As social media continue to expand, in Thailand Facebook has gone from 1.6 million users in January to over 4 million now, marketers are still asking: “How do I get started in social media?”

Carefully

As I’ve said before, the watchword is carefully. Social networks are created and maintained by people, for people. Unlike daytime TV, they are not there to sell soap.

Authenticity

In social networks the natural, human voice prevails. Marketing-speak and PR-babble do not fare well in this space. As many brands have learned at their cost, it’s hard to fake sincerity.

Way back in 2006, there was a blog “All I Want for Xmas is a PSP” (PlayStation Portable). This purported to be written by American teens, ruminating (in an attempt at teenspeak) on the wonders of the Sony PSP. The blog (really a flog) was short-lived. Genuine teens pointed out how lame the blog was. Someone looked up the website’s owner.  It was a PR company connected to Sony.

When they posted this on the site, the site’s owners pulled down the posts. So they got posted somewhere else.  Eventually (in internet time eventually means days), Sony confessed and discontinued the site. Although its mirrors (copies) lived on for a while as monuments to marketing folly.

Sincerity is not something at which marketers excel. If you can’t be authentic, find someone who can. For some this means using dedicated, genuine, brand evangelists. The Coca-Cola Facebook page, built by fans not by Coke, achieved its success before Coke took a role in it (and seems to have grown little since). Other companies harness the flair and credibility of early-adopter employees. In a previous column, I looked at how Comcast created their Director of Digital Care.

Judicious authenticity

Here’s the rub: authenticity is crucial, but what you say can have enormous reach, and be extremely difficult to remove or live down. This makes marketers extremely nervous.

When I tell them that they can’t control social media, like they control advertising…well it’s time to break out their tranquilizers. Years of marketing expenditures invested in building brand, potentially destroyed by incautious social network postings.

What a thought! No wonder that many marketers are frozen into inaction. They know they need a social media presence, but shy away from the authenticity needed to create it.

No wonder that Keith Weed, Unilever’s new Chief Marketing Officer (and the man with the world’s second largest advertising budget), is reported to have said: “Digital marketing’s like high school sex. Everybody’s talking about it. Few people are doing it, and those that are doing it, aren’t doing it very well. “

Many marketers are substituting bribes for authenticity. They build those Twitter followers and Facebook fans (strictly speaking we don’t “Fan” any more we “Like”, but they’re still called fans), by giving things away: coupons, discounts, free tickets, whatever. It’s hard to believe that the relationships these freebies create will be any more long-standing than those created by promotions in tradition channels.

Brand Guidelines

The more forward looking companies are investing in developing guidelines, standard operating procedures, or protocols (terminology varies) which spell out what can and cannot be done on social media.

Intel has one of the clearest and most elaborate, reminding its employees (amongst other things) not to report private conversations, nor comment on legal matters (without clearance), nor bad-mouth competitors…and to write only in their areas of expertise. And, above all, to take responsibility for what they post.

As brands rely more and more on (authentic) spokespeople outside of marketing, we can expect to see more companies needing these guidelines.

Read before—and more than—you write

The old adage that we have two ears and one mouth so we can listen more and talk less, applies without a doubt in social media. To participate credibly in social media means understanding and internalizing the tone of posts.

Different venues, different discussions have different norms. In traditional media it was important to fit the ad to the programming content, in social media it’s even more vital to fit in.

In traditional media, the marketer was the host: the advertiser paid the bills, so a bit of hard sell might be pardoned. In social media, marketers are guests. Good guests (who want to impress their hosts and get invited back) make sure they cause no inconvenience, and don’t overstay their welcome! The transition from in-control-hosts to guests is quite challenging for many marketers.

This article originally appeared in Bangkok Post, June 30, 2010

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