Mature Vs. Immature Social Media Efforts

July 13, 2011 Author Adam Singer In The Social Web

I’ve been drafting vs. posts for quite some time on a variety of subjects. Today, I thought it would be fun to talk about brands who are mature in social vs. those who are immature.

Brands mature in their social efforts are customer-centric and don’t feel a need to constantly hype their own products or services. They understand users will organically make that connection and have a more subtle and useful approach to accomplish it.

Brands immature to social prattle on about their own product and are self-centered / brand centric. They don’t realize that by becoming a publisher and adding value to their category, their products and services will gain far more visibility than always (un-artfully) pushing them directly.

Brands mature in social efforts focus on building opt-in to source content and growing a platform agnostic community.

Brands immature in their social efforts focus on a single platform and obsess over meaningless KPIs like followers or friends within that platform. They ignore the fact that the web is holistic and platform use is distributed and in flux.

Brands mature in social media focus less on microcontent and more on thought leadership. They become media companies and produce consistent, remarkable source content the rest of the industry reacts to when they publish. In time their own publishing ventures become as popular as their industry trades.

Brands immature in social media simply create microcontent because it is easy and doesn’t require the effort and self-discipline to carve out a voice and well-referenced brand of media. Microcontent can never unlock the full benefits of pull PR.

Brands mature to social easily measure efforts within a larger digital marketing dashboard as they natively understand how social, web, sales and marketing analytics work together. They focus less on the fuzzy and less actionable details within platforms they don’t control and instead measure the critical few.

Brands immature in social think measurement is difficult because they aren’t savvy about web metrics in general. They chase irrelevant datapoints like increasing their Klout score vs. focusing on outcome oriented metrics.

Brands mature in social media integrate social with SEO, email and other marketing initiatives. They realize the web is holistic and don’t silo efforts. Cross pollination is encouraged and embraced and digital teams work in harmony: there are no sacred cows.

Brands immature to social create self-imposed roadblocks to success. One department hordes existing, high value digital assets like corporate homepages or email lists and refuses to allow a sharing of information, data or contacts. There is a lack of integration between teams and a frequent need to build new networks from scratch and reinvent the wheel for no reason other than politics.

Brands mature in social understand that efforts go beyond leads generated or unique website visitors, they are savvy about how social touches all aspects of marketing and PR and contributes to a trend up of a variety of KPIs.

Brands immature to social don’t comprehend how efforts work together and fail to take into account how social tactics affect other initiatives already in place.

Brands mature to social media already have a larger digital marketing strategy. So when new tools or platforms arrive it is clear how and if it should be used. Also since mature brands are platform agnostic, it is usually as simple as adding new networks as another spoke in an already robust mix, tagging back to a hub.

Brands immature to social freak out when a new tool is released. Because they are frequently so platform dependent, they worry their networks may be disrupted and any digital leverage lost.

What do you think are some qualities of mature vs. immature brands in social?

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