Social media isnt about campaigns its about strategy

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Social Media Isn’t About Campaigns It’s About
Strategy
Posted by:Adi Gaskell
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Posted November 21, 2012
When I talk to people about social media or see how companies are
using the tools, the pervasive impression is that it is still used primarily
in a campaign orient ated way. Social media folks will be required to
show evidence of their Facebook campaign or some viral video on
YouTube in order to be regarded as a success.
Now I’ve nothing against campaigns on social media, but lets say you
conduct maybe two or three of these per year, what are you doing the
rest of the time? The problem for me is that by emphasising a campaign orientated approach,
it creates a mindset t hat social media is another advertising platform. The campaign approach
is understandable in advertising because you generally only have a budget to do a few
campaigns a year. With social however, not only is the environment ill suited to direct sales
messages, it’s also often free, thus negating the requirement to limit your activity to a few
campaigns.
Wouldn’t it be better if instead of a campaign mindset , your organisation had a strategic
mindset? The kind of mindset t hat has social media at the heart of what it does. The kind of
mindset that treats social as an unheralded opportunity to engage with and learn from your
cust omers, and to use this knowledge to craft a sense and respond approach to strategy.
Here are four ways you can use social media to make the sense part of your strategy better.
4 ways to use social media in your intelligence gathering
1. Find your curat ors – Information curation has been a part of the social scene for years.
Whereas most of t his curation is done around topic areas, if you can f ind (or create)
someone who curates the relevant t opics around you and your business, then it can
serve as a significantly better source of information than trawling through a database. By

collecting information from a variety of sources you avoid the groupt hink that is so
pervasive. Recruiting these curators from outside of the company is an easy way to
avoid company centred thinking. Of course, this curation doesn’t just have to be about
you, you can also do it for competit ors as well.
2. More engagement, less data collection – Whereas previously dat a gathering took up a
significant chunk of time, with social listening tools, and fine curation, you’re freeing up a
lot of t ime to actually engage with people. This is the respond part because it frees up
time to solicit ideas and get feedback from your customers, and get them co-creating
new products wit h you. Therefore the ability to engage with a community is now a key
skill for the modern employee.
3. Drive insight – Do you still use SWOT when doing strategy? How about empowering
social media to try a different approach. More and more analytics products are hitting the
market that will analyse the social web f or you. They’ll be reading blog posts or
discussion forums, they’ll be checking out Twitter and Facebook. They’ll give you great
insight into what really matters to your customers. They’ll tell you where your strengths
and weaknesses are.
4. Drive action – I’m sure many of us have been handed reports stuffed to the gills with
data. Whilst no doubt thoughtfully produced and full of nice insight, they don’t make it
easy to actually make changes. Social media offers you a way to get insights delivered in
such a way as it makes driving changes much easier. New social software automatically
curates important information collected from the social web and delivers it to decision
makers in an easy to understand format. The nice thing is that this information no longer
has to exist on a ‘need to know’ basis, it can be shared throughout the organisation,
therefore democratising intelligence.
As you can see, there is so much more to social media than merely running campaigns. Your
task is to ensure you utilise it to its fullest.
Feed: Views from a Community Manager
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Adi Gaskell
A writer on management and social media for sit es such as Technorati, Professional
Manager, CMI, Business Works and HRMToday, as well as at my own blog.
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