Putting people at the heart of social media
By Simon Fuller. Marketers really need to understand what social media is at heart.
“Social media is wild and untamed,” Andrew Grill, UK head of sales and business development at Visible Technologies, said at brand-e’s recent Buzz about the social media buzz event in London. “Listen, [as] you need to know what’s going on. If a product sucks, fix it – it’s better than hiding it – people know what’s going on. No matter what the marketing promise is, if you don’t deliver, they’ll tweet to let you know.
“Social media is like real life. Real groups form, you follow people who look interesting. So treat social media as such – don’t upset anyone.”
And when it comes to monitoring brands online, there’s certainly some great technology out there, though nothing is fool-proof. And there are some less-than-satisfactory tools too.
“There’s sophisticated tech but social media monitoring isn’t perfect,” said Grill. “If you’re a client, lean on the agency to do the work. If you’re an agency, your analysts can do the work – they’ll give you your numbers and your insights.”
And he advocates putting real people in charge of monitoring, since only human beings – and certainly not computers – have the contextual knowledge and appreciation of a situation to deliver accurate results.
“Automated services can’t understand context,” Grill said. “Humans need to analyse what you’re seeing against… business objectives.”
