Social Media Marketing Mistakes And How to Avoid Them (1 of 6)
May 28, 2008
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Earlier this month, I ran a daylong seminar on social media marketing, which was sponsored by the Triangle chapter of the American Marketing Association. It was sort of a “101″ class. We started at the basics and moved through it to best practices. About 75 people were there, and we had some fun, so I thought it might be fun to share a little of the content with you. One of the sections was “The Top 5 Most Common Social Media Marketing Mistakes.” This post focuses on mistake #1: “Not Listening. Not Responding. Not Good.”
The two examples in the class, Kryptonite lock and Dell Hell, are really old, almost to the point of being hackneyed. Despite that, they remain highly relevant examples in May 2008 for two different reasons.
Kryptonite lock is a good example because a post about them written in September 2004 still comes up in the top 5 searches for their brand almost 4 years later! Is ANYONE at Kryptonite working on this? I know that chasing an Engadget post off page one ain’t easy, but if my brand were at stake, I’d find a way. I’d call someone like my boy Andy Beal and pay him whatever he wants.
Dell is a good example precisely because of what they learned from being crushed in the blogosphere beginning June 21, 2005, they really have turned things around. It’s now being reported that Dell has sold $500,000 worth of product through Twitter. I believe it, as the 22″ wide screen monitor hooked up to my MacBook came directly through finding a deal on Twitter. That’s just one of the things they are doing right.
Over the next few posts, I’ll share the other five most common social media marketing mistakes (and a BONUS 6th mistake FREE). In the meantime, what examples do you have of brands not listening to social media conversations? I’d love to hear them.
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4 Responses to “Social Media Marketing Mistakes And How to Avoid Them (1 of 6)”
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chasing engagdet from page one wouldn’t be sufficient, since the wired article and some other posts are also on page one. I wonder if it was possible at all to resolve this…. It would probably need some heavy SEO strategy…
At this point you are right Roland. IMO the absolute only way you are going to start bumping those sorts of “heavy hitters’ down is by creating viral situations that will attract massive amounts of links for your mini sites. Or you are going to have to wip our your pocket book and start buying a ton of links.
Bottom line is pre reputation management is where its at. Post reputation management can be terribly, terribly expensive, time consuming, and in this example near impossible.
Yeah, Roland, you are absolutely right. And I have to think that if it weren’t really hard they would’ve done it by now. But I was thinking along the likes of Brian.
How much has that cost them in lost revenue over the last few years? And what’s it worth to get rid of it? I would think a lot. I’m not privy to their marketing budget, but I’d work pretty hard on that for a while if I were them.
~Jim
Excellent point- reputation management is becoming more and more important these days, especially with the increased popularity of blogs, and how well google are ranking them. A popular blog can easily place bad publicity of a company on the first page of a Google Search result for that company name.