Getting It Right (and Wrong) in Social Media: Current Business Practices

How are your adventures in social media for behavioral and social change working for you?

Looking for some inspiration of what to do better or differently next year?

Cathy Hallingan writes in AdAgeDigital about Four Marketers Getting It Right (And Wrong) On Facebook. Her observations of commercial marketers complement what I was writing about in The 5 Fictions of Social Media in the health and health care sectors.

She notes that there may be as much as $3.8 billion spent in advertising on Facebook in 2011. But are these marketers creating any value or sustainable advantage for their businesses? Her answer for most of them is "categorically no."  Here's why:

• Most marketers approach Facebook purely as an advertising and engagement platform. The select few who are getting it right recognize and approach Facebook as a new business-building capability.

• Most execute programs only on Facebook.com. The select few who are getting it right also use Facebook off Facebook.com; using the open graph to develop relevant, compelling, personalized experiences on one's branded web properties.

• Most measure the media activity (reach and frequency, impressions, buzz, fan count) only. The select few who are getting it right also measure commerce activity (referral traffic from Facebook and the resulting conversion on one's site, customer acquisition).

She provides recent examples of the right and wrong approaches to using Facebook - Amazon, Step2, TripAdvisor and Louisville Slugger (pay particular attention to this one as it parallels much of what I see happening in public health applications).

Paraphrasing her guidance of how to judge the success of your Facebook (and other social media) efforts, we need to address the questions:

• What relevant and compelling consumer problem does it address? 

• How do your social media activities advance the behavioral and social change objectives of your organization?

Her conclusion of what is working 'right' for successful companies is that they are exploring and exploiting the 'social' aspects of the social media experience, not using technology in the same old ways…something we talk about here regularly.