Will companies that use social succeed?

There is a lot of talk on the interwebs about how "Companies that use social will succeed". Frankly, this talk gives me the jitters.

Why?
Social is just another communication tool. Like the telephone. Or email. Would we say 'Companies that use the telephone will succeed'?!

Succeeding is of course dependent on ensuring you use the most appropriate communications channels to reach and interact with your audience, but it's also about:

1. knowing who you're trying to interact with
2. understanding that specific, defined audience and having something of genuine value to provide to them
3. having clear goals / objectives for your interactions
4. making a good plan that's intended to help you reach those goals
5. implementing the tactics using the relevant tools for your audience (including social if applicable)
6. tracking, analyzing and figuring out what works and what doesn't for your specific, defined audience in your market
7. tweaking, iterating and continuing to improve on your plan and implementation

Social media is transforming the ways people communicate - and it is and will continue to be a relevant way of engaging with many audiences. But it is just a communication mechanism. The other factors need to be in place.

Thanks to listening to my Thursday morning rant.

Have I have missed anything in the list above? I'm Interested to hear other's thoughts and comments.

Comments

[Caesar Wong]

Actually I tend to disagree (sorry! I seem to be very disagreeable here generally), although it's only with your initial premise, not the supporting content.

If we go back to the days when telephony was a nascent technology then I definitely would've said 'companies that use the telephone will succeed' because in historical context, it introduced an alternative way of reaching customers instead of selling door-to-door. Some company comes along and creates the first call-centre, their costs are drastically reduced, and they beat their competition. Success.

btw you should consider putting these posts on the DCoP community blog. I'd love to see what our colleagues think, and they're more likely to catch it there...

[Rowan Hetherington]

Caesar, I love it when you disagree, because it always means we get to dig deeper into something, so please keep at it :-)

I totally agree with you (sorry!) that using new, more effective ways of reaching people (e.g. at a previous point in history the telephone, now social) will lead to success IF THAT NEW COMMUNICATIONS TOOL, AND THE WAY IT IS USED, IS RELEVANT and appropriate for the people you want to reach.

Using the telephone wouldn't work if an influential office you were trying to contact didn't have a telephone, or if the people you were trying to reach (e.g. surgeons) rarely answer their 'work' telephone or call back. OR, if marketers were so hyped about using this new tool called the telephone that they went ahead and used it before considering who they wanted to interact with, what their objective was for the conversation or what value they were hoping to provide. I see marketers doing just that, every week, if not every day with social media!

So, my point here is not whether the communications medium being discussed is generally on the way up or down in usage, but that marketers and communicators need to invest time in planning using the points listed in my post above. This seems more important than ever before with social, simply because the number of social tools available globally, multiplied by the number of ways to potentially use those tools is becoming infinite (just like the telephone can facilitate potentially infinite types of interactions).

I see too many people jumping on 'social' like it's a new mass marketing channel, without having gone through the rigor of thinking about these basic steps of integrated marketing & communications planning.

That's why I don't think 'social' is the key to success. I think relevance (the right messages reaching the right people in the right way/place at the right time) is the key.

Do you agree / disagree?!

[Caesar Wong]

Can't argue with that! :-)

[Rowan Hetherington]

Right, need to find a new topic to disagree on then... ;)

[rohetherington]

I just came across a presentation on this topic from Mark Schaefer that made me smile - it includes a great example (Apple): http://rowan.typepad.com/watts_up/2014/07/social-media-engagement-is-not-a-strategy.html