As more companies and PR firms attempt to manage their brands using social media, there are just as many opportunities for greatness as there are pitfalls.
To broaden our collective understanding of these challenges, we consulted six social media pros with extensive experience in PR, branding and marketing. Each one has gained respect in their respective spheres of work; and each one of them told us about a unique challenge and how to address it.
From being transparent to being profitable, from the tools you use today to the ones you’ll need tomorrow, here are six specific challenges to managing your brand on the social web. If you’ve got your own insights to share, please let us know about them in the comments.
1. Drew Olanoff: Your Biggest Challenge Is Transparency
You might know Drew Olanoff from his long and ballsy public “feud” with cancer. But he’s also a king among community managers — currently working for textPlus — and an all-around bright young man, especially when it comes to dissecting how social media mechanisms work in real-world business environments.
Olanoff’s advice stressed the need to “be everything to everyone.” He advises not holding back or skimping on your branding and marketing. Internally, you have to let employees know what your external messaging is going to be.
When communicating to the outside world, Olanoff said, “You have to be straight up. If your company fails, you have to be the first to call yourself on it. If you succeed, you have to message that in a way to get people’s attention.” It requires undivided attention to communicate with the social web in an honest, diligent way. “It’s a 24/7 job,” he concluded.
2. Scott Monty: Your Biggest Challenge Is Scale
Scott Monty is Ford’s intrepid and brilliant social media chief. He told us that among all the challenges facing a brand on the social web, “one of the biggest is the issue of scale. If you’re working for a successful brand, there will always be more customers than there are employees, which means there will be many more conversations about your brand than you’ll be able to participate in.”
Monty says that being able to scale your social media conversations and branding requires careful prioritization. “Exercise judgment to determine which discussions are worth spending time on. It could be engaging with a major influencer, publicly handling a customer complaint, or giving fans special access to events, information or other opportunities that would deepen a relationship.”
He also noted that you’ll need to limit how many services and platforms you use. “Decide which social networks are the most relevant to your customer base and help you achieve your broader business communications goals. Choose a small number to begin and expand your footprint based on staffing and trends that are evolving externally.”
Monty noted that half the battle is simply showing up. “It’s not just about running an online promotion or campaign and expecting results. You need to be there consistently and reliably every day, so that over time, a community will grow — and that’s when the magic begins to happen.”
3. Laura Fitton: Your Biggest Challenge Is Your ToolbeltWe love Laura “@Pistachio” Fitton. This woman is a powerhouse: Intelligent, capable, and bursting at the seams with a deeply ingrained knowledge of the apps and software that make the social web both easier and more robust.
For Fitton, the biggest challenge facing brand managers is “figuring out which tools you should use from the hundreds of tools you could use.” As the founder of oneforty, an app store for third-party Twitter applications, she knows better than anyone just how many tools are available and how much they can vary in quality.
“It takes time and effort to find tools that suit your business’ needs, your team’s work style, your data, backup, analytics and tracking requirements,” Fitton said. “The right tools can save a lot of time, money and hassle.”
4. Peter Shankman: Your Biggest Challenge Is RevenuePR man Peter Shankman is perhaps best known for Help a Reporter Out, his amazingly cool resource for PR folks, subject experts and journalists trying to find sources. He also wrote the book on PR stunts that actually work.
While this sometimes flamboyant, outspoken, skydiving entrepreneur clearly loves making a splash, he advises brand managers to keep and eye on the bottom line. Your biggest challenge, he said, is “convincing the people actually doing the managing that it’s not about cool, but about revenue. If what they’re doing doesn’t increase revenue in some way, the powers that be won’t give a damn how cool it is.”
5. Ayelet Noff: Your Biggest Challenge Is RelationshipsOn the flip side of that coin, online marketing and branding pro “Blonde 2.0,” a.k.a. Ayelet Noff, reminds us that not every action will or should lead to a quick buck for brands that use the social web.
“Brands have to make the mental switch from seizing every opportunity to sell to their market and rather look for ways to engage with consumers instead,” she said. “If a customer reaches out to you, instead of pitching them, try talking to them, listening to what they have to say and make an effort to develop an ongoing communicative relationship. Such a relationship is far more valuable than any one-time sale.”
6. Brian Solis: Your Biggest Challenge Is the FutureOne of the biggest names — and one of the best guys — in PR right now is Brian Solis. He is the principal at über-firm FutureWorks and recently published Engage!, a thorough and fascinating guide to online PR and branding.
When we asked him about the blessings and curses of social media for brand managers, Solis gave us the following forward-looking advice: “The greatest challenge that faces brands in social media today and tomorrow is the culture shift required to not only support engagement in social media but also adapt to become an authority within each network of relevance. In order to do so, however, businesses require a bottom-up conversation workflow that leads and responds, and also a top-down hierarchy that transforms insight into new products and services.” Essentially, businesses need to listen to their communities and embrace new ideas while having the administrative structure and openness to convert those ideas into practicable services.
“This is not about competing for the moment,” Solis said, “this is about competing for relevance and resonance for the long term.”
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