What Social Media Can and Can't Do by @davekerpen

Find New Customers is now a partner of Likeable Local and as a partner we got many great books from them, including Likeable Social Media - How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook (and other social networks) by @davekerpen (Follow him on Twitter.)

Fearless Competitor is the blog of the company Find New Customers and we have lots of great free content for you over there and we welcome your visit.

One of my favorite sections of this book is where Dave explains What Social Media Can and Can’t Do and I want to share that with you.

“Before we move on, I’d like to share three key points about social media to dispel any myths you may have heard and make sure i manage your expectations from the start.

Social media cannot make up for a bad product, company or organization. If you’re marketing a bad service or widget, not only will social media not help you, but it will actually hurt your cause, as word will spread quickly. The good news is, if you’re using social media well, you’ll quickly know when you have bad products, employees or processes. As a good businessperson or marketer, you can fix these problems before they cause any serious damage. (A good example of a bad organization is Business Objects where I grew GE by 242%. They were simple a “Purchase Order Extraction” company back then.)
Social media won’t lead to overnight sales success. Success will take time and will come in increased buzz, referrals, traffic, and eventually sales. I wish I could tell you that after you read this book you’ll have all the tools to instantly turn on the social media revenue engine and watch the money pour in. I can’t, of course. I’ll demonstrate the return on investment in “likeable social media” in lots of case studies, but no matter what, social media is not an instant win. We’re talking about building relationships with people, and that invariably takes time. (Amen, Dave. There are no magic bullets in the world.)
Social media is not free. It will take time and/or money to achieve sustained growth. Since it’s free to join Facebook and any social network worth talking about, many marketers think social media is free, or at least cheap. Well, the good news is, no matter how large your company is, it’s nearly impossible to spend the kind of money on social media that large companies regularly have spent on network television in the last twenty years. But building and executing a likeable business social media plan will take lots of time and work. Ultimately, such a plan can’t be the sole effort of any one marketing or public relations department but instead must be integrated across your entire company, its agencies, and vendors.

Let’s get Likeable and Find New Customers is proud to be a Likeable company. We’re doing a webinar with them later this month. Stay tuned.

Dave is a great writer, isn’t he? And he was a guest on Marketing Made Simple TV and he created some great promos for us, which I share below. It’s short, only 12 seconds, and worth a watch by you..