Social media marketing used to seem like smoke and mirrors. But when the smoke blew away and the mirrors came down, it turned out that you still need writers who can deliver valuable content.

Social media marketing is an exercise in riding the tiger.

The buzz is that the traditional, prescriptive notions of marketing don’t fit very well in social media, and so marketing managers need to cede some control to the crowd. Let your customers tell you what they like about you and want from you. Give it to them in short, quick bursts. Hope that you’re building relationships and spreading the word.

So you’re trying to convince your tradition-minded boss to let you bend your marketing effort toward social media. You know that “Because it’s fun” and “Everybody’s doing it” won’t fly as cornerstones of a social media strategy. So you have to explain tweets, back-links, followings and stories in classical marketing terms.

A social media marketing program for traditional marketers

Pete Caputa of Hubspot writes:

Based on my daily interactions with marketing agencies, I believe we’ve finally reached the point where convincing companies that they need to be using social media to build awareness, audiences, traffic and leads is almost over.

Now it’s about being able to speak to them in terms they understand (rather than in terms our social media peers understand), to explain why a social media strategy is absolutely necessary.

Pete describes a new e-book from Channel V Media that bridges the voodoo of the vehicles (remember that Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit and the others are only vehicles) and the traditional approach to marketing. Its goal is to help companies and marketers gradually introduce social media to all areas of marketing:

-Audience Identification
-Platform Development and Design
-Brand Campaign Integration
-Content Creation/Coordination
-Goal Mapping
-Brand Identity
-Audience Attraction
-Community and Social Responsibility
-Internal/External Community Engagement
-Brand Advocacy
-Customer Service

Gauging the fit for your marketing writers

In particular, the fourth bullet concerns your writers. Are they thinking too traditionally to fit in with your new approach to marketing? Do they know what to do with your SEO keywords? Can they develop the content you need for these social media channels, and the brave new expectations of the people at the other end of them?

• You still need content. Whether you opt for a white paper, a webcast or a video, you need to tell your story somehow.
• That content will still come from marketing writers you hire.
• The marketing writers have to write in new ways so that the content is valuable.
• Every sentence has to answer the reader’s question, “Is this worth sharing?” Readers don’t want to share your brochure. They want to share something that will make people follow them.

The goal of social media marketing is that somebody will read your story and share it. Your marketing writers need to get that.

photo credit: L. Lew