The 5 dangers of a half-hearted social media campaign

It was your lifelong dream to open a pizza parlor. Finally, after years of toil, you succeed in making Panucci’s Pizza a success. Then you decide a delivery service is a must since everyone else does it. But you aren’t sure how to make it work, so you decide to limit your risk by buying cheap vans that happen to be lacking brakes. Your delivery business is not in a position to succeed. In fact, it would be a miracle if it didn’t drag your whole business down with it in a blaze of flying bodies.

Pictured: Unexpected danger

We see this a lot with companies trying to market their brands through social media. Many execs are uncomfortable with going all in, so they do a little dabbling instead. This either results in no effect whatsoever, or a backlash as social media users can spot a conservative suit a mile away. So if you don’t understand social media tools and the investment they demand, they are dangerous grounds indeed.

Here are 5 pitfalls you are setting yourself up for by only making a half-hearted foray into social media. 

You can’t respond as fast as you need to
Social media is all about communicating in real-time. And communicating in real-time requires open dialogue and snap decisions – things that the traditional brand - consumer exchange does not involve. If you aren’t ready to have a round-the-clock discussion with your audience, they will take over the conversation, feel like you aren’t interested in participating and either lose interest themselves or become resentful. We see this happen when clients set up a Twitter account and don’t do more than the occasional self-promotional tweet. If you put yourself out there in social media, your audience expects you to have a dialogue with them. Building that expectation and letting them down is worse than never having entered because you’ve damaged your credibility in the process.

Dabbling = obvious lack of enthusiasm
The entire purpose of getting involved in social media is to inspire enthusiastic participation from both your own people and your audience, and half-hearted efforts never inspired anyone. If you have yet to find an enthusiasm for social media that makes you genuinely eager to get out there and meet the people you’re selling things to in cyberspace, and more importantly to really listen to them, you need to do some research and get convinced of how important it is. You’re lack of enthusiasm will only make people feel alienated from you.

You won’t be able to overcome the noise
Your audience is bombarded with messages all day long. Half-way will not get their attention because they tune most brand messaging out and instead focus on listening to each other, not to you. Going in half way will only ensure what resources you do devote to social media come to nothing. If you convinced your boss to give social media a try as a “cheap” option, you’re still expected to show some results at the end of the day, or you can kiss your social media program goodbye. 

It breaks fundamental marketing rules
Deciding to add a little social media to your marketing mix for the sake of doing it is contrary to good marketing. Your basis for all efforts should be solving clients’ problems to create pull, not just to make noise. Start like any other job with all the background research, strategy, targeting and high demands on creative work as you would for any other job. If you’re hearing suggestions that don’t go beyond “let’s start a Twitter account and Facebook fan page,” you should be worried. Start with a need, and from there decide what tools are the best way to solve it. Do not start with Twitter and Facebook and try to figure out how to shoehorn your brand into them. 

Best Buy took the perfect approach with their award winning Twelpforce campaign. They started with their customers’ problem (product support) and found the best way to solve it, which just happened to be Twitter. It ended in happy customers a Cannes Lion.

Failure is an option (when you do it right)
When you’re all in, people are forgiving of mistakes as long as you’re responsive and try to meet them half way.  When you get tyrannical after things don’t go your way, are you ever in for a backlash. Getting into social media means playing by its rules, and those rules do not include conservative policies like censorship and lawsuits. Apple and Nestle have both made costly errors in handling criticism by failing to respect people’s freedom to express themselves through social media. It’s their space, you’re just visiting. Going all in means letting go of control. Or rather, realizing you never had it.

Admit it: your brand might not be ready for social media after all. But all it takes to get ready is diving in and learning the ropes – with genuine enthusiasm. If you aren’t all that interested in social media and want in just because everyone else is, you’re better off leaving it alone. Or at least letting someone who loves it take the reins and giving them the freedom to do what it takes to engage people. 

After all, you wouldn’t send a fleet of out of control vans to mow down your customers. Why would you unleash a dysfunctional campaign on them?

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry. 

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