13. Don’t Fall in Love

The question marketers need to be asking is “What’s the next platform on which my audience will be talking about my company?” For example, when Google started, it was a pure search engine. Years later, Google has moved from a search engine to a highly diverse group of web-based applications and is making a major push toward cloud computing—the capability to access shared services such as online storage, photo-editing tools, word-processing tools, and so on. In coming years, the web browser will likely become less relevant as new applications to access the Internet are created to work with Google’s newly announced operating system, ChromeOS. Of course, that means more change for web marketers everywhere.

When Tim Berners-Lee created the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)—this was back at the dawn of the internet before the thought of broadband internet access was even a glimmer in anyone’s eye—he likely never intended for applications such as Flash to be used through it. In fact, playing videos through a web browser probably was the furthest thing from his mind. He only wanted to share information with his other physicist colleagues. Mike Grehan (an online marketing thought leader who heads up Search Engine Watch, Click Z, and their companion conference series, “Search Engine Strategies”) points to this fact about Berners-Lee’s creation and what it’s used for today. “It’s like trying to shove an elephant through a keyhole; it just wasn’t meant to be,” Grehan says.

When you think about all the different ways that we can access the Internet—smart phones, traditional computers, PDA devices, and gaming systems such as the Nintendo Wii—the death of the web browser is not around the corner, but the reliance on it to connect to the Internet is lessening. We discuss this phenomenon in more detail in Chapter 42, “It’s Not Just a Web Browser Anymore.”

The Social Media Site You Love Might Not Be Where Your Audience Is

Although you might love Facebook and think it’s a great place to communicate with your audience, you might find that your audience isn’t on Facebook. When you look at social media technologies and sharing sites from your own personal view and think, “This would be a great place for my company,” you need to stop and take a step back. You should perform objective research on whether your audience is really on that platform.

The social media platform(s) your audience uses might actually surprise you. Your audience might be using an old, very well-established forum that hasn’t updated its platform in a few years and lacks all the bells and whistles that newer platforms offer. People are creatures of habit. If they are comfortable and find something of value, it can be tough for them to change.

The same holds true for marketers. You might be comfortable with a particular social media platform and, therefore, drive all your marketing efforts there. However, if your audience is on a different site, all that effort is wasted. Try not to fall into that trap.

Although you can certainly represent your company through your profile on a certain social media platform, keep in mind that your audience won’t necessarily come searching for you on the platform you are most comfortable with. It certainly doesn’t hurt your strategy to put your company’s information and content into the profile you have on your favorite social media site. It’s possible that some conversation about your company will develop there, but you still might not be hitting your target market.

People Don’t Converse on Just One Platform

Nearly every week, some company announces a new social network or social sharing site. Just take a look at the archives of Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch blog or Pete Cashmore’s Mashable site (which is solely dedicated to reporting on social media), and you can get an idea of just how many new social media technologies appear every month. The sheer volume can be mind-blowing and intimidating.

The average Internet user, who doesn’t keep track of the ins and outs of what’s going on in social media, relies on friends to introduce different social media platforms and communities. In fact, users usually don’t even attach the term social media to these communities. For the average user, social media sites are simply a place they visit to share with their friends and families.

People find the communities they become part of through a quick search in a search engine, recommendations from friends, or word of mouth. They start on one social media site, but eventually they branch out to finding a different community when they’ve become comfortable with one place and realize that they can share their hobbies and passions with other communities.

Through your research, you will find that the conversation is happening many places. That’s because people aren’t inclined to use only one social media platform after they’ve discovered just how much they can share with a global community. For instance, people aren’t just using Twitter all by itself: Your audience might be chatting on Twitter; discussing the same thing in their favorite forums; sharing their personal information and passions on Facebook; uploading photos to Flickr; and then sharing those photos via Facebook, Twitter, and a favorite forum.

This type of cross-pollination can be tough to keep track of, which is why buzz-monitoring tools such as Techrigy and Radian6 can be valuable tools to have in your marketing arsenal. If you can’t afford these enterprise-level tools, Google Alerts can help, but it requires a bit more manual work to keep track of the conversations happening across multiple platforms.

People often keep the same usernames across social media platforms or use something very similar if their original username is already taken on the new site. I started in online chat rooms and forums in 1992 with the moniker storyspinner. I’ve kept that same username, or the similar storyspinn, in all the places I hold conversations so that it’s easy for my friends who also cross platforms to find me.

I also use the same avatar across all the social media sites I use so people can easily identify me. Using the same or similar username and avatar isn’t just a unique thing to me. You’ll often see this when you start researching and watching the communities in which the conversations about your company are happening. When people cross different communities to share their experiences, they generally act and speak in the same manner across all the sites.

If you start seeing the same person in two or three different travel forums and they are quite active in a community, you’ve likely found a major influencer. These people are dedicating a lot of time to sharing with not just one community, but a few, and their sphere of influence is magnified by moving from one platform to another. Other people notice this as well and tend to give these cross-pollinators a bit more authority because they believe that these influencers must have something of value to add because they are on multiple sites.

Your Audience Can Migrate from One Platform to Another

Over time, your audience might move. When social media sites upgrade or change features and community members don’t accept or embrace the changes to make the community grow, the users tend to move on to a place where they feel comfortable. If the influencers move on, generally others in the community follow. This is another reason you should avoid falling in love with just one site.

Although humans are notoriously creatures of habit, we also love to feel comfortable. If change happens and we no longer feel comfortable, we will break habits to seek out a new place to find that comfort we previously had. This is why web marketers must be watching, listening, and actively participating in a community. If you are active in a community, you can stay abreast of migrations and understand why they are happening—and be ready to adjust your social media marketing strategy for that migration.

Sometimes these migrations happen slowly. Other times communities migrate rather quickly. If a new community appears or a competing social media site implements brand-new technologies that make communication and sharing much easier, community members will flock to that new platform—especially if the key influencers of the community quickly embrace it.

This is pretty evident when you look at how fast MySpace grew and then how quickly Facebook surpassed it (see Figure 13.1). Facebook offered more ways to connect and easier ways to share with friends—tagging photos, joining groups, and creating fan pages.

Figure 13.1 A Google Trends Chart shows how Facebook overtook MySpace as the top social media platform between January 2006 and December 2009.

I have to admit, I’m a reluctant Facebook member. I started in MySpace, and as I joined Facebook, I noticed a distinct difference in my friends between the two communities. My real-life friends—the ones that I see regularly—represented the majority of my friends on MySpace. On Facebook, I discovered that people from the online marketing industry and others involved with web technology represented the largest portion of my friends. I don’t regularly see these people. That said, during recent months, I’ve seen my friends slowly migrating from MySpace to Facebook. I was curious why this was happening. When I asked one of my MySpace friends why he moved to Facebook, he plainly stated, “It’s just easier.”

Think Beyond the Web Browser

At the beginning of this chapter, I mentioned that the web browser might not be the way we will all communicate in social media sites in the future. That’s why marketers need to start thinking outside of the proverbial box when it comes to marketing online. As companies sell more smart phones across the globe, developers are building applications that enable these devices to connect to the Internet. Some of these applications don’t use the HTTP architecture of a web browser.

Smart phone apps such as the applications developed for Facebook, Yelp, MySpace, and Flickr, just to name a few that are cross platform (meaning BlackBerry, iPhone, Droids, etc.) are just another way to access the internet without having to utilize a web browser. As these types of devices are becoming more popular and integrated with every day life, we can expect to see fewer people accessing social media sites via a web browser.

It’s not just about phones. Programmers are developing applications that can access the Web without a web browser. Consider Twitter as an example. Although you can access Twitter via your browser through its website at www.twitter.com, desktop applications such as Tweetdeck enable Twitter users to organize, share, and communicate through Twitter without ever touching Safari, Firefox, or Internet Explorer.

We dive deeper into this subject in Chapter 42, but for now, remember not to fall in love with one technology—especially if it’s tied to a web browser. It might not be around in the future.

What Happens If the Social Media Platform Disappears?

So what happens if the community you found does suddenly disappear? Or what happens if the service goes down for an uncertain amount of time? How much are you relying on just one platform for your social media marketing strategy? Falling in love with an unstable platform and banking your entire strategy on it can end up in failure.

When Twitter goes down, it makes the front page of CNN. On August 6, 2009, Twitter was the victim of a denial-of-service (DOS) attack, and the site was down for more than 2 hours. The DOS attack also impacted Facebook and MySpace.

Had this attack crippled Twitter for days, any company relying solely on it for its social media marketing strategy could’ve suffered adverse affects. The company’s form of communication and channel for conversing with its audience would be gone without a contingency plan or another place to reach its audience.

If you use just one forum or message board (one that’s owned and operated by someone else or another company) as your only form of communication with your audience, you could also fall into this detrimental situation. What happens if you find that the site has been taken down for nonpayment of hosting services, that the owner died, or that the original company that ran it filed for bankruptcy?

These types of events are very real and have happened. It’s upsetting to the community members who have invested so much time and passion into the community. It’s also detrimental to a strategy if that’s the only place you relied on to communicate with your audience.

This is why social media marketers should look at a mix of social media tactics when creating their social media strategies. Falling in love with one type of social news site, such as Digg, or a particular forum is dangerous if you don’t pay attention to the other places where the conversation is happening.