Top 10 Social Media Fails

and what we learned from them

 

There has been no textbook for social media. Most of what The Duffy Agency is doing for our clients in social media has never been done before. That means sometimes things will take an unexpected turn. Having launched several social media campaigns over the last few years, we’d like to share what we have learned. While most of these projects have been successful, they were not without their lessons to be learned. If you want to sharpen your skills in social media, the best way to improve is to learn from your mistakes. Or, in this case, ours. 

Don't be fooled by the “gurus” who talk as if they have been practicing social media since birth. Social media is new to all marketers and all marketers are grappling to come to terms with it. When faced with your first social media campaign, it is natural to apply strategies and tactics form traditional marketing. What we have discovered is that many of these tried and tested approaches fall flat when applied to social media. I outline here 10 of the most common social media fails we have encountered and how they can be remedied. 

So that we may discuss these projects frankly, we won’t identify the clients or brands involved. All projects were global in scope. In each case, it was the client’s first social media project. Deadlines were tight on all but one of the projects. 

Fail #1:  Runway Fail

The biggest difference between traditional media campaigns and social campaigns is the amount of ramp-up time needed. Traditional campaigns can start and have effect almost instantly, like a rocket shooting straight into the sky. Social campaigns need time to build an audience and credibility to gain altitude, like a glider. Every social media project we have started has been starved for time. Our clients have planned them as they would a traditional campaign. As a result, we were tasked with accomplishing in weeks what should be given months. 

This certainly hurts the outcome and can damage brands who appear to be pushing too hard in the social space. In several instances, we needed to hit very ambitious numbers in a very short period of time. We surpassed our numbers, but it meant we needed to push the conversation harder than we were comfortable with and got some push back from the community who felt at times they were being spammed by our “conversation.” 

The Fix: Plan a long runway for your social media project. If, for example, you want to use social media for a launch and do not have a social media following today, plan at least six to nine months to build a following before your launch. Better still, start building your social presence now so that you will be ready.  

Fail #2: Approval Fail 

It's hard to sign off on a project when you don’t really know what you are buying. This is the situation many marketers find themselves in. As a result they sit on proposals. This bogs down the project from the start, frays nerves and eats into time schedules. This is a double whammy as most social media projects are initiated with insufficient time to start with.  

The Fix: Since social media is new for most marketers, we often conduct workshops with our client’s management team to help them understand social media campaigns and how they work. This way, they understand what they are investing in. The companies that took the workshop were able to get the estimates approved quickly. Three clients did not. In each case, the approval process dragged on for months (over 3 months in one case). These delays would wind up creating further obstacles down the road. 

Fail #3: Campaign Management Fail

With traditional media, most of the work comes before the campaign is launched. You develop promotional items like an ad, TV spot or brochure. You tweak them to perfection then launch it into the market. Once it is published, broadcast or distributed there isn’t much you can do, so you move on. With social media, the real work begins after launch. We find this takes many, many clients by surprise as they aren't used to allocating time or resources to this post-launch phase and fumble the projects, despite the campaigns being successful.  

The Fix: Prepare for success. Once you start a conversation in social media, you must be prepared to a) fuel it with new content on a regular basis that adds value to the community, b) address criticism and concerns in near real-time, c) address sales leads and enquiries in near real-time and, d) access the right people at every level of the organization to participate if needed. 

Fail #4: Adaptability Fail

Social media campaigns give us the ability to measure the results of our efforts in near real-time. That's the source of one of the true powers of these campaigns. We never had this capability before. With traditional media, we would take our best shot and conduct research after the fact to see how well the campaign succeeded. Today, we can see how things are going instantly and, better yet, we can make course corrections while the campaign is running.

Being able to monitor a campaign's success in real-time means you see what works and what does not immediately. If you aren't set-up to act on this information and make course corrections, your campaign will suffer.

 

The Fix: Adopt a new mindset when it comes to campaign management. Nothing is locked in place. Look at your campaign plan as a hypothesis and be ready to adjust it to reality. For instance, finding how your target wants to be engaged in social media is the key and it sometimes takes a little trial and error to find it. So be ready to adapt your brilliant strategy at any moment. 

Fail #5: Reflex Fail

As a consequence of getting real-time feedback and interaction, social media campaigns require swift reflexes and much quicker reaction times than traditional media campaigns. This often conflicts with a company’s approval processes. All our clients understood that social media required swift response. They prepared their organizations for fast-track approvals. However, this usually meant reducing approval times from several weeks to several days. What was really needed were approvals in a matter of hours and in some cases minutes or seconds. 

The Fix: Adopt a real-time based time frame and then adjust existing creation and approval processes accordingly. In most cases, it will mean your approval people need to speak on behalf of the brand, as opposed to approving individual statements as such. This is new for many companies and places more responsibility in the hands of the people at the end of the communication chain. It also makes the need for clear brand values and brand training more essential than they have ever been before. 

Fail #6: Employee Engagement Fail 

Social media assets need to be populated to attract your target. They require a certain critical mass of people in order for them to function properly. Once they function properly, they produce value for participants. This attracts lots more users, which adds to the value etc. If your campaign is under a tight timeline, like these programs were, achieving critical mass quickly is essential to success. Your employees can be the key to this - if they participate. Do not assume they will. 

The Fix: Getting employees to participate should be treated as a campaign in its own right with a well thought through campaign strategy. Ad-hock efforts won’t cut it. A couple of the clients we worked with have in excess of 100,000 employees. Just 1% participation would have skyrocketed their campaigns. That didn’t happen. Smaller companies tended to do a much better job at persuading employees to participate with participation in excess of 50% common. And, by all means, review your company's policies with regard to firewalls and access to social media by employees. System security and access to social media are not mutually exclusive (no matter what any well-intentioned IT department tells you). 

Fail #7: Etiquette Fail 

While each social media tool has its own subtle etiquette, they all abide by one golden rule: Do not bore people by talking only about yourself. Marketers are used to talking about their brands. For decades we have used traditional media to push our message out onto the world. That is a strategy that is destined to fail in social media. In fact, we saw a very clear pattern across all our campaigns: the less we talked about ourselves, the more people listened and interacted with the brand. Want to drive people away? Just start pushing your marketing and PR messages out through your social media channels. 

The Fix:  Zip it, stop selling and start listening. This can be a hard pill to swallow for many marketers. Just remember that all the rules of polite conversation hold true in social media, chief among them do not talk about yourself incessantly. Focus the conversation on the parties you are conversing with.

Fail #8: Conversation Fail 

Traditional campaigns are events with defined start and end points, usually over a few months. A social media campaign is an ongoing process that has no defined end point. In several cases, we have built substantial communities for clients who thanked us for doing such a great job and asked us to pull the plug and end the campaign. This means shutting down websites, Twitter streams, Facebook pages, YouTube channels LinkedIn dialogue, etc... They did this because that’s how they have always run campaigns – as independent events. They did not understand the power in having a community and developing it. Neither did their bosses. So they asked us to disband it.  

 

The Fix: Building communities is the single most important commercial objective of social media. If you do not regard a community as a tangible, measurable asset, then you are wasting your time engaging in social media. If you have amassed a community of several thousand people, you cannot simply shut them off, especially if you ever want to interact with them again. Understand the nature of social media campaigns before you embark on one. This requires long-term planning and a community-building mindset. 

This is not to say that all social media activities are run forever. We divide our social media campaigns into baseline activities and special campaign activities. Baseline activities may, for example, include a constant presence and interaction via a blog, Twitter, Facebook and buzz monitoring. During campaign periods, we may add to this with special contests, campaign sites, videos, activities, forums etc. that we will stop at the end of the particular campaign. But our baseline activities to build and nurture a community are a 24/7/365 activity and need to be planned and resourced accordingly. 

Fail #9: Generosity Fail 

Generosity of spirit goes a long way in social media. This includes honesty, transparency, the ability to accept criticism of your brand and to acknowledge achievements of competing brands. Wishing anyone ill, including your competitors, will not help your cause in social media. Far from it. On several occasions, we have been asked to delete comments in forums that have mentioned our clients' competitors in a positive light. Or we have been asked to inject unjustified digs at our clients' competitors. If you indulge yourself in this manner, it will only serve to make your band look bad. 

The Fix:  Do not be mean-spirited in social media. Of course, if there is misinformation about you or your competitors, you should clarify. But in all cases, remain balanced, positive and objective. Do not seek out opportunities to make your competitors look bad. Why? Because they are not considered “competitors” by the people you are conversing with. More often than not, they will be considered valued resources by your community. If you really want to compete, focus instead on being of more value to the community than your competitors are.    

Fail #10: Budget Fail 

If you have read the previous nine Social Media Fails, you can see that a social media campaign is fundamentally different from conventional marketing campaigns. It needs to be budgeted as such. One of the biggest snags for companies entering this arena is having no basis on which to plan budgets for social media. In most cases this leaves the social media campaigns under-resourced and dysfunctional.

 

The Fix: Budget for long-term engagement, not one-off events. Read through the nine social media fails above and, based on this, have a frank discussion with your social media advisors about your marketing objectives and how you see social media contributing to those objectives. Sketch out a 12-month program with measurable objectives and then talk price. Finally, nine months into the program begin planning for the next 12-months.  

You may have noticed that most of these fails stemmed from two common causes. First, the application of traditional marketing tactics to social media. And second, inadequate lead time.   The good news is that in both cases these barriers to social media brilliance are easy to overcome. If you feel you need some help getting on the right track, contact grant@theduffyagency.com to see how we can apply what we've learned to your next social media campaign. 

Recommended Reading:

An excellent post by Brett Nicholson on DigitalOZ blog “99 Social Media Mistakes, Complaints & Failures.”