Social Media: So Easy a Caveman Can Do It?
I mean really. Is it all that hard? Create a Facebook page, invite your 200 closest friends from pre-school, connect it to your Twitter feed, and voila! Instant social network. Climb on board one of the Twitter followbots to scrape up another 12,000 warm bodies and you’ve got rockstar influence, right? Time to turn your sights onto the beckoning world of affiliate programs and start rolling around in the $96,543 per week you’re supposed to be making. Or better yet! Find a job in social media. (It’s an actual industry, right?)
Yes! Social media! So easy a caveman can do it!
And boy can they. It appears they’ve even managed to get jobs working for large companies and trusted organizations. They’re really doing well for themselves!
In fact, this weekend I thought I was watching a Geico commercial but turns out I was witnessing the pre-historic fail whale of a Facebook app from the American Cancer Society. It’s kind of sad because ACS is a great organization. And one little social media mishap is doing some embarrassing damage.
Not to disparage the organization, but just because someone knows how to start a Facebook group and shows a little creative spunk doesn’t qualify them to handle social media for a national organization with significant brand value. Someone in the back office coming up with crafty ideas, can with the click of a mouse, take a 96 year-old organization and alienate its most loyal supporters.
Yeah. Social media is that powerful.
So what started the whole brouhaha? Over the weekend I noticed a Facebook status from a friend who’s a cancer survivor:
Hey, I thought it was a nice post. My friend, Rebecca (@rebeccaesparza) is big-time into cancer support groups, runs the pink races, relays, walks, all that. Good stuff. So it wasn’t a surprise to see that she was supporting American Cancer Society on her birthday, right? Um, wrong. When checking my Facebook feed the next day, it was a bit of a different story:
Apparently she didn’t realize that in joining the ACS birthday group she gave permission to update her status. (Anyone else getting that icky, slimy feeling?) Even Rebecca, who’s such a dedicated supporter had to admit she felt used.
Good cause. Bad use of social media.
Still think a caveman should be doing it?
Some days it seems like there’s a whole contingent of social media “directors” operating off of not much more than Mafia Wars and a Bebo account. Days like today. When the American Cancer Society is using members’ Facebook statuses to solicit donations. And taking some pretty hefty liberties by telling friends “don’t give her a birthday gift, donate to us instead!”
I’m trying to picture the Neanderthal moment when that idea came up. I’m still not clear if there were opposable thumbs involved.
With all due respect to a great organization, that one little oversight compromises a lot of brand goodwill and integrity built up by ACS over nearly a century. The organization makes a tangible difference for a lot of people. There should have been more care and attention given to what was going on in the social media department.
And this is true for every company and organization.
Social media is fast becoming the central hub for brand communication. It’s easily the greatest opportunity we’ve ever had for building brands. Or for tearing them down. I can’t think of anyone who’d hand over Ferrari keys to a caveman. But there are plenty of companies giving away control to employees who haven’t accumulated enough marketing perspective. Remember the Pizza Hut exec who so proudly announced the company’s new face of social media was going to be a Summer intern? Don’t be that guy.
Seasoned marketers and executives everywhere need to take responsibility for the development of social media and carefully guide and mentor those who want to be a part of it. Encouraging employees to participate and learn about social media is a good thing. But hiring them into social media management or high-profile consumer-facing positions and letting them execute ideas unsupervised is not.
I’m all for mentoring the next generation and I love the cycle of progress that comes from it. But I’m cringing as I watch the social media leapfrog where basic social media knowledge qualifies someone to direct a social media program. Companies do need to integrate social media. Just not backwards. The enthusiastic tech-savvy employee with the Twitter account should be executing tactics developed by a marketing pro. Not the tech-savvy employee having total autonomy over online brand voice because the marketing pro hasn’t figured out social media yet.
Or (yikes!) thinks it’s not worth their time.
Social media is powerful. It’s a marketing discipline that requires an emphasis on strategic planning. And a clear understanding of what a brand is, what its purpose is, and how to build it with integrity. So when you come across something like the American Cancer Society’s Facebook application that hijacks the status (and birthday gifts) of supporters, it’s pretty obvious we’ve got some social media cavemen running around that need to be reigned in.
Should we be clamoring for a mass extinction of the caveman? Not at all. Social media is the future of branding. It’s good for everyone to get familiar and comfortable with it. To learn it and engage in it. Yes, let the caveman be a part of the social media program. Teach them marketing, mentor them on branding, give them your Vesper Martini recipe. Help them understand what’s at stake every time they press “enter.”
The caveman may start off dragging knuckles at first, but as anyone who’s seen the Geico commercials can attest, a caveman has the potential to learn quite a lot. Eventually he’ll be wearing Kenneth Cole and listening to Thom Yorke.
And hopefully someday engaging in social media. In a full upright position.
