How I explained social marketing to myself so I can explain it to others

Do you ever “know” something in your head, can envision how it works, but when it comes time to take it through step-by-step it is hard to explain?

That’s how I felt about explaining social marketing until I reached out to the Twittersphere and found the calming words of Julie Bonn Heath (Julie’s blog) and Sonali Burke (Shonali’s blog).  They urged me to trust my instincts and apply my PR 1.0 thinking to explaining the new social marketing world of PR 2.0.

What helped me explain it to myself was slowing down, reminding myself of the goals, and then segmenting the steps.  Like with most forms of marketing, in social marketing you identify groups of people, engage them somehow with a message, and then try to move them in the direction you want.  One of the main differences of course in social marketing is that you are communicating directly to them and asking them to help spread the word to others.

It really helped me to separate things into three groups (I’m really into “the three things”):

• Audiences:  These are the groups that you want to communicate with so they can be your “pied pipers.”  It really helps of course if you can gain access to the groups without starting from scratch through either e-mails lists or existing social marketing groups like Facebook or LinkedIn groups.  If you have to start from scratch the task isn’t insurmountable, it just takes more time.  Go ahead and list all of these audiences, and then segment them into categories based on what you want to say to them.  For example, you’d like communicate different messages to a group of adults than you would to a group of kids, but in the end you might still be able to drive them to the same place for different reasons.  Same in this case.

• Platforms:  One you identify and audiences and put them into categories you should decide which of the social marketing platforms is best to engage those audiences.  Is it Facebook?  LinkedIn?  Twitter?  YouTube?  E-Mail or E-Mail newsletters? A combination?  Others?  You can usually tell by doing a bit of research.  Another determining factor is how you want to engage those audiences and how you want them to communicate to each other.

• Tactics:  Finally, you will likely need a combination of tactics to drive them to the platforms and get them to not only interact with each other but also to help spread the word to others to join in on the fun, or good information.  These can range from 1.0 tactics like advertising, promotions, etc., the long-time traffic drivers, to things like blogs, widgets, applications, viral videos and other 2.0 tools.  The keys are to listen, provide feedback and good content, and value so that folks will come back and pass the word to others.

This may seem like a over-simplification to some.  There’s also  a first step of doing “listening” to see what else is out there that might influence these audiences and then continuing that “listening campaign” to adjust the messages and targets along the way.

But at the end of the day as Julie and Shonali (btw, looking forward to meeting you this week) urged me, you then can just trust your PR instincts as all good communicators do. 

Once I explained all of this to myself, it made it easier to explain to others.  I liken the steps to most other internal and external campaigns I have been involved with over the years.  It is just some of the rules and “toys” have changed, but the basics of good communications rarely do.