Worst-Ever Social Media Advice....

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Permalink Reply by Jeffrey J Kingman on October 25, 2011 at 10:56am

Ha. 

 

Erik Qualmann (bless his heart) made the statement in his video "What's the ROI of your phone?" without explaining how to calculate the ROI of social media. In other words, it was "trust me on this". One observation.

 

I often see so-called social media "professionals" that come to the table with no engagement strategy (for restaurants). They tell the operator they'll setup a Fanpage and a Twitter account and post out the specials. 

 

As you know, it goes much deeper than that. Like in political campaigns, brands must identify influencers, the people who can be targeted as brand loyalty conversions (if they aren't loyal already), build relationship with them through dialogue and creative content production.

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Permalink Reply by Michael Minichello on October 25, 2011 at 11:01am

Although I am usually the one trying to convince the "nay sayers". I was once attending a seminar on social media where a marketing firm (who will remain nameless to protect the clueless) gave out this advice. "If the comment is too negative just ignore it and hope they go away" "You don't need to talk to everybody" As I said before "clueless" isn't the idea to talk to everybody and that is how you turn a negative into a positve. I would say that has to be the worst. Even more surprising, the company continues to do seminars.  

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Permalink Reply by Jill McFarland on October 25, 2011 at 11:20am

In the earlier days many people advised to keep personal and professional accounts/interactions separate.  I love Jason Seiden's use of the term "profersonal".  I myself was a bit uncomfortable letting clients in on my personal life at first but my relationships with past, present and future clients became much stronger when I became profersonal.  When I consult with clients I encourage them to do the same with their audience.

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Permalink Reply by Lane A. McFarland on October 25, 2011 at 11:41am

The worst advice i ever received was from a "Marketing Manager" from one of the top food suppliers in the East. She recommended i run a contest for whoever can post the most pictures of themselves at my bar on facebook. Thinking, "well this seems like it will give us some good placement", I went along with it. Much to my surprise, the final day of the contest, a bachelorette party came in a few hours before close. Accepting their very good behavior as not detrimental to my family friendly restaurant and bar, i accepted it as business. Well, two days later the pictures emerged on facebook, with the restaurant tagged in every photo. Lucky for me 90% of them were taken in the bathroom and when the bartender and i turned our backs. Nude, obsene, derogatory, and just plain disgusting pictures were featured all over our page, and ofcourse facebook being what it is, every one of our friends saw them. Well the marketing manager said, and i quote "Keep them up. Any publicity is good publicity". I was smart enough to know this was a terrible idea considering most of our customers are either families, or people over the age of 30 into their late 80's. Lucky enough we did not suffer any bad outcomes, but i will never take her advice ever again.

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Permalink Reply by Bill Campion on October 25, 2011 at 12:08pm

Hire an intern to do your social media

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Permalink Reply by Tracy Spears on October 25, 2011 at 1:51pm

In the very begining, it was suggested to me to put privacy controls on Twitter to filter who I would allow to follow me.  Not only was it very time consuming to have to approve each request, but it also limited who I could engage with.  While it is scary to put yourself out there without those controls, I would have missed out on many very valuable relationships that have been created in Social Media and even met IRL.

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Permalink Reply by Norm Elias on November 4, 2011 at 10:06am

HAHA, Hire an Intern! Thats funny. On a side note, the worst social marketing in today's fast paced society is not socializing at all! That is a very general statement, but what good does your business do if you have an amazing product and no-one knows about it! DEATH! I believe all types of marketing avenues are beneficial, even if your business workers are horrible, they are still making your firm known to the public. If I could pick the worst piece of advice, it would be Facebook social media marketing.

Norm

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Permalink Reply by Paul Paz on November 26, 2011 at 2:04am

Some good stuff here!  :-)  "What not to do."

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