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Stop Marketing Like It's Still 2004

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This is an excellent, insightful, enjoyable, and easy to follow slideshare from Gary Vaynerchuk.

Here are a few key points I took down:

Most marketers simply treat social media as a distribution channel—as another form of mass marketing. Big mistake! You lose all the benefits.

This forgets that what’s unique about social platforms is that they are a two-way conversation, not one-way. That’s what distinguishes them from mass marketing.

Social media is like a cocktail party. And a good cocktail party doesn’t come from talking about yourself the whole time (that’s one-way marketing), but from talking about others and interacting.

You bring value by engaging with users. That means replying to them—not just shooting stuff out there.

The trick is to learn the uniqueness of each platform and tell your story in a way that syncs with why and how people use that platform.

“Those who don’t learn how to tell their stories on today’s platforms are the ones who will go out of business.”

This has taken down some very smart, rich, and well-supported companies (for ex: Blackberry; AOL).

The Tribe or the Person?

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This is perhaps one of Seth Godin’s most difficult blog posts to grasp — but also one of the most important. Kudos to him for writing something that goes so deep.

At root, he’s talking about the difference between leadership and management. Management is about changing people one-on-one and is about individualizing; leadership is about groups and tapping in to what is universal. 

That’s a broad brush, and the best leaders can individualize very well (and need to more and more, in our age — so you can’t ignore that). But it’s a critical distinction to keep in mind. Godin’s post helps.

Here’s where it leads: “To change the culture, change the conversation.” That is, culture change requires leadership, not just management.

The Right Use of Analytics in Social Media — It's Not What You May Think

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Analytics are important and helpful, but they are a minor-league detail, not a major-league detail. The numbers can almost never tell you what is most important, and easily hide the fact that some of the most important interactions may result from smaller avenues that a bare look at the statistics would have told you to kill.

This is very, very well said by Gary Vaynerchuk, one of the best social media experts around, in his excellent book Crush It!: Why Now Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion:

I use analytics very rarely and I urge you not to rely too much on them either, especially if you’ve got good business instincts.

A lot of times the stats and percentages related to my business just don’t support what my instinct says is true, and I’ll trust my instincts over numbers every time. What if your analytics tell you that you’ve only had seven views on Break.com in two months? Are you going to stop posting to that platform? The data are telling you that you should probably drop it, but what you don’t know is that one of those seven viewers is a producer for The Today Show. There’s no reason to think that can’t happen.

The numbers can be a trap that changes your behavior. People see they’ve only gotten fifty viewers in a few weeks and decide they suck and they stop trying as hard. Or their video catches on and gets watched a thousand times and they think they’ve made it, and they stop trying as hard. Metrics can be useful, of course, but the effect of your online interactions and the excitement building toward your brand isn’t accurately reflected by the number of viewers you have.

It’s not about how many viewers you have, it’s about how passionate they are. If you must use them, analytics should be a minor-league detail. Focus the majority of your attention on your overall brand positioning.