Social media clearly were the hype of 2011. Twitter and Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+, and some smaller, lesser known services were rising stars in 2010. 2011 was the year during which Twitter and LinkedIn got huge, Google+ got out of its alpha/beta phase, and Facebook grew to huge proportions. Especially in marketing circles social media is now hot, with a lot of nonsense being written and promises being made that lead to nothing.

The most important myth to debunk is that social media are conversations. They are not. The closest real world process social media can be compared with is a telegram. Real conversations are the realm of forums, not social media. Social media are not all the same. For example, Twitter is more like a telegram than Facebook is. Google+ is more of a telegram service for business contacts, acquaintances, family and friends than LinkedIn is, etc. But in general, social media equals ‘shouting’ short bursts of content in the hope that others may find them interesting.

Because of the association by the ‘experts’ of social media to a conversation, an interesting question is what sets forums apart from social media. Forums concentrate on a common subject matter and are usually password-restricted. Forums exist to discuss topics, not to quickly announce and broadcast temporary topics. That is why forums are absolutely counter-productive for marketeers, because any marketing message is seen as an intrusion and therefore as spamming the forum.

Social media is a marketeer’s dream if understood well. For example, it’s important to understand a message on enterprise technology is lost when promoted on Tumblr. A message on consumer technology may work on Tumblr.

Marketing on social media is about telling others about a company or product’s state of being, status in the world, etc. — just like a person’s status — and therefore doesn’t seem out of bounds or off-topic. It’s this same characteristic that makes services such as Twitter and Facebook so effective when rallying, demonstrating or protesting.

Content marketing is hot, or so it seems. But content is not enough. Content, no matter how good the quality, is useless if nobody consumes it.

Twenty years ago, web masters would tell you: “If you build it, they will come”. They were the visitors. They would come alright; there wasn’t much choice and every new website was a revelation by itself. Later, design started to play a role. Then big business kicked in and had a whole army of designers, programmers and SEO’ers build websites, and “they” didn’t come just because you started a new website.

It’s the same with content marketing. A large number of the content marketing advisors that I see on the web, are still living in the cocoon of “good content means more eyeballs”, but in fact it’s the other way around. More eyeballs means better content, because you can monetize your “publication” when a lot of people visit.

Yes, you need good content, but you’ll also need a network of media to push that content into, and ideally you’ll also have an audience that is willing to communicate about your content through various channels with people that are beyond your own reach.

It can be done, but it’s not easy and it is time consuming. When it’s done right, you are a real content marketer, but also a content curator and syndicator. And that’s where it becomes interesting for business.

We call it the “conversation”, the tweets, Google+, Facebook updates, etc. The conversation is what sets 21st Century marketing apart from old-style, one-way marketing. It is a more powerful way of bringing a product, service or idea under the attention of millions, but it costs a lot more. Perhaps not directly in terms of money, but certainly of effort and time. (Free white paper available!)

Even if you don’t think much of a tweet as a means of conversation in a sense that it should be a spontaneous exchange of ideas, it still is more of a conversation than a TV commercial. It requires some preparation and forethought. And somebody must convert the idea into text. Automated tweeting is possible of course, but strangely enough automatic tweeters have garbage followers.

So, there’s a little man or woman in the process who has to commit to writing those 140 characters. In some small companies, that person will be the receptionist who distills the 140 magical characters from the more elaborate texts like press releases and memos. In most cases, it’s a random group of people who are supposed to share the message with the larger audience.

There are a couple of problems with this approach:

1. It is commonplace to see people having so much on their plate that the sharing part gets snowed under.
2. Tweeting is not the only method of engaging in a conversation a company should foster. There are plenty of other means.
3. To communicate the essence of the message, you need to analyze the content and extract the right parts from it.

What is needed, is a person who will:

• spend the necessary time to find suitable snippets of text from a pool of content
• who will reformat these snippets so they become optimized for the conversation channel
• who will distribute these snippets to the dozen or so “social media” that are currently available.

This is not the same as what Public Relations firms do, nor is it a marketing manager’s job. It is more like SEO (Search Engine Optimization) — you could call it Social Media Optimization.

It really is a marketing job by its own merits, and to be successful in this new type of marketing and communications, it is as essential as PR.

I remember Twitter starting out as a service that people would use to tell their friends what they were doing. I thought it was a silly idea. After all, who would be interested in my very down to earth daily activities? Twitter turned out to be a powerful conversation technology that is a perfect fit for marketing.

Small organizations mainly consisting of young people won’t have any problem with knowing what to tweet and when. It’s the big company that needs to have a social communications manager who manages it all. The result usually is boring and worse: bad marketing. Why? Because a manager takes out the spontaneity of tweeting.

In large companies, tweeting about something else than the product or service is harder than in small businesses, because it involves more ‘ruling’ — as in ‘business rules’, ‘policies’, etc. Twitter then rapidly becomes a promotion vehicle, with few followers as a result. Twitter should not be used as an advertising medium. We have plenty of those. It should be fun and bare some witness of the person’s interests, even if those are not always related to the company and its products. I’d say: even if they go against the company and its products.

The way around this is to find a different angle. The trick is to find an angle that is interesting and won’t harm the business. A good manager can do some good in this area, but will have to refrain from stifling people…

Some publishing systems or CMSes allow users to designate a snippet of text as a tweet. The feature is touted as a way to automate content publishing, but can be dangerous.

A publishing system or CMS is optimized for automating the publishing process across output media. Until a decade ago the output media would have been print and the web. Then came mobile, eReaders and now some publishing systems also regard Twitter, Facebook, and other social media as output channels.

By chopping up the written content into small chunks of data, usually using XML, the system can offer the user a quick and dirty way of publishing a tweet or a Facebook update. In many cases, such an automated tweet will consist of a title and headline, which is perfectly fine for magazine or newspaper stories.

However, in corporate content a title and the headline of a report or even a draft marketing text may already hold trade secrets. Unless the system has a built-in mechanism that makes accidental release of confidential information impossible, such advanced automation may be dangerous, and should be avoided.

There is another reason why it should be avoided as well: it won’t do your social presence any good.