OPINION MAKER: World of social media demands marketing in real-time

By Diane Charton, managing director at Acceleration Media

By now, most South African brands that sell products and services to people in the mid to upper LSMs understand that they can no longer ignore social media as a channel.

With many South Africans using Twitter and Facebook to connect with people and companies that matter to them, they ignore them at their peril. If you’re not on these channels talking about your brand, you can be sure that your customers are, and that they expect you to respond to their questions, complaints, and compliments.

Unfortunately, however, many marketers make the mistake of believing that they can control social media as they did the mass-marketing media of the past. They assume that they can carefully roll out a Facebook campaign at their leisure, tweet what they like from their Twitter accounts and that their customers won’t want to talk back.

But the truth is that you need to be ready for anything once you start engaging with customers using social media. Just ask the likes of Cell C, who saw a range of unintended consequences from their social media efforts last year. That means marketers can no longer carve their strategies out in stone at the outset of a campaign. Instead, they need to be ready to monitor what is happening in real-time and then respond appropriately, even if the campaign isn’t unfolding the way they expected it to.

Online reputation management (ORM) tools, like Radian 6, can be invaluable aids in this process. They allow you to easily track and analyse what people are saying about your brand or product in real-time so that you can respond appropriately. With your finger on the pulse of the social buzz, you’re empowered to capitalise on any opportunities that arise and to counter any threats before they turn into crises. The key here is to operate in real-time, keeping up with the quick ebb and flow of social media.

If you’re fast, you can catch and address a complaint from someone who found your TV ad offensive or had a problem with a product you are selling on special before it goes viral, for example.

Equally, you could pick up users who have turned something from one of your ads into a tribute and do your best to encourage it to spread. This doesn’t mean that all planning needs to go out the window, but rather that your planning needs to be a lot more fluid to accommodate the uncertainties of interacting with your customers using social media. The phrase we use to describe this is ‘planned spontaneity’.

It’s all about anticipating the responses you will generate to your brand and campaigns in the social media world, and then responding rapidly to drive further interest in and engagement with your company. It’s also about staying visible when things are not working out the way you hoped they would.