Social Media Is Not Your Knight In Shining Armor

Is social networking really the new king? Will immersing yourself in the social web cure you of your marketing and communications ills?

This image was taken from Mr-Shopping.com. If you are looking for some renaissance wear, check them out! No, this is not an ad.

It was 15 minutes past midnight last night and I was lying on my couch, in the dark, staring at my ceiling.  I couldn’t sleep.

It wasn’t because of the insomniac bird with Tourrettes that sits in a willow tree near my house, nor was it because of my neighbor’s dog, which randomly makes noises I can only equate with those of a moose.  It must have been a minor annoyance over a recent post titled “Social Networking Is The New King,” because I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  I’ve been seeing this article pop up all over the place.  Maybe I’m getting wrapped up over semantics, but if social media were king, then I should just be able to create a presence on social sites and call it a day.

Yeah, that would solve my communications problems.

Social media recently attained “rank” and assumed its place as an integral part of Web 2.0, but that doesn’t make it king.  I suppose my fear is that the fireworks of social media will draw our attention away from the primary issue -- a good web strategy.

Where is this dog racing to? To farm out his social media content of course! Photo credit: me

Social media is now an undeniable piece of the puzzle in your overall web strategy.  Simply put, this would include: your site, a mobile site and/or apps, mass email, and a social media presence.  You need all of these pieces, working in coordination, to have an effective Web 2.0 strategy. Without one (or for goodness sakes, many) you can still operate, but you’ll be missing the bigger picture.  I was going to make a nice puzzle graphic using a picture of my dog, but I couldn’t make it work. Still, I couldn’t leave the picture out.

Look, I’m just as thrilled about social media as the rest of you.  But don’t get caught up in the fervor and think that social media is going to ride in on a white stallion and make your web marketing and communications problems go away.  We’ve learned this lesson before.

Déjà vu? … or Déjà fait?

This whole process seems like a familiar echo from the 90s, when there was a burning desire for a business to make a website without fully evaluating why they needed a website or what they actually intended to do with it.  They just needed one and they needed one now!  This led to website factories, which pumped out scads of poorly designed sites awash with useless information, coupled with the “everyone is a web designer” phase (saving a word document as HTML is web design, right?).  Back then, your non-strategy left you with a website slipping into disrepair while you wondered why the promised mega-results never manifested.

And now, before some of those sites could even be cleaned up, businesses are staring agog at the dazzling social media toys, stamping their feet in desire to get involved.  Their non-strategy in social media is inevitable, and I know this because the social media content factories have already sprung up. Just google “social media content factory” and you’ll… well, just do it.  It’s scary.

In the end, it’s not about the tools, it’s about the strategy.  Yes, you probably need a presence on social media, but figure out why first.

If you think I’m off the mark, that I missed something, or have something else to add, please take a moment to comment! And as usual, I’d like to reference some of the blogs that inspired me to write this post:

I particularly enjoyed this post and its ensuing debate: News flash: Social media won’t fix your content problems by Kristina Halvorson, which had nuggets of wisdom like “Make your corporate website relevant by having a well-founded, sustainable content strategy. Let that content strategy inform the kind of content you create and share, how you share it, how you engage, and how you react.”

Don’t like my puzzle analogy? Try reading @HarleyRivet’s post relating this concept to a pinball game.  I stumbled across his post while reading @markwschaefer’s blog, which also had a recent article about this very same subject.