Industry Action Required – Sharpening social media practice

Being a relatively new form of interactive marketing should not excuse social media from being a domain of sharp practice.

Recently, Justin Pearse, editor of New Media Age magazine, wrote a leader in which he argued that social media is not a black art and therefore shouldn’t be treated as such by some of the people practicing it in the UK. He quite rightly called for a greater level of professionalism in this area and I agree that this is a call we all need to pay heed to.

Our own experience of conducting social media projects for our clients has led us to believe that existing standards for good research and design practice are being ignored by many of those designing and delivering social media campaigns – not only in the UK but around the world. When we have been engaged by clients to carry out social media research and measurement we have found that a great deal of the advice we are providing has had to focus on rectifying basic flaws in approach and process due to agency poor practice.

The standards that are being dropped relate directly to the fundamental skills that exist in new media. Basic research, design, implementation and measurement practices are often, if not always, completely ignored. Design standards for new media like ISO18529 for example, that have been created and fastidiously adhered to by mainstream agencies, are now simply being ignored by a new breed of social media companies. From our own perspective as customer experience consultants, the fact that social media strategy is often being set and implemented without any real understanding of the customer is short-sighted.

Simply by applying the process illustrated below based on ISO 13407 would result in significant benefits:

The ISO 13407 process is based on good user-centred design principles and we believe it can apply to social media research and measurement. The continuous process describes the following:

1. Research target consumer: Unless the work has been done to properly segment the audience and define the customer a campaign will be untargeted.

2. Create and test concepts: Just because social media measurement is hard and few carry it out it does not mean we can ignore the impact of bad campaign design on our audience. Concepts should be tested and refined before launch.

3. Implementation of campaign: Measurement strategy is all to often considered post launch and should be part of the implementation process. What will success look like? What and how are we going to measure?

4. Measurement: If we have established a measurement strategy and are collecting feedback the most important concern is that the feedback is acted upon and the campaign refined and enhanced.

Following what is considered best ISO standard design practice is an effective way to create winning social media campaigns. Using process and rigour doesn’t mean we have to stop being experimental, but only by starting to behave like offline marketing agencies, who embrace and fully involve the specialists in their fields when a new format emerges, will customers on both sides of the fence get what they need.

This article was written as part of the April newsletter