It occurred to me reading George F. Snell III’s latest post what’s missing from a lot of social marketing strategies. The passage below may sound awfully familiar to those of us working in digital advertising:
Social and digital media activation is built-in as part of a new campaign or launch. There’s a furious amount of activity during the campaign and then the Facebook page goes dark. The tweets stop happening. Fans and followers are wooed and collected during the campaign and then forgotten as the campaign winds down. No one in marketing or communications is really sure who is now responsible for maintaining these new social channels opened during the campaign. As a result they fall to the wayside or the activity becomes sporadic and almost exclusively one-way. Sometimes these channels are even abandoned.
I think the short answer solution and logical first step for brands is to start hiring full-time community managers to proactively engage with audiences in the digital space. This needs to occur on a regular basis.
Perhaps next comes consistency, in the voice and in the creation of more sustained engagements. Developing strategies that carry on indefinitely, beyond the ‘open and shut campaign’ model.
I love the idea of using a cradle to cradle design approach in social media. A strategy emulating nature’s regenerative processes by ensuring products (in our case marketing programs with a social component) have no waste or by-products. In other words, filling the gaps by addressing the dreaded end-of-campaign scenario of “what do we do now?”