Our Social Media Day event at Zsofi in the evening was great fun, and a chance to meet some great new people as well as catch up with old friends and to also meet some more virtual acquaintances in the flesh for the first time.

Something kept getting said on that day and it was this: people kept talking about Social Media strategy as a ‘resource’ – as a person. They were implying, I think, that one view of what constitutes a Social Media strategy is having a person sit all day on Twitter or Facebook responding to people’s complaints or questions.

And, indeed, for some brands in Singapore and elsewhere, it appears that their doing exactly this seems to be a large component, if not the entirety, of their strategy.

This doesn’t feel like a strategy to me. In fact, what it looks like is the kind of conversations usually reserved for Customer Support Staff (probably on the phone or via some support email address) happening on a Facebook page or via a Twitter conversation.

I should point out, however, that being responsive to a customer’s query on Facebook or Twitter is, I think, at least for now, a necessary component of being in the space. I hasten to call it a component of the strategy per se because responding to customers’ queries does not feel strategic to me – it feels just like something we should do anyway.

I’m not going to dwell on how brands will need to deal with this obligation at the moment. It feels like a bit of a problem and I’m not sure how it will resolve itself.

At the moment, opening your brand up on Facebook leads, in some cases, to a lot of niggly little conversations happening. A typical exchange I see (on a brand fan page) opens with the brand saying ‘Hi’ to all its Facebook page fans and then the announcement of the day’s special offer. There will then be a bunch of comments about the offer interspersed with complaints and moaning.

So, what the visitors to that brand fan page are actually seeing is some essentially one-way brand marketing communications followed by publicly visible customer service issue conversations. All in all, pretty dull, uninspiring and boring.

There’s an inevitability to having to respond to queries as I said, but the sooner we don’t all have to look at it, the better. I put it down, in part, to the ‘brands on Facebook’ still being a model in its infancy. I have my own ideas about how this could be managed but that’s for another time. Back to strategy.

Putting a product offer on Facebook that you may have put in the newspaper a couple of years ago isn’t good Social Media Strategy. There’s some immediacy to be gained from it, I suppose, and there’s no doubting that your target audience is probably hanging out on Facebook. But re-purposing collateral and messaging for another medium without looking at and embracing the nuances and opportunities offered by that new medium is rarely compelling for the customer.

Social media is about people coming together around your brand – it’s about a shared experience, about storytelling and, ideally, about content creation and sharing. One-way brand messaging and planning to administer your dirty laundry in the open won’t get you where you think you might want to go.

Integrating the unique collaborative and shared experience of what social media offers and integrating this with an event, a competition or another (more traditional) component of your marketing and branding strategy whilst facilitating brand advocacy might just.

Featured image credit (one way): Ockra/iStock