On my run this morning (working off more literal snacks), I thought of the work ahead of me when I returned to my desk — editing a video, writing a blog, uploading photos, tweeting across several client accounts. None of these projects resembled creating what we think of as traditional ads. And yet, I think the term ’snacks’ can be misleading. I think the preparation of quality info snacks demands as much craft, devotion, and time as creating traditional modes of commercial messaging. And, as alluded to in our last post, you need a recipe if you want it to come out right.

Your guests are hungry. Are you leaving out enough snacks?

In this age of social media, more and more marketers regardless of their understanding of these new channels want “on that Facebook thing” in much the same way that the checklist marketers of the early ’90s wanted “a website on those interwebs.”

Recently I heard some words of wisdom — ironically, at a marketing best practices conference. “Why do we come to these conferences, learn what everyone else is doing, and then go home and copy them. Why do we follow, when we should lead.”

So how does this apply to you and wanting a piece of the social media action? Simply put, all of these new channels — Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube (to pick a few low-hanging fruits) — are more than just items on a checklist. Want a Facebook page? It can be created in 10 minutes. Same with creating profiles or accounts on all of those other sites. If you want to be a follower, the good news is that it doesn’t take long to establish a simple presence on these channels. You can probably spend the better part of a day creating accounts on all prevalent networks and community sites and cross a BIG item off of that beloved checklist.

But what if you want to lead? What if you want these channels to actually work for you?

Then you are ready to realize a simple truth — social media is a means not an end. Creating presences on these channels is not the item on your checklist but rather a means for accomplishing an even bigger item on your checklist — developing greater brand engagement with your customers and potential customers. Checklists aren’t bad by nature (I use a ton of them to keep several different things straight). Often it’s what’s on them that’s wrong.

Using ‘greater brand engagement’ as your goal, how can you use social media as a means to help you achieve that? Which social channels would best support these goals? Too often marketers grab all of these sites off the rack regardless of how well they support their business’ goal. Maybe a photo-sharing presence on Flickr would be better than a blog for your business. Maybe Facebook isn’t right for you. In order to answer these questions you first need to know what you are doing.

We are currently working on a project for a client that I cannot wait to share with you that does all of these things. We have a branding/messaging goal for the client and are building the means for accomplishing this through social media. More on this when we can share it but leading produces a greater sense of satisfaction than following.

In the meantime, ask yourslef if you have a social media strategy or just a checklist? Are following or leading?

I agree with those sentiments in general. However they are black and white and, as we know, the modern world is rarely that cut and dry. Truth be told, in medium- to large-sized  businesses where you are often deep with marketing staff, you could and perhaps should keep social media duties in-house, as you have more than enough marketers to navigate most new media channels. But in several small businesses including many that we work with there aren’t any staff members dedicated to the full-time marketing of the brand. Many of these businesses understand the impact of new media and know that they need to have a presence in these channels but they don’t always have the time, tools, or personnel to get there. That’s where we come in.

The other way in which we don’t fit the black and white rules mentioned above is that in a lot of ways we are different from traditional agencies. First, we are purposefully small. We don’t have deep hierarchies of our own with account people and creatives. Our account people are our creatives and vice versa. We are deeply involved in almost every aspect of telling our clients’ stories. We also work closely with our clients in ways that many agencies don’t. We’re involved in long-term planning and analysis. In many ways we are an off-site marketing team for a handful of businesses.

So having blurred these lines and qualified ourselves as relevant Twitter admins for our clients I will say there are rules that we have created (and continue to create). If asked, we are clear about who we are and who we are not. We don’t create an identity that’s not true. We tweet as the business or brand itself and never as ‘Nick from INSERT BUSINESS HERE.’ We also work to relay all true social media inquiries directly to staff to ensure a timely and relevant response.

Perhaps our most prescient guiding principle in working with our clients on social media projects is best related through the classic saying — Give a man a fish and you’ve fed him for today. Teach a man to fish and you’ve fed him for a lifetime. Our long-term social media goal is to teach our clients to fish. And that’s where the open nature of social media comes in handy — for collaboration. Twitter makes it easy to share the work of tweeting via CoTweet and other similar platforms used by Ford, Starbucks and Whole Foods. On Facebook, you can assign as many page admins as you want to share the work.

Do you need a social media strategy for your business? Absolutely. Is there one strategy for all businesses small and large? Of course not. In short we tweet for our clients because we are teaching them to fish and guiding them along the journey. And because it’s not a black and white world with black and white business/agency lines. So that’s our theory. What’s yours?

Photo credit netzkobold via Flickr

Of course client stories are a great fit and we are very excited to share these first two with you from Mark Hummel of Hummel’s Nissan and Barry Smith of Peoples Trust & Savings Bank. We hope to add more of these in the future. Client Stories >

1. Pages = Profiles As you can see, pages for organizations and businesses now look more like profile pages. This is a good update for brands with pages as the old layout was clunky and difficult to update and leverage. This means your business can have status updates that are supposed to start appearing in fans news feeds soon (no word from Facebook on when ’soon’ is). This also means that your page will feature profile-like tabs for users to easily navigate plus a wall for you and your fans to interact. Very cool as all of this allows for more frequent interaction with your fans — giving you the potential to build even stronger brand advocates via Facebook.
2. The Need for Speed Definitely a behind-the-scenes update but you will notice it instantly. The ‘new’ Facebook features news feeds that are updated pretty close to real time vs. every 10 minutes as before. So users will now be even more in-tune to the goings on in their network.
3. Cutting the Clutter So with all of this new info coming at users much faster than before the logical progression will be that the quantity of updates will increase as well. To protect against this new onslaught of info, users can now create filters on their homepage (now being called a ’stream’ like that other social site that starts with a ‘T’ …) in an effort to cut through clutter.
4. Relevancy Rules What do filters mean for you? If you start spamming your fans you could get banished to that filter they never check. However, if you keep your messaging relevant then you could make your way into a more frequently monitored filter. Like email — and most online marketing anymore which is becoming more personal by the minute — relevancy is king.
5. Face Time Making pages more like profiles and moving to an almost real-time news feed means that you will probably have to increase your time investment in Facebook. Gone are the days when you could set up a fan page and watch it grow like a garden. You’ll need to get in there and prune it more regularly to keep your updates in this bigger and more competitive ’stream’ high on the wall.
6. More Metrics In addition to the general fan counts page admins had before, you’ll know get more rich metrics on comments, posts, etc. More measurement is always a good thing especially since the new Facebook may require a bit more time thus giving you a better handle on your ROI.

So as you can see, for marketers, these updates are very advantageous though they seem to be raising the ire of many Facebook users. Unlike the toppled terms revision of last month, these updates are probably here to stay as Facebook searches for ways to stay competitive with Twitter and, like all social media sites, strives to monetize.

What do you think of the new Facebook changes? Is it too much like Twitter or just the natural evolution of the online conversation?