Do not talk about Starbucks and Lady Gaga

I recognize it! I am a fan of Social Media, and as such, consumers of all kinds of information, theories, practices, innovations and good examples.So far, and everything I’ve read and experience, I have taken clear that social media are channels of two-way communication, and as such, we have no choice but to engage in a communicative dialogue with our audience individually, face to face, person to person, face to face.

It is not easy, since this requires us some of our brand and be more sociable, more human, be close. Any other behavior considered arrogant and therefore antisocial. On the other hand, mass communication practices are frowned upon, indeed are rejected and penalized by the users themselves, thus the results are zero. In social media you work a lot with a few, just to those who want us as a brand, social consumer wants to be our friend, and for this, we assist by name.

Therefore it is impossible to escape back to being human and unlearn old marketing techniques, in order to have results in social media. Something change!

The first step to success part of you. It is understood that although your brand is a great brand, is a great unknown brand, and as such, we have to go slowly and from below to gain the confidence of the people. Recognizing this is very hard, but it certainly is the beginning of the track to success of social media. When you are the “new”, you get to show friendly, sympathetic, receptive and willing to abide by any rule, otherwise, we will be rejected by the group.

So far, it is one of the first problems that any Social Media will face a brand. Myopias marketing with Social Media emerge, as this acts as a mirror, and the first thing it shows is what you really are, openly or exaggerations, to your target audience.

After opening our Fan Page on Facebook or our profile on Twitter, we believe that that day will be a “boom” of our brand followers chanting, throwing confetti and giving us a warm welcome. After several days waiting, we can not believe that we only have 10 followers and a cricket singing, “That’s the Comunnity Manager has done something wrong!”hehehe … a Girl … That’s who you are “new”, and as such, you get to get off the vine, accept that you are a stranger, and start socializing with your target audience with humility, listening It is you who take the first steps, as plays, earning you trust one by one.

All these problems that is affecting the Community Managers, comes largely by the same examples hollow “success stories in social networks” and the numerical data of the millions who overflow and use each network, and Youtube or show options daily.

Big brands like Starbucks, Ikea or Red Bull are set as great examples of the results and the potential of social media. Great personalities like Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber are used as examples domain of social networks. Well unfortunately not worth us no good, in fact it leads to confusion.

These big brands, previously dominated by mass media, and therefore already have a position in our society which our brand, unless you have spent billions on ads, no.

Upon entering social networks your goal is not to get “more fans” or more audience, since already have them by conventional means, … the problem is that they can not address them individually overflow .. .and their usual lofty corporate practices are rejected by network users because we want them to treat us differently to conventional, now I can say what I like and do not like about you. Unfortunately this is not the problem that we face most, rather, we want to increase our popularity and interactions.

So our situation is not the same, nor the goals either. We do not have a previous position in society, we have to win little by little, and the way they act is different. To us we are not allowed to close the wall or leave a message without answering them if, as is understood to be very popular and is not viable answer to 4 million people one by one. Therefore we must ignore the number of followers they got (since most of it is thanks to that achieved popularity in TV, radio, press, …) and stay with the reputation that generates an action of a great brand in your audience and so, when we get to those levels, we know we should do.

I acknowledge having ever used a video on numerical, demographic and other crap on the number of people present in social networks, with very negative results data. What do we want with this? “experts” should be aware of their responsibility as educators in social media and not ride false expectations, since teaching this type of information and induce the belief that it will reach such a number of people and free examples (“Lady Gaga got … “), and being honest, social networks do not try to be a means of mass communication, rather a means to interact with your potential customer and to establish lasting relationships over time. Do not you think that popularity and personal relationship are somewhat contradictory?