Beyond social media buzzwords: It's your business that matters and how you think and what you believe that really matter...

This article from AttentionMax struck me.  Its premise is simple:  most agencies and media publishers still don't get social media right.  In terms of coming up with social-media solutions, most are found wanting - and too "buzz-wordy", rather than really actionable.

To be sure, there are a lot of promising attempts on both the media and agency sides. But most are short-sided. In fact, most seem disingenuous or uninformed, as evidenced by the advertising community’s excessive and ambiguous use of words and phrases like “conversation,” “viral,” “engage with your customers” and “let the community do the work for you.”

It seems that I am not the only one who is beginning to be frustrated by the buzz-wordy, ambiguous words and phrases that pepper most ad and media companies and publishers' presentations.

I believe that social media is important:  but how exactly do you manage it?

I believe that you can't manage something that you cannot control - and you cannot control what you cannot measure.  If we follow that line of reasoning even further, you cannot measure what you do not understand.  And you cannot understand unless you observe and organize.

But social media is chaotically organized.  It is perhaps one of the most glaring examples of "simplexity":  social media is simple - and its premise is simple.  However, because it involves complex 'variables' (people - lots of people!) it just becomes complex to be captured and organized in math formulas and even structures and MECE processes.

And yet, we know that social media needs to be considered because of its sheer power in influencing others.

How then?

Here are my suggestions:

1. Go beyond the marketing plan.  And yes, go beyond the media plan.  Go beyond these measures of "opportunities to be seen".
2. Use the marketing plan, the ad-messaging and media plan, and the PR plan, and the 'viral plan' as a means to achieve something bigger - the business' bottom-line/
3. Create a strategic plan centered on consumers and community of consumers.  The problem with most marketeers is, they want to get everyone and anyone to love their brand and contribute to their business.  C'mon: you can't please everyone!
4. In doing so, forget the buzzwords - unless we have a real understanding of how to operationalize them and get them to act and benefit a brand, forget about using "engagement", "connection", "involvement"... etc.
5. Viral videos aren't the end-all/be-all of a campaign - or word-of-mouth or facebook ads or widgets.  The end is getting new business in:  from existing community-revenue-sources, from communities that are not yet open - but could be open - to the business.
6. Tactics ain't going to cut it: the short-term is good, but the longer-term is what really matters.  Don't sacrifice the long-term goals and vision of the brand and the business for the sake of one sponsorship or one community.
7. Be prepared to invest:  Just because you have a database of people who wanted to be members and "friends" with your brand doesn't mean you've hit it big time.  Invest in them.  Listen to them.  (And I mean that in a very non-buzz-wordy way...) 
8. Bring out the data.  If you have a "loyalty program" (which is a misnomer, because these databases are most likely just gathering 'electronic dust' somewhere in your server's hard drive), check and let the data tell you what they've been doing with your brand.  If you are lucky, you'd find nuggets of information and knowledge about these individuals who have taken the time to get involved with your brand.  Get to know them.
9. Make marketing your 'integrative thinking department' - where sales, procurement, finance, operations, admin, customer service, supply management, frontlines converge. 
   In fact, get MORE out of your marketing department beyond checking ads, approving media plans, and berating your agencies as if they were less than human.  (And if your marketing director is one who is still involved in selecting what programs to buy into, fire her - she has bigger things to do - and bigger issues to solve - than looking at specific programming your brand is buying into.  She's wasting valuable company time - fire her and get someone in.)
10. Get everyone to understand what it's all about: the business and its sustainability.  From everyone internally to other external stakeholders.  It's not about the frigging Cannes awards or that left-right pagination on the main paper.  It's about the business and its sustainability.

OK.  No item in the list above mentions anything about social-media.  (And my English paper teacher would probably fail me...)  But that's the whole point:  the whole point about social-media is you can't fully engineer it - you can't fully engineer how people react to your brand and your business because, well, they are people - and people are complex.

The only way you can fully maximize and benefit from social-media is when the brands' companies are themselves organized and are firm believers of creating remarkable brands and businesses that would benefit and reward their consumers.

(And just because you're the biggest financial institution with the biggest number of credit cardholders doesn't mean you're the best and that everyone loves you - it just means you have the muscle.  But not everyone likes muscle guys [and girls].)