Using social media well is a vital part of any successful content marketing campaign. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to get right. As Allister Frost, Microsoft’s former Head of Digital Marketing and expert on all things digital, wrote in this article, many companies are getting it wrong. Rather than engaging with consumers, as they are trying to, they are patronising them.
Among the examples he gives is Cillit Bang asking its customers whether they like to listen to music while cleaning, and to list their favourite “motivating song”. That’s a great example of something that just hasn’t been thought through. The marketers involved have failed to put themselves in their customers’ place. If they had, they would probably have realised that most people don’t want to talk to a cleaning company about motivation. They have done the opposite of engaging: they have treated their customers as if they were idiots, a different breed to those clever marketing people.
Dumb and dumber?
Social media seems to lend itself well to this kind of dumbing down. It’s an easy way to send out It can be a fantastic tool to have real conversations with consumers on their own terms, and to genuinely engage. But when marketers try and go for the quick fix option that they think will earn them lots of ‘likes’, it fails. Those who do this need to remember that they are consumers too, and use that knowledge to develop real engagement.
So where’s the line between brilliance and failure in social media? To do well, brands need to be aware of their own reputation and what they mean to consumers, and they need to understand what really matters to them. These should be marketing basics, but somehow they often get forgotten when it comes to social media.
Take McDonalds, for example. They launched a Twitter hashtag earlier this year, hoping people would post nostalgic, happy stories about McDonalds meals. Consumers quickly hijacked it, and are still using it to complain about the food and service at the company’s restaurants. McDonalds failed to understand their own reputation when they launched it, and made an assumption that customers loved their brand so much they would spend time talking about how great it was.
Much better was Smirnoff’s Nightlife Exchange Project, which launched in 2010. It invites partygoers all over the world to see how each other parties, sharing photos of their nights out and posts about what makes going out in their country special. It allowed people to connect with each other and swap stories and ideas. Isn’t that what social media does best? Of course, it also got Smirnoff plenty of valuable publicity.
What Smirnoff did that McDonalds didn’t was to recognise how consumers actually use social media when they talk to their friends, and offered them a way of doing that. They came up with a campaign that was as intelligent as their customers are, rather than assuming they would blindly respond to anything they asked of them. That’s what makes a good social media campaign.