Managing social relationships is a big part of what I do every day. Not as part of my studies in social media marketing, but in my work, both paid and voluntary.

For instance, in managing the various social networks for different organisations and brands I use a variety of tools. I use Buffer and Hootsuite to help me listen in to what’s happening on social media and manage multiple admins for different accounts.

I use Google Alerts to monitor media and conversations that include my boss, Colleen Hartland, what Ballarat City Council is up to locally and issues I’m involved in such as Ballarat Civic Hall.

Possibly the most useful Social CRM tool I’ve come across is Mention. Not only does it provide great monitoring of conversations, particularly what’s happening on social media, it connects to your social media accounts so you can respond right there in the app or even assign it to other social media managers if you’re in a large organisation.

I recently came across an example of perhaps some poor social relationship management. Tom Waterhouse had a paid post on Facebook to promote a special offer. Knowing these offers are illegal in Victoria and being someone who is concerned about the prevalence of problem gambling and the damage done, I thought I’d take a look at the responses they were getting. Take a look at the comments here.

It’s particularly poor form from Tom Waterhouse to be promoting an offer that cannot be claimed by people in Victoria or South Australia in those states. Facebook allows advertisers to target who they want their ads to reach, including allowing for ads to be targeted geographically. Clearly they want to attempt to defy the law and use the promotion in Victoria and South Australia, likely to result in dissatisfied customers who may sign up and spend money before they realise they can’t claim the offer.

There’s no doubt that Tom Waterhouse as a brand has received a lot of negative comment and bad social media. Their approach hasn’t changed, so perhaps they feel they are reaching the audience they want and managing the relationships that are important to them. However it does not seem likely to last. Just by searching ‘Tom Waterhouse’ on Google, negative Facebook pages come up on the first page of results.

Campaigns are hooking into the negativity that people feel about his saturation of advertising and promotions.

The gambling ad spoof campaign run by the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation called ‘Kid Bet’ is a satirical take on Tom Waterhouse ads.

It would be interesting to know if anyone at tom Waterhouse is concerned about all this and what their strategies are to deal with it, because there seems to be little successful relationship management happening on the face of it.

Now here’s an interesting topic, but not necessarily in the way it’s supposed to be discussed. Of course social media is all about relationships and social media marketing involved all the important things in a relationship like listening, understanding, respect and give-and-take.

However the impact of social media on our real relationships is too important not to mention. Great video that illustrates this:

Back on topic, I think the key challenges facing social media marketers are sincerity to the brand, being interesting without overstepping the mark, turning their work into real value for the organisation and engaging with corporate social responsibility.

It’s a real challenge for social media marketers to be sincere to the brands and organisations they are working for. Particularly if social media marketing is outsourced, those responsible can be removed from the organisation and have little understanding of their culture, their customers, market, products and services.

All to often, social media marketing is becoming cookie-cutter stuff that simply chases superficial engagement – likes, comments, shares, retweets and so on. For some of the worst examples, check out the Condescending Corporate Brand Facebook page. This is where you don’t want to end up.

A quick scan of the Condescending Corporate Brand Facebook page shows just how many brands seem satisfied with superficial, generic social media aimed at engagement statistics rather than real engagement. It’s depressing reading, although some of it is so bad it’s also amusing.

I’ll come back to discussing the use of analytics such as Facebook Insights on another topic, but it’s already clear that measuring social media strategy needs to be about more than just the numbers.

Whether embedded in the organisation or acting as an outsourced contractor, social media marketers need to really understand the organisation, their culture, customers, markets, products and services. A social media strategy should make these elements clear – what is our voice, how do we respond to different possibilities and how is the strategy creating value.

Chasing likes, comments, shares, retweets and so on doesn’t build a relationship on its own.

As well as being sincere to the brand or organisation, social media needs to be interesting without overstepping the mark. What is the mark? This will differ for different organisations. Obviously, social media for a church will be different to a tattooist for instance. If engaging in a social media campaign, both of these examples need to be interesting, but they will have different boundaries and therefore will have to maintain interest in different ways.

For example, take a look at the difference between the Hillsong Church Facebook page and the Cherry Bar in Melbourne. Both are sincere and interesting to their market, which of course means they’re very different.

Finally, corporate social responsibility must be considered. If an organisation builds relationships with a large number of people, what is the responsibility that comes with that reach and power. Is it really power? Can an organisation use their reach to do positive things without alienating their customers?

This is a topic worth further discussion, but here’s an interesting example for discussion. Perhaps Kraft/Vegemite think they’re doing a good service while also promoting their brand and building engagement, but Condescending Corporate Brand page saw it differently.

Ballarat only has a couple of platforms at our train station connecting us to Melbourne. Southern Cross has around 15 platforms connecting Melbourne’s suburbs and much of Victoria, as well as interstate services.

How many social media platforms are there? Too many to list and definitely too many for one person to manage for themselves. Probably too many for small to medium organisations to engage with too, but different platforms have different capabilities, different audiences and their own strengths and weaknesses.

Just because a big brand ignores a social network, doesn’t mean it can’t work for you, it’s all about what will work to connect you with the people you want to engage with.

I found this handy graphic that features just some of the platforms that are out there and attempts to categorise them. Interesting here is the focus on international platforms that we don’t hear much about here.

Isn’t it strange that at the same time as social media is supposed to bring us all closer together and globalisation means business is going international, we are often on different platforms altogether and often aren’t even aware of the platforms our near neighbours might be using.

What do I use?

Facebook and Twitter mostly, although I’ve tried out many platforms over the years.

My old Myspace still exists and I opened a YouTube account years ago. I also have a LinkedIn if anyone wants to offer me work.

In various capacities I’ve used Instagram, Flickr, Stumbleupon, Digg, Delicious, Vimeo, Pinterest, Tumblr, Picasa, Google+, Blogger, Yahoo and others.

My personal and professional use of platforms has really been focused on local geographic areas and connections, so I haven’t found much use for anything beyond Twitter and Facebook as few people seem to be using other platforms from this area.

However, thinking about how I work I think it may be worth investigating platforms such as Pinterest or Delicious or other note-taking or bookmarking platforms such as Evernote in order to better store and collate important and useful information that I find along the way.

The lack of searching capability in Facebook makes it quite limiting in bookmarking or collating information and making notes that can be referred to later.

I’m not as inspired about social media strategy as I was about social technographics, Groundswell and Empowered. This seems like more traditional marketing stuff, but perhaps that’s unavoidable.

Sure, we’re still listening and having conversations, but this all seems a bit more contrived. Personas was where things get a little shaky. Why create personas of the people you are trying to engage with when you have the real people right there?

In fact, could we not just crowd source our social media strategy? Put it on a Wiki, get out there and talk to people with tablets at the ready, email your customers and ask them to contribute, get your creators to make videos about how your company should manage social media.

Perhaps there are limits to devolving power, but shouldn’t we give it a try first?

Reviewing assets is definitely a smart thing to do, whether for social media or not. I’m particularly interested in including ‘volunteers’ in this review. Perhaps we can account for our customers, how engaged they are, our wider audience too – whether creators, spectators or somewhere in between. A valuable balance sheet for any company for sure.

Goals seem to be something that come from the organisations broader strategic plan, but how was that plan developed? Did we listen before we developed that plan? Perhaps this is a good time to revisit the strategic plan and make sure it is informed by the listening that we’ve done.

Benchmarking and gathering data is such a rich environment online. Just when all this strategic stuff can seem a little fluffy, you realise that every element of the strategy in the online world can be measured – clicks, mentions, followers, sales, customers, traffic, links, shares – it’s all there to be measured. Analytics can show us not just who is visiting and when but how they travel around our site and where they go afterwards.

Privacy is of course a concern, but for organisations paying attention, there’s a lot that can be discovered from good analysis, data and benchmarking.

Clarifying the message makes a lot of sense, but it’s also somewhat at odds with the principles of social media. The audience is diverse, our customers have individual attitudes, concerns and ways of interacting. If we become too focused on one message we risk losing the genuine interaction with people that social media is all about.

Choosing a channel is certainly a challenge, but if you do your research and know who your audience is and where they are, it should be a lot easier. The temptation is going to be to try and be everywhere, but as always, it may be better to do less things well than do many things badly.

Ahhh, the conversation, this is where it’s at. I particularly like this slide:

It seems to be the best advice you could offer to start with when entering the social media world. If you’re being transparent and honest, doing the wrong thing is more likely to ring alarm bells before you actually go ahead and make a mistake.

As always, we return to listening. My ears are open, how about yours?

It dawns on me that my worlds are colliding. While marketing has always been about relationships, businesses have always had to listen to their customers and the experience of the customer has always been critical, social media is changing how this can be done.

What really struck me is how the marketing that I’m learning in this course sounds so much like community development, the are I’ve studied in the past.

This little video was part of how I came to this realisation:

So the latest book from the authors of Groundswell is Empowered. Straight away the title struck me as familiar language used all the time in politics and community development. My sceptical brain tells me this is about empowering companies, managers or employees, but no.

Empowered is about empowering customers! Not in terms of a simply empowering them with the information and confidence they need to make a purchase, they’re talking about empowering customers within your company. Bring critics in to the company and get them to refine your products, have creators make your advertising, allow collectors to organise your website, make sure there’s something for joiners to join and good content for spectators to absorb. You might even make some inactives inactive if there’s something for them too.

The principles of community development and welfare teach us that people have the skills they need to assist themselves and communities know what they want and often have the resources available to get there. It is often just a question of teasing out the ideas, creating the space for them to be discussed and developing and implementing a plan for change.

As the schools of thought in marketing and management converge with community development, what an exciting world of opportunity opens up. Not only in marketing strategies that actually hand power and control over to customers, but in companies recognising that they too are communities and are part of the wider world. The principles remain the same – empowerment is key, devolving power works and people should be the first consideration.

Technology and social media provide some great tools to make this happen, but they are just tools – it’s the principles and objectives behind the strategies that matter.