Social-Media Myths: Busted

Dachis Group chief strategy officer Peter Kim in 2006.

Image: hyku on Flickr

There’s a lot of information out there about the best way to use social media to boost your business. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of myths.

At New York’s Web 2.0 Expo this afternoon, Dachis Group chief strategy officer Peter Kim went about busting some of those myths. Here’s a quick roundup of what he had to say:

• Myth: It’s OK to fail, as long as you fail fast: Netflix’s Qwikster debacle cost it dearly, but it could have been much worse if it hadn’t dropped the idea so quickly, right? Wrong. It wouldn’t have lost anything, be it market cap or consumer respect, if it hadn’t done it in the first place. “Don’t fail fast, be strategic,” Kim says. In other words, if you rely on being able to fail fast, it means you don’t have a clear strategy to begin with. Which is not really a good thing. Instead, have a clear company culture with standard protocol and the right people in the right jobs.

• Myth: Consumers are in control: Kim gave the example of the Austin Solid Waste Service running a competition to decide a new name. The winner of the popular vote by a significant margin was “Fred Durst Society for the Humanities and Arts.” A few months later they quietly changed the name to Austin Resource Recovery. Marketers still have control, he says, and they have more control than they let on.

• Myth: You don’t need a social-media strategy: Wendy’s attempt to breathe digital life into their “where’s the beef” ad by using a promoted trend ended with a bunch of rude jokes. Having a social-media strategy and thinking ahead can help you avoid a similar mess. Both Twitter and Facebook are too big now for you to not have a coherent strategy that also ties in with a wider advertising plan. And, importantly, promoted tweets are not spurring mass unfollowing, and instead reach engagement rates of between 3 and 5 percent—much more effective than normal Web advertising.

So there you have it. Social-media myths: busted.

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