From a brand of this size, this is very significant, for a few reasons. Firstly, because they are acknowledging that misleading practices are widespread – and in our own experience, the beauty industry is at least as bad as any in this respect, maybe worse. Secondly, they are admitting that brands have a role in perpetuating that fraud, by creating the demand that “influencers” respond to.

From a marketing professional perspective, this is fantastic news. If more PRs and brand clients had been making educated decisions about who they pay for influence within the social media ecosystem, we would very likely not be having this discussion at all.

But here we are, and mainly because of the longstanding practice of setting influencer payscales mostly or entirely according to their number of followers, rather than, say, rewarding them with a proportion of any sales resulting from their work. As a consequence, it’s wise to regard any social media account with unaccountably large numbers of followers, or whose every banal uttering on Instagram is met with disproportionate enthusiasm, with great suspicion.

That has had a massive and toxic impact on the whole sector. Clients look at these (literally) unachievable numbers, apparently generated by doing nothing particularly clever or out of the ordinary, and they demand that marketers achieve the same thing for them. Potentially, marketers are put in a position of choosing whether to pay their own mortgages or stick doggedly to doing things the right way – which will pay dividends eventually, but often well after a client has lost patience.  Other social media users ( your would-be Influencers) have to choose between a lucrative push-button option to bulk buy followers, and the slow and arduous route of building a genuine following through creating great content.

Everything gets distorted by those “dishonest business practices” that Keith refers to.  I know we as a business will have lost potential clients in the past, because we don’t have an enormous Facebook following. The reason for that is that we have chosen not to invest in the resources required to build one honestly – ie, ongoing high quality content creation in the social media space. That takes time from good people, and those good people need to be paid, and those costs would have to accrue to the fees we charge our clients. We hope that our potential clients will look beyond those particular numbers, take time to chat with us and evaluate our expertise and approach in a more meaningful way – but there’s no doubt that somewhere along the line, some won’t have done. Is there a temptation to cheat the numbers? Of course there is!

The illusion of widespread but inexplicable popularity on social media itself spawns other scams. People who want it to work for them can’t see any explanation for others’ success, which makes them easy prey for practitioners who claim to have a “secret formula” that they can either teach or deploy at will – for a price.  The truth is, there is no secret formula, and success depends on the same basic factors that have been around since God was a boy – understanding your audience, having a great product, consistently generating good quality content that your audience enjoy, and ensuring that you take best advantage of the opportunities for visibility that each platform offers.  Quite often, this news is surprisingly unwelcome…

So where does this leave social media marketing? The thing is, that none of this changes the fundamental uniqueness of what social media marketing can do. There has never been a single, unified communication platform of the size of Facebook or Instagram, since time began. There are real opportunities for effective marketing and laser focused targeting that can’t be found anywhere else, and at a cost which is very hard to equal through other channels.

BUT

As marketers and as clients, we have to be satisfied with “just” those unparalleled opportunities. Stop trying to believe in the unicorns, and take the word “viral” out of your vocabulary (in most cases, at least).

What’s the problem?

There’s a fundamental tension between the way that communication between an organisation and its audience (customers, peers, even shareholders) has traditionally been managed, and the type of communication which succeeds in the social media environment.

Until recently, all communication was “official”: provided through relatively formal channels like newsletters, permanent website content or magazine editorials. These could be crafted over days or even weeks, conformed to a particular set of norms, and would usually be issued only by a small number of approved individuals in the marketing department. They would then often be signed off by one or more senior managers, allowing close control over everything which left the building in that organisation’s name.

Applying literally any element of that model to a social media presence though, is a recipe for – well, if not disaster, certainly not success.

What needs to change?

Firstly, you’re not always the originator of the “story”. Social media is partly about engaging in, and responding to, existing discussions, which may or may not relate directly to your product or service. You don’t get to decide what gets discussed, let alone what will be said about it.

Secondly, things move on too quickly for the “sign off” hierarchy to be viable.  Occasionally there might be time for a quick internal call to sense check some proposed content, but a day or two’s delay whilst waiting for someone to get around to reading and signing off an email is going to be the kiss of death to any conversation on social media.

And finally, and most importantly, content authored “by committee” just won’t resonate with individual  users. Social media is primarily about individual, one to one interactions, but with a public dimension.  For an organisation, that will always be a challenge to some extent; nobody wants to read a Facebook post authored by The Borg.

Whether you choose a social media community manager to represent you, or encourage a number of key staff to be active online in a professional capacity, they need to be able to make authentic connections. And that means expressing their own personality and opinions.

If this scares you, you probably need to have a good think about your recruitment policy – while not every job role requires amazing communication skills, if you don’t trust at least a handful of staff to act professionally whilst still being themselves (something that most people do in their office environment every day!) then you’re going to find social media very difficult to deal with.

We need a policy for that!

Which brings us to the topic of social media policies. We’re by no means anti-policy here, in fact we actively encourage our clients to have one. But its focus needs to be on supporting good interaction, not on suffocating it.

In our experience it’s relatively simple to define what you shouldn’t do on Twitter or Facebook – it pretty much boils down to good manners, the same professional standards you’d apply in the office, and avoiding a handful of sensitive topics. Most of the time, especially where there’s been a culture of always having “t”s crossed and “i”s dotted by managers, the challenge is in helping whoever is representing you online be confident in finding their own voice.

In general, the shorter and simpler the better – within reason.  Zappos shoes, a US brand which is hugely successful online, has a policy consisting of just seven words: “Be real, and use your best judgement“. Which is all well and good for a young company whose employees are generally confident in the online world, but those who are less confident may appreciate a little more detailed guidance.

However, most of the examples often cited as good corporate social media policies are no more than a page or so long, and avoid getting into the level of detail which is going to start making people second-guess themselves. Specifically, try and avoid areas such as insisting everything that goes out is written in a particular “house style” (using specific types of language) – if for some reason you really need all your content to be that consistent, you need to employ a single social media editor / manager who can take ideas from the rest of the organisation and copywrite them in the required way. It’s still not recommended though – far better to let your community manager host the party in their own language!

This article has some good examples, and also highlights a few additional issues to consider, such as ownership of a hybrid professional / personal account if that user leaves the organisation.

Keeping it in context

“Doing a policy” is often the first port of call because it’s a nice, tidy way of putting things in the “done” box. But it’s also important to ensure that everyone relevant understands the context – what the wider company objectives are for social media, and what they are ultimately contributing to. The more information they have, the easier it is for them to interact confidently and constructively – and the more confident the organisation can be in letting them do so.

This week, we’re going to look at the Fear Factor: those times when, either on an organisational or personal level, the response to any discussion of social media is “Whoaaa hang on there. It’s just far too risky”.

What are organisations scared of?

There are two schools of thought which cause organisations to run away from social media. The first is a complete refusal to engage; often this is because of reading vague but negative media reports, suggesting that posting on Facebook means your house will be burgled, or that Twitter was responsible for the London riots in 2011.

The second is more about concrete concerns: lack of control, loss of reputation, exposure to customers or employees with a (real or imagined) grudge against the organisation. Or to a lesser degree, “getting it wrong”; accidentally posting something inappropriate or negative.

Are you or your senior management running scared?

If those sound familiar, this post is here to help! Let’s look at each of those issues in turn.

Firstly, the “social media is evil” theory. The best cure for this is simply understanding a little about exactly how the main social media sites work, and what choices each individual user is making. For example, Facebook is intended to be used to keep in touch with people you know and trust – that’s why you have to actively accept a friend request before someone new can see what you post there.

If you’ve chosen to accept friend requests either from people you don’t know well, or that you do know but who have criminal tendencies, then it’s a bad idea to put a post up detailing your upcoming month-long absence from home. If that isn’t the case and you get burgled anyway because of something you said on Facebook, then you need to choose your friends more carefully!

Similarly, blaming Twitter for causing riots is essentially the same as blaming the Big Red Telephone to the White House desk for a nuclear war. Holding the transport medium responsible for the message simply doesn’t make sense, and neither does refusing to use it just because someone else uses it for ill. Most companies wouldn’t stop using the postal service just because they get junk mail….

Staying “safe”

That second group of worries are better founded in reality, but even so, avoiding social media is definitely not the cure.  Hiding under a blanket won’t make the Big Bad Wolf go away…and the same is true of the Big Bad Social Media wolf.

Yes, every organisation has less control over what’s being said about them, since social media arrived. Yes, reputational damage can happen more easily and faster. And of course it helps if staff have a good understanding of how social media impacts on your communications strategy, and what’s expected of them.

But unfortunately, your customers, suppliers or partners are not going to refrain from discussing you on social media just because you’ve chosen not to have a presence there.

That’s the bottom line with most of these kinds of fears – those discussions may already be happening, but you won’t be aware of them or able to participate…which really doesn’t make the situation better! And you’re also missing out on the ability to identify and engage with people who do love your product or service and want to tell the world about it, as well as all the other benefits that joining the social media realm can bring.

Send in the clowns

Just an additional note on the “haters” fear; that someone with a vendetta and time on their hands will target an organisation’s social media presence. Firstly, this happens much more rarely than most people think. In many years of managing clients’ social media, we’ve had no instances of it happening, and only a handful of incidents where discussion got out of hand and we needed to gently step in. Of course if you’re in certain lines of business (life sciences, arms sales) you may be right to expect trouble, but for the average organisation it’s not an issue.

Secondly, people who are heavy internet users (as most social media users are) learn to identify obsessives and crazies pretty quickly. They’ve seen them before, many times. So just because Mrs Trellis posts ten times on your Facebook page that you stole her favourite biro, that doesn’t mean that anyone will take her seriously. And if you’ve done a good job of building and nurturing your Facebook community, you may well find that they will step in to defend you before you even need to.

You have permission to worry about…

….missing out on the opportunity; and doing a mediocre job because you don’t approach using social media rigorously enough. There may be a risk that you’ll be overtaken by a competitor, and there is certainly a risk that if you don’t manage the basics well, your social media presence could impact negatively on the perception that customers and peers have of your organisation. The good news is though, that these are things which are well within your control, either by allocating resource and knowledge internally, or by getting a little help to set you on the right track.

This is a topic which comes up so often with our consulting clients, that we thought a short blog series might be in order. So we’ll have a few articles to follow looking at the issues in a little more depth, together with how to tackle them.

But for now, here are our top three characteristics of an organisation which will find it really hard to sucessfully integrate social media with their communications and marketing activities.

Red Flags to watch out for:

Product or service challenges

This is probably the biggest potential commercial issue, and in our opinion the main area where social media can cause an organisation some real pain. Note though, it’s the existence of social media which causes the pain, not the organisation’s decision to get active and involved with it!

There is no doubt that social media can expose problems. If there are known issues with a product, or you’re aware that a particular service is a frequent cause of customer dissatisfaction, you may well come to wish that social media had never been invented.

In particular, it allows customers to easily connect with one another, and discover that the issue they’ve been told was a one-off…isn’t. That’s often where the trouble starts.

So, if you know you’ve got some work to do in terms of your core offering….social media makes it all the more urgent that you address it quickly. And if you’re being kind to your front line staff, perhaps do it before you launch on your chosen social media platforms.

Restrictive employee culture

Does every communication need sign off from more than one person (or indeed, country, in some examples we’ve seen) before it can leave the building? Do you have policies for anything and everything, until your employees are scared to choose their lunch sandwich without reference to the HR handbook? That’s another bad sign.

This one’s more of a slow burner. You probably won’t have a major PR catastrophe, but neither will your social media presence deliver the benefits you’re hoping for.

In order for your people to succeed on social media, you need to allow them to be human. Otherwise, it’s the equivalent of sending someone into a crowded pub with a 30-page behaviour guide…they probably won’t get thrown out for bad behaviour, but they’re never going to be the life and soul of the party, either.

If empowering your employees to be ambassadors for your organisation, and make sensible decisions without micromanagement, brings you out in a sweat – one way or another, that will need to be addressed.

Fear and / or lack of understanding at the top

Your senior management (or trustees / funders etc) turn pale at the very mention of YouTube, and tremble at the sight of Twitter. They don’t use it and don’t really understand what it does, but they’ve seen articles in the media about Bad Things which happen because of it. As a result they’re convinced that social media is the Root Of All Evil – from lost productivity to employee riots!

In the early stages, this may not actually hamper you that much. One or two champions might begin using social media, and even seeing some benefits from it. But ultimately, if those at the top aren’t on board, things will eventually grind to a halt.

It’s crucial that senior executives at least accept that social media has benefits and are confident in the relevant managers to use it constructively. Ideally, they should understand exactly how those benefits relate to their company, and even have some very basic experience with using the key platforms so that they are clued up on what’s important, and what is and isn’t achievable.

Sound familiar?

If you recognise one or more of those symptoms in your organisation, stay with us. We’ll be tackling each one, and what to do about it, in the next few posts.