Alice in Wonderland speaking to the Cheshire Cat…
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where –” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go” said the Cat.
“– so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
Like Alice, marketers often find themselves needing to “get somewhere” but may not be precisely sure where that somewhere is. This has become particularly true of social marketing efforts. With the fervor around social media, marketers are feeling pressured to begin incorporating it into their program but aren’t quite sure how. In some cases, they’re not even completely sure why social marketing matters so much – they just feel they ought to be doing it. So, like Alice, they often set out in a direction, only to find that after considerable time and effort, it got them nowhere.
In talking with marketers I’ve come across three common pitfalls that, from the beginning, can lead them astray.
Pitfall #1: Believing that all social marketing means creating social media
While social marketing may involve social media, there’s a fundamental misconception that all social marketing involves the development of content – blogs, videos, Facebook apps, etc. But depending on your company’s objectives, you may never want or need to create your own content. The key lies in defining what results you want from the program.
I like to think of social marketing as a spectrum of engagement ranging from passive to active. The objectives you target will directly affect the activities you undertake and your engagement level.
Pitfall #2: Setting program objectives that aren’t measurable
A head of marketing for a major regional shopping centre recently told me her objective around social media was to generate foot traffic for the mall.” This sounded like a reasonable objective but the problem is that the mall has no empirical means of credibly measuring foot traffic.
The objectives you set should meet three key criteria. They should support the overarching strategy and positioning of your business. They should be credibly measurable. And lastly, they should be meaningful to the people in your company that control the financial and/or human resources you’ll need to continue or expand your social marketing effort. After all, there’s no glory in meeting an objective, if it doesn’t at least win you the resources you need to continue your program.
