Getting your station ready for social media marketing

Graeme Newell

In the viral frontier of social media marketing, it is important to understand that you no longer own your station brand.  For generations, TV stations have carefully crafted their advertising and PR to convey a regimented and disciplined marketing message.  Because we had the raw power of a sign-on-to-sign-off broadcast signal in our back pocket, we got to control the message.  Sure, the local newspaper columnist might have a wee bit of sway with our audience, but there was just no way an occasional rant could compete with the raw GRP power of our own prodigious on-air marketing.  In order to be heard, you needed to own a media company, and that meant the average person never got a platform to voice their feelings about us.  TV advertising was about carefully concealing your warts while repetitively flaunting your virtues.

For the better part of 20 years Tom Cruise's publicist successfully managed to build his sexy and mysterious brand.  Most importantly, she managed to hide the fact that Tom is one weird guy.  For whatever reason, Tom fired her and hired his sister to handle his publicity. Suddenly she had him jumping on couches, making intolerant remarks, and freaking everyone out with his Scientology dogma.  Her job was to hide that runaway ego because Tom really is a freak.  But word finally got out.  Tom Cruise is just one individual person and he wasn't able to hide.  Imagine how impossible it will be for an entire company with scores of employees, vendors, customers and observers.  Thanks to the blogosphere, all of them have a voice now. 

In the world of social media marketing, getting your own house in order is one of the most important things to do. It will not be enough to simply lock the gates and hope the hordes don't comment.  They have a voice now.  You can choose to manage it, or let them dictate your brand image without your input.  They are firmly in control. You are just one of the many voices in a battle for the mindshare of your own company’s image.

One of the organizations that has done an outstanding job with social media marketing is Sun Microsystems.  Sun's goal was to start an honest and constructive conversation amongst its customers, employees and vendors.  They achieved this by turning all these people into blogging machines.  It made it a prerogative that all employees would participate in company marketing through blogs.  This includes all the top managers at Sun who write and answer questions.  Sun has more than 2700 bloggers who have created the definitive discussion site for all things Sun.

These blogs tap into the community of developers who work with Sun products every single day. They know the product best and by enrolling them in the Sun developer blogs, they have become evangelists for the company.  What makes them so loyal is that Sun does an amazingly good job of listening. They want to hear about all the problems.  Then, the whole community works together to solve them.

Boeing is another great example of incredible social marketing.  Randy Baseler, a marketing officer for Boeing, publishes Randy's Journal, an authentic and passionate blog where he celebrates all things fascinating in the airline business. Last year, Airbus put out marketing claiming more head and seat room on their big planes.  On his blog, Randy offered schematics and definitively showed Boeing had more room.  Randy had been on both planes.  He had first-hand knowledge about the planes’ comfort.

Customer did not just blow off Randy as another company shill.  For years, he had been providing honest feedback about his own products and products from competitors. Despite his marketing title, Randy's blog had proven his integrity and demonstrated his genuine love for the industry.  Had Randy put this message into a print ad, no one would have believed it. All of us look at advertising with our guard up.  Randy's blog allowed him to make the case honestly and straightforwardly without the spin. Boeing scored a huge marketing win without spending a dime in advertising.

So how do you get safely started in the two-way conversation of social media marketing?  Unfortunately, most stations aren't ready to open the flood gates of viewer commenting on their sites.  Sure, we have a few very well controlled and managed commenting areas, but most TV web sites are pretty much a one-way communication systems.  We aren’t ready to hear all the feedback we get from our customers.

If commenting on your own site is not encouraged, then try your first run at social marketing on someone else's site.  Start small.  Participate in other local blogs. Launch a station YouTube, Facebook or MySpace page.  The goal here is not to set the marketing world on fire.  The first goal is to learn. You must crawl before you walk. 

In the TV world where traditional one-way advertising is the rule, changing your marketing paradigm to the two-way conversation model is going to take some practice.  Remember that social media results happen at a slower pace and in ways that most managers don't expect. By definition, it is viral marketing.  That means the marketing message will go places you could never anticipate. Controlling the message is a top priority in traditional advertising.  We buy ads in specific publications. We place media on specific channels. With social media your message will travel places you never dreamed it would go. This can be both exhilarating and incredibly frightening.

It is dangerous for marketing organizations to hide a company's personality from the public. The marketplace defines you now. The only question is whether you will try to mold and shape that vision before the marketplace does it for you. That means getting your values, your passions, and your foibles out to the community.  This is the only way you can hope to shape the conversation. So get in there, roll up your sleeves and give social media marketing a try.  Once you've figured out how the public really feels about your station, you'll be able to create and manage the conversation more effectively.

Graeme Newell is a broadcast and web marketing specialist.  His teasing seminars immediately increase audience retention.  He guarantees you will get an immediate ratings increase or his workshop is free.  Find out more here.