A Golden Rule for Your Social Marketing Campaign: Pay Attention!

In the last three years, a solid social marketing campaign has become absolutely fundamental to the online success of a business in today's cut-throat and over-crowded marketplace. In this context, ‘online success' is measured by the amount of web users who are directed to a business' website via the endeavors of their social marketing campaign as well as the number of these users that ultimately become paying customers. As such, a decent measure of online success takes time, patience and dogged determination. In social media marketing there are few short-cuts and even fewer overnight success stories. Thankfully, with the emergence of social media marketing as a powerful tool for brand communication there has risen an equally strong presence of online advertising firms that have the manpower, resources and expertise to put your business firmly on the virtual map, which saves you, the business owner, a whole lot of time and frustration!

Keeping an Eye on Your Social Marketing Campaign

Most modern business owners hire other people to manage the various departments that make the entire enterprise run like a well-oiled machine. They do this so that they don't have to worry
about the day-to-day running of the business, such as who keeps the pencils sharpened or who makes sure the books balance out. The same applies to your social marketing campaign. There has been a massive surge in the number of individuals and firms that are offering their online advertising services to business owners that don't have the time, resources or expertise to manage their company's own social marketing campaign. Since social media and networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter provide such important portals of communication between brand name and target audience; many business owners decide to hand their account over to an online marketing firm rather than miss out on exploiting this totally free advertising space.

Social Marketing Campaign: A Golden Rule

It is at this juncture that many people make a huge mistake. A golden rule you should apply to your business' social marketing campaign is:

Never allow your marketing firm to post, create or air content that you yourself have not approved of first.

You may not need to plan, manage or implement a social marketing strategy yourself, but you absolutely need to keep an eye on what's going on! Many social marketing firms generate content for their clients and this helps to bolster their rankings on local and global search engines such as Yahoo!, Google and MSN. Allowing this content to be posted without any quality controls or checks have landed many businesses knee-deep in you-know-what. A prime example of this would be Coca Cola who – without knowing it – allowed their social media firm to post a status update on some 14 year old girl's Facebook page as part of a competition. Unfortunately, this particular status update happened to make some sort of pornographic reference. As accidental and oblique as this reference may have been, it succeeded in causing an incredible stir with the child's parents baying for blood. Had the people at the helm of Coca Cola been keeping an eye on the activities of their social marketing campaign, this all could have been avoided. There is no excuse for corporate oversight: pay attention.

Social Marketing Campaign: A Final Note

If there is one other golden rule to be gleaned from this social marketing campaign story, it is this: learn from other people's mistakes. Let Coca Cola take home the PR mess while you just take home the message.

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