Back to the Basics

Kristina Knight at BizReport wrote an excellent article called "Why Community Building is Better than Simple Social Marketing".   This should be required reading for any small business owner, lead corporate marketer, and marketing/branding/social media consultant that wants to truly wants to help brands effectively use social media.

The intro says:  When it comes to social marketing many brands are doing themselves a disservice by simply creating a social profile or tweeting deal ads to followers. Sure, this gives the consumer a reason to visit a website, but for a truly integrated social campaign marketers need to take their social profile to the next level. That includes building a community the consumer will return to time and again, and that means more than deal tweeting.  You can read the entire article here. 

Kristina's article brings to mind the top 10 rules about social media and branding that I've been preaching for the past 4 years:

1. Being on social media doesn't make your brand interesting.  Being interesting makes you interesting.
2. Social media is an amplifier.  It takes what you truly are and makes it louder and more prominent.  This is great unless your off-line brand sucks.
3. If you treat social media like advertising, your audience will treat it like advertising.
4. The best brands feel comfortable having their people talk to other humans.  This means they embrace being transparent and don't block the use of social media.
5. Great brands already have a community; they just use social media to facilitate those existing conversations.
6. If you have made someone really, really happy or really, really mad then you are already on social media. 
7. At some point in the very near future, if you aren't on social media (as an organization or a person), then you won't exist.
8. As with all things branding, be simple, unexpected, and consistent.
9. Lead by example: if an organization's top executive isn't using social media then what does that say about listening and relevance?
10. Spending money on how to use social media is stupid.  Spending money to learn why is smart.  In other words, once you know why, social media is a do-it-yourself project.