Social Media - Like Unto A Thing Of Iron

This is a social media reality check.

Social media can be very powerful, but there are definitely things that it does better than others. If you think that Facebook of Squidoo or Mahalo Answers can build your brand up from nothing and bring in truckloads of cash, well, think again. Thinking of social media like a revenue stream is not only bad for expectations, it’s bad for the social media project.

This doesn’t mean that social media isn’t right for your company or isn’t providing value, it just means that you need to know what it can do and what i can’t.

And now I’m going to talk about comic books. Because I like to work that in wherever I can.

This is the Silver Surfer.

He’s covered in silver and flies through space on a cosmic surfboard. He’s amazingly strong, fast, can travel through time, and destroy an armada of alien invaders without much of a thought. He can transmute matter, heal people, change his size, render himself intangible and has limited telepathic powers.

He can pretty much do anything, which is why he spends so much of his time doing nothing or taking orders from an even more powerful force.

This is Iron Fist.

Iron Fist is very good at fighting because he beat up a dragon. He has no powers that don’t involve beating people, or small groups of people, or large groups of people, up. He’s rich, but he doesn’t have much of a head for business. He’s been on several teams, but isn’t a born leader.

He is very, very good at a limited number of things but there are plenty of things that are just plain out of his league.

Social media optimization is Iron Fist and not Silver Surfer. It’s the ideal hero for your brand if you want to engage in:

• lead-generation
• customer service
• reputation management
• increased visibility/foot traffic

and your ideal customer is already using the web.

Essentially, you can put yourself out there, you can interact with customers, offer discounts to your Facebook friends and Twitter followers, but it doesn’t matter if nobody knows who you are and the sad reality is that social media cannot make people care who you are. People who write on your wall aren’t necessarily converting shoppers.

That’s a difficult reality to grasp sometimes. It’s difficult to quantify social media/word of mouth ROI if you’re looking for dollar signs or a giant spike in brand mentions overnight; that’s what ad campaigns and a publicist handle. And yes, to a degree, the web lets you be your own publicist or brand evangelist, but social media’s cachet of microcelebrity doesn’t have the same reach unless you’re also Rainn Wilson or Shaquille O’Neal.

If you’re going to indulge in social media (and now is the time, people) you need to have a cohesive idea of how you’re going to use it, even if that means you start broad and focus in as you go, or that you don’t have a strategy until you take the time to understand the landscape. Saying, “I need a Facebook page and an iPhone app and a podcast and widgets and a Facebook app and a Twitter and everything else you can think of,” ends up diluting your ability to interact well, when you just need to be really good at punching things. Metaphorically. Don’t actually go and hit anybody.