Feed our target’s need for news by activating a Twitter channel” need a brand strategy that says how you’re going to do these things in a way that’s ownable for your brand.  Otherwise, they’re the equivalent of saying, “Generate brand awareness via a print ad”.

5.  Thinking your actions dictate outcomes

No matter how much you plan, people are unpredictable.  It’s not about getting people to do what you want; it’s about having a conversation.  Just because you supply the opening line doesn’t mean they’ll stay on-topic.  So be prepared and be flexible, because anything can happen.  Plan for unpredictability.

Nestle found themselves in trouble when Greenpeace launched a campaign criticizing them for their use of palm oil.  Nestle, unprepared, tried to mitigate the crisis by removing all offending materials which only made matters worse, and as the situation degenerated, the Nestle social media voice ended up responding rather rudely to their fans.  (You can read about the course of the crisis here). Had they had a crisis plan in place, things probably would not have escalated as much as they did.  As long as you’re ready for whatever people will throw at you, you won’t be caught off-guard.

Nicole Polivka, Digital Planner