If you are an avid reader of my blog posts (I mean, who isn't, right?) then you probably know that I tend to write on the topic of social media. I write about social media primarily because I personally enjoy using the services on which I extrapolate and because it happens to be my job to sell folks on the benefit of engaging target audiences using these services. Having said this, what I am writing about today may at first glance seem somewhat contradictory to my profession (and might even smack of blasphemy to some of my socially-strategic brethren!) but I feel that it's time to lay down some brutal truths.

You see, in my profession I have the sometimes-duplicitous role of building up a client's expectations at the onset of a social media campaign while, at the same time, tempering those expectations. The buzz surrounding social media makes it an attractive marketing tactic, especially with the many successful case studies one can reference. However, the social media landscape is laden with pitfalls and barriers, and even the best laid schemes of mice and mad men often go awry. It is in the best interest of the client, and the agency itself by way of cultivating a long-term relationship, that this reality is addressed and not mitigated in the hopes of of winning the account or project.

To better describe what I am trying to explain, let's take a look at the imaginary company BetterButter. BetterButter is a medium-size, B2C provider of organic peanut butter. They have been around for roughly three years and have had modest success in the Northeast region of the USA. The Powers That Be at the company have decided that it is imperative to establish a social presence. After a brief review, BetterButter chose Agency X to help them achieve this goal. Agency X begins to set into motion the development of a Facebook fan page and a Facebook application, as well as a twitter-centric promotional campaign.

Now fast-forward a year. The Powers That Be at the company are perplexed. They have invested a fair amount of time and capital into growing the brand socially, but the results have been far from a commercial success. The Facebook page has only 150 fans. The application (a nifty peanut butter recipe-generator) has only been adopted by 40 people, 25 of which are employees and their family members. The brand's twitter account has 230 followers, 30% of which consist of attractive women with x-rated links for viewing and the several twitter promotions have not increase the company's presence on the service, let alone any substantial increase in sales. The Powers That Be can't understand why this campaign hasn't yielded the results they projected and Agency X inferred.

If you are a small-to-medium size business, this scenario may sound eerily familiar. If it does, it's because your internal marketing team or third-party agency that carried out your campaign either didn't know what they were doing or were simply to eager to take advantage of the buzz surrounding social media. This scenario, whether fictional or close-to-home, is indicative of what's wrong with our industry right now. It is our responsibility when providing these services to our clientele to be forthright in stressing the substantial barriers of entry that exist in the social realm, rather than take advantage of an organizations eagerness to "get social." The following are several things I think every client must know before strategy can be discussed, let alone executed:

1. Social media is not the end-all, be-all answer to an organization's marketing goals. It is merely a component, albeit an increasingly crucial one, to your overall marketing mix. The core parts of that traditional mix, most importantly branding and corporate identity, must be strategically developed and executed. As with all of your communications efforts, you want a unified communications front. If your brand or corporate identity is not established, then your social presence will lack a real-world tangibility.

2. To expand on the subject of the importance of branding, I'd like to note the correlation between brand-loyalty and successful social marketing. The largest asset an organization can have at the onset of a social media campaign is a brand-loyal consumer base. Brand-loyal consumers provide you with a pre-established network that is already exicted and knowledgeable about your organization/product and therefore likely to be receptive to any attempts to socialize with you. From a viral standpoint, you need to use this group as your mavens. If you are lacking in brand-loyalty, then one of the long-term goals of your social campaign should be to build that base. Think quality over quantity in terms of followers/friends.

3. Has your organization developed an application for one or several of the major social networks? If so, you probably spent a good chunk of change on it and have not received the ROI you expected at the onset. Here is a sobering statistic that you should be aware of: only 1% of the applications on Facebook account for 77% of volume in terms of usage. Last I checked, there were over 17,000 applications on Facebook. That means that only 170 applications are being adopted by the majority of users. I'm not saying that applications aren't great viral tools (I may just put myself out of a job if I were); rather I am stating that your application had better be engaging and useful to your audience if it is to succeed. If your social media presence is in its nascent stage, it is probably not a wise idea to launch an application. If you do have a firmly established social presence, make sure that what you application offers is unique and, most importantly, serves a useful purpose.

4. What is the status of your organization's current digital presence? (Note that I said "digital" presence and not "social," and by this I mean any and all web-related endeavors. What's your website like? Is it dated? Slow? Informative? What's level of traffic does your site experience? These are important questions to ask before launching a social media campaign because what you distribute socially should be, in terms of best practice, short and sweet. The real bulk of information is located on your website, and one of the primary goals of any social media campaign should be to increase traffic to your site.

5. Does your company have a blog? It should and, while there are great third-party blog sites available, that blog should exist within your own domain. A blog is the best opportunity you have to: establish thought leadership and expertise, display your corporate identity and personality, optimize your site's search engine ranking and allow for direct dialogue with the community your are seeking to build or grow through trackback and comments features. More often then not, engaging an audience through social media means participating in a conversation that is directed by the community itself. Your blog is were you set the agenda.

There are still other things to consider when planning a social media strategy, all of which should be determined by conducting a preliminary audit of your marketing mix and digital presence. As communications professionals, it is our duty to make sure that we are honestly and accurately assessing our client's strengths and weaknesses at the onset of any social media endeavor. It can be difficult, especially in these trying financial times, not to be blinded by dollar signs when approached for this type of service. To best serve our clients, we need to be brutally honest about the barriers of entry that exist in social media, as well as communicate the importance of traditional marketing, PR and advertising.

Beyond all of this (and thorny subject matter to be further elaborated on in a future post) we need to redefine - for this specific medium - how we measure the success of these campaigns. Promising a lofty, or mollifying a more realistic, ROI goal does not accurately reflect the value inherent in participating in this medium. I have worked in public relations, where there exists a similar debate on attempting to quantify the value of a media hit. I've always been of the camp that believes that a story in the New York Times speaks for itself and need not be quantified through the application of the Advertising-Value-Equivalent method (measuring the size or length of the placement, using current ad pricing to determine what an ad of that size or length would cost, then multiplying by 1.5 or up to 3). In social media circles I've heard others refer to ROE, or Return On Engagement, which I think is much more representative of the nature of this beast. Simply put, we need to work with our clients to categorically determine how "success" is to be defined at the onset of any social media campaign.