the most important part of your social media strategy

james, I think your cover's blown

Social Media as a communication platform for businesses is only good for one thing: getting people to spread the word about your product, service, or program… without asking or paying them to do so.

Why would they do that? Because your product, service, or program is remarkable.

If it isn’t remarkable, then you may as well spend thousands of dollars on ads designed to trick people into thinking it is, like in the old days. Social Media will do you no good at all. I’m sorry if this sounds a bit harsh, but the only way to use Social Media successfully is to let it do most of the work for you. And the only way it will do that is if it has a good reason to.

But how do you know if what you are selling or providing is remarkable? In some cases it is easy to tell. Does it revolutionize a familiar process? Does it solve a prevalent problem? Is it better than the other options?

In other cases, “remarkability” may be in the details. In Tara Hunt’s excellent book The Whuffie Factor, she outlines numerous case studies of social media strategies (or anti-strategies) that work, as well as those that don’t. Moleskine notebooks are just notebooks, but the subtle details turn their customers into fans, and as Hunt outlines, they have engaged with these fans to increase their social currency online. But they were remarkable first.

Walmart, on the other hand, tried to use social media like traditional disingenous advertising. They created fake online personas for made-up young people who wrote about their awesome new school clothes (uh, yeah, right). And before long they had created exactly the opposite effect of what they were aiming for. Social media worked against them, because they did it wrong.

I have a lot of followers on twitter who are promoting themselves or their products, but I seldom add them to my feed. The ones I do add are the ones who are remarkable. Not only are they funny and interesting in their own right, but their product or service or program is something I could get behind.

If you don’t have something that people can get behind, then do you really have a viable and valuable offering? In these shifting economic times that is a key question for your business strategy, not merely your social media strategy. Do something worth talking about, and everyone wins.