Social media is changing the nature of conversation, yet what your human audience needs from a conversation is pretty much as it was 2,000 years ago. In this article, Maria provides tips for mastering the art of conversation within the context of social media to help you refine your social media practices, or to help start you off on the right path.
Today, companies have the power to make a choice between conducting their marketing communication as a commodity endeavour or to carve out a specialized niche. What choice will you make? What value do you place on the quality of your communication?
After reading about a company that was pushed to the brink of bankruptcy by a Groupon deal, we started thinking about the “when, the “why” and the “how” of using a coupon as a promotional tool.
According to the literature on the topic, the art of conversation hasn’t changed significantly since 44BC, when Cicero was penning his thoughts about what makes a good conversationalist (“Listen more than you talk”). While technology now empowers us to converse online, in extremely large and diverse groups, and in real time even without being face-to-face, it’s still humans – human emotion, human desire, human psychology – that drive conversation.
That’s important to remember when you – on behalf of yourself or your business – are using social media to engage with audiences. Social media is changing the nature of conversation (“The medium is the message”), yet what your human audience needs from a conversation – what they need to be motivated to participate in a conversation – is pretty much as it was 2,000 years ago. It’s easy to confuse matters by forgetting the human element in one’s excitement or focus on the medium…and that’s precisely where social media marketing will fail.
In this article, I’ll provide tips for mastering the art of conversation within the context of social media to help you refine your social media practices, or to help start you off on the right path.
Before thinking about how to have productive or rewarding conversations with your contacts, networks and target audiences through social media, it’s helpful to think about how social media makes conversation and communication different today:
At the same time, recognize what has not changed about conversation:
I’ve borrowed heavily from Cicero and Milton Wright here, taking time-tested rules about effective conversation and updating them for the contemporary social media context.
Prepare. Every book or guide ever written on how to be a great conversationalist tells its readers to prepare. For example; come to a conversation armed with information about the people you’ll meet, with interesting news and information of general interest, with a good joke, with a topic for discussion, etc. In a social media context, preparation can include:
Speak clearly. The social media equivalent of mumbling is typing cryptic messages, indecipherable sentence fragments, and posting messages that don’t seem to have a point. Take it from a professional writer: it’s more difficult to craft a clear message in 140 characters than in 140 words or 140 pages. You’ll need to give extra thought to your tweets and re-tweets. (And remember that re-tweeting adds characters. To ensure a clear message, I usually rewrite or repost rather than simply re-tweeting).
Listen more than you speak. Ask questions. Start discussions but don’t dominate them. Offer useful input – personal experience or great resources that relate to a topic – when you can. When you can’t, just listen – you’ll be surprised at how much you can learn. You can also use tools like HootSuite to schedule social media posts to avoid “talking” too much all at once, even if you are only online once or twice each day.
Be inclusive. Remember that social media conversations are closer to group conversations than they are to one-on-one conversations. Conducting private conversations over public mediums can be inappropriate or exclusionary – like an inside joke that only the “cool kids” understand. Unless you want or need others to listen in on one-to-one conversations, take them “offline” by using personal replies (via social media tools designed for private chats, email or a phone call).
Don’t talk about yourself. Some parts of conversation require one to share one’s own experiences, opinions and ideas – and that’s okay. But a really good conversation is an exchange of ideas – you have to make room for other voices and encourage others to participate. While part of your social media activity may involve promotion, this should be only a small percentage of your strategy.
Be courteous; never lose your temper. If online communication escalates to anger, blame, slander or other intense emotions, the conversation should be taken offline and dealt with productively in a one-to-one format. Publicizing the positive outcome can be a good way to re-involve the community at large once a resolution has been reached.
Respect your brand. I can’t say this one better than Cicero: “Above all, be on the watch that [your] conversation shall not betray some defect in [your] character. This is most likely to occur, when people in jest or in earnest take delight in making malicious and slanderous statements about the absent, on purpose to injure their reputations.”
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Social Media Marketing: Should We?
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Will your naked brevity be a commodity or a specialty?
It’s as if Marshall MacLuhan was anticipating the dawn of Twitter when he wrote, “The medium is the message.” What MacLuhan was getting at is that the channel or format one chooses to deliver a message will itself contribute to how the message is perceived.
In the world of Twitter’s 140-character-max format, messages are by definition public and they can’t provide a lot of detail. In this new world of naked brevity, messages are easily lost in the rapid-fire fray. It’s what many people call “noise.” As in: “Social media? No, my company’s not doing any social media – there’s too much noise out there already, why should we add to it?”
No matter the medium, there will always be a spectrum of quality in the content produced in any context: books, magazines, videos, tweets … products, services. But, as “social” mediums like Twitter exponentially increase the scale, speed and mass intimacy (did I just coin a phrase?) of communication, content producers have a choice.
You can choose whether you will produce messages as a commodity or as a specialty.
We all know what commodity messages look like. To slaughter a line from Leo Tolstoy, All commodity messages resemble one another. They fail to consider the intended audience’s needs or interests. They are self-involved. They don’t make sense. They may look like this:
…or this:
…or this:
Neither commodity or speciality communication necessarily requires more or less time to produce than the other – but the latter one does require more thought. What would a specialty message in your industry look like? How could you or your organization create a content niche? What would be the potential business value of publishing and curating valuable niche content in your industry? How could you effectively deploy tools such as Twitter to engage audiences in the consumption and discussion of your quality content?
Those are the very questions we like to tackle on behalf of clients. We can provide your marketing communications with a purpose and a strategy aligned with your business and marketing goals. And, should if social media fits into the plan for you, we can be trusted to create, maintain, curate and share a specialized communication stream that helps you rise above “the noise”.
Back to TopWe recently came across an article about a UK bakery that was pushed to the brink of bankruptcy when a Groupon deal cost the company its profits for the entire year. This got us thinking about the “when, the “why” and the “how” of using a coupon as a promotional tool.
If you’re considering a coupon, think carefully about the message that it will send about your product or service. In general, a coupon suggests that your product or service is a commodity: “Choose our widget because you can now get it at a discount!” Unless your product is a commodity item with price as the top customer consideration, a coupon could contradict other branding efforts and negatively impact the perception of your product.
As the unfortunate baker learned, you have little-to-no control over the volume of business you can expect from social coupons like those offered by Groupon and LivingSocial. Fulfilling an unexpectedly massive order can not only tax your inventory and hurt your bottom line. Perhaps more importantly, it can reduce the quality of your customer service and alienate existing clients if their access to your offering becomes limited.
We always advocate taking a strategic approach when building any promotional campaign. Ask yourself about your ultimate goals and the reasons behind the promotion. Are you only concerned with bringing in more traffic, or do you want better traffic? Would a referral program for existing customers be a more productive use of your efforts?
We’ve helped a number of clients run strategic promotional campaigns. If you are wrestling with this challenge, contact us!
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