Breve post de lunes para compartir con Uds. Un importante hallazgo. Se trata del blog Social Media Today, aunque visto bien, no es estrictamente un blog, sino un blog de blogs.  Este pequeño banner explica la naturaleza del sitio:

Robin Carey, fundadora y CEO del blog (¿No suena raro eso de que un blog tenga CEO?) dice en una entrevista que Social Media Today es a la vez un destino web y un “playground” para cualquiera que esté interesado o le apasione el social media. Concretamente, el sitio te invita a participar en una comunidad de bloggers interesados en la relación entre el Social Media y el mundo de los negocios. A mi particularmente me gusta esa idea de playground, porque supone justamente un intercambio no muy sistemático de opiniones de diversos bloggers interesados en el tema. Compartir, nuevamente, es la premisa fundamental y lo que hace a este sitio tan atractivo. Echando un ojo rápido al blog se puede ver una importante lista de autores y de post todos relativos al social media y su relación con el mundo del mercadeo. Como todo en el mundo de la web 2.0, la gente escribe post y estos adquieren relevancia conforme se van leyendo y comentando. Se puede, por lo tanto, ir teniendo una idea de cuáles han sido los post más valiosos, pero sobretodo, se puede ir conociendo a personas con ideas interesantes que están dispuestas a conectarse directamente para compartir información y generar valor agregado.

Para muestra un botón: lo que sigue es un post que encontré en mi visita rápida y que me pareció interesante. Lleva por título “The 6 Dangerous Fallacies of Social Media” y fue escrito por Jason Baer. 

You may have heard of social media. There’s been a bit of news about it recently. However, a lot of people making that news have created expectations and beliefs about social media that aren’t true.

 

1. Social Media is Inexpensive

False. As Charlene Li said recently, social media trades media cost for labor cost. Done correctly, social media – even a simple reputation monitoring program – is a time intensive proposition that requires daily vigilance. 

2. Social Media is Fast

False. Social media is by definition slow. Done correctly, social media is about developing meaningful relationships with customers and prospective customers in their natural habitat. That’s not a “wave the magic wand” scenario. You have to create content, be part of many communities, and proceed incrementally. Many successful social media programs take months (or even more than a year) to really germinate.

3. Social Media is “Viral Marketing”

False, in the same way that a square is also a rectangle, but a rectangle isn’t a square. Can a social media program go viral? Absolutely. But if you’re engaged in a social media program in an effort to go “viral” you’re not really engaged in social media at all. You’re engaged in an advertising and marketing campaign that uses the Web as its distribution platform.  

4. Social Media results can’t be measured

False. Especially in comparison to many other communication programs like traditional PR, TV advertising, outdoor advertising and others, social media actually offers pretty solid metrics. Many social media software packages (great ebook analysis of them here) can provide highly detailed reports on the impact of social media programs. Can those results be tied back directly to sales, and therefore ROI? Probably not yet, but other than search and email (and maybe banners) where CAN you do that?

5. Social Media is optional

It doesn’t matter what the demographics of your customers are. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. Your customers and prospects are talking about you online. Your company needs to be part of that conversation. Today. Online is where many people do their talking, so that’s where you need to be. If barber shops were still driving consumer sentiment, I’d be writing this post about barber shop marketing. Be where your customers are. 

6. Social media is hard

False. It’s not hard, it’s complicated. And that’s only because of the alphabet soup of social networks, lifestreams, sharing sites, etc. Social media is not about Facebook or MySpace or Flickr or Twitter or blogs or YouTube. It’s about having a strategy for making your company or organization more like a person and less like a machine. It’s about humanization.

If your customers and prospects feel like your company is more human and actually cares about them, they’ll want to be part of it. That’s the brand engagement holy grail that we’re all seeking. Too often, the humanization part gets overlooked in an effort to create a “user-generated video contest widget that we’ll launch on Facebook with support from Ustream.” Whatever. Use technology to be yourself, and don’t overthink it. 

Fabuloso el post de Jason, sobretodo porque ilustra los errores comunes que la gente en mercadeo hace cuando piensa en Social Media (por ejemplo, el común “hazme una campaña pa´l facebook”). 

Échenle un ojo a este blog de blogs, promete mucho contenido interesante. Incluso pueden animarse a contribuir uds mismos con algunos insights sobre el Social Media en nuestro país. Yo ya lo agregué a mi lector RSS y pienso dedicarle buena parte de mis madrugadas en la oficina a leerlo y comentarlo.