Give Before You Get - by Heidi Skinner

“Make a Facebook Fan Page because it doesn’t cost anything. Create a YouTube Brand Channel to house your video assets - YouTube allows you to do it for free. Befriend 100 people on MySpace and create a Ning community because there are no fees…” If you’ve ever allowed yourself to say these things, please adjust your social media compass.
The expectation that social media tactics are free initiatives is a huge fallacy to both agencies and marketers. There are four reasons why a good influential marketing strategy should cost you money:

1. Focusing your scope costs money. Take the guess work out of social media by engaging a buzz monitoring tool. Before you decide on your brand’s approach, gain insight on the topics, tonality and volume of conversations around our brand before you get started. If not, you aren’t truly fishing where the fish are.

2. Creative development costs money. Don’t let your media planners decide on social placement without consulting the creative and technical teams – and vice versa. At Critical Mass, we’re changing the model to make sure the “how” and the “what” happen in tandem to make sure that we’re not hap-hazardly repurposing TV or traditional online media messaging. If content is the currency in this environment, we need invest in our message.

3. Getting people to talk to you costs money. Sites like Facebook and YouTube are so large that a great effort is needed to cut through the clutter. While standard banner buys aren’t the solution, a dedicated effort is needed to monitor and grow community-based conversations.

4. Tracking costs money. Because brand presence in social places has yet to be perfected, it’s imperative that we calculate risk, set benchmarks for both branding and quantitative study to be able to scale in the future.

Done correctly, influential marketing strategies aren’t cost-prohibitive, but we need to accept the fact that 100,000,000 new pieces of content are posted within the social sphere every week. To cut through the clutter, we need to start taking social media seriously. Be prepared to give before you get.