Social Media 101 for Marketers: Use Social Media Tools the Way Ordinary People Do

Chris Brogan is one of my favorite thinkers in the social media space, and I’m very fortunate to have met him on a couple of occasions. Last week, he posted a great article entitled “Marketing is NOT Social Media-Social Media is NOT Marketing.”

In it — and I paraphrase here — Chris argues that marketers who screw up in the social media space are often confusing the medium with the practice. Marketing is a discipline that is all about shaping and controlling a message. Social media are tools that allow ordinary people — or at least geekier-than-average ordinary people — to create and distribute content themselves.

In short, social media enables the little guy to make his voice heard.

Marketers should turn to social media the same way the little guy does — to connect. Self-expression and connection with other human beings are the bedrock reason why people are drawn to YouTube and Facebook and WordPress.  If you use those tools as just another distribution channel for the same message you’ve been sending down a thousand other channels — radio, TV, print — they’ll fail to translate nine times out of ten.

The result is that you look ham-handed, desperate and spammy.

Working from Chris’ central thesis, these are my recommendations for marketers:

1. If you want to understand social media, start using it as an individual first before you use it on behalf of a client. Pick a passion that has nothing to do with work and explore its presence on the tools you’re curious about. Hint: try using Google’s search within a site function — type “keyword site:twitter.com” into Google — to seek keywords within Twitter.com. That’s a great way to find people to follow. You can do this for other sites as well, like YouTube.
2. Observe what people do, then jump in and try your hand at commenting, leaving a video response, tweeting a bit, etc.
3. Eventually, you’ll start to feel a sense of investment in whatever community you are participating in. Once you’ve reached that level, you have the necessary understanding to apply the practice to your marketing life.
4. Pick one of the social media tools you’ve explored and see if you can find either a community of your client’s stakeholders or conversations about your client. Now, think back to your personal online community and ask yourself, “if a marketer came into our community and wanted to talk about their client, what would I want from them?”

Welcome to our community! If you like what you see, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed!