You Need a Media Strategy Not a Social Strategy

So much is written about social media strategies, but in reality you need a media strategy not a social strategy.  We are a decade into a rapidly maturing social web.  New mobile based apps seem to spring up every couple of years to capture the next
emerging demographic of teens moving into adulthood.  Consumer businesses are satisfied to merely broadcast over these new channels, forgoing what is supposedly social, and business to business companies are frequently left flummoxed over which channels they should be paying attention to and how they should be leveraging each. 

The confusion and frustration is understandable, especially when you consider the amount of effort required to make social media work for a company.  A task compounded by what could go wrong.  But to better understand that we should be seeking a focused media strategy and not necessarily a social strategy we must pay attention to the use of these channels, and how they are maturing. 

Consider, for instance, that the active demographic of Facebook users over the age of 34 is 38%, higher then both the 18 to 24 demographic (33%) and the 25 to 34 demographic (30%).  For business to business applications this is an opportunity as our customers are more likely to be scrolling through their news feed today than they were just five short years ago. 

If we consider Snapchat, on the other hand, 71% are under the age 35, and nearly 85% are under the age of 44.   But it is also important to understand where snapchat is headed.  Nearly everything they do to the app is in some way connected to their ad platform.  This matters because people tend to stick with the media platform they grew up on.  So in five to ten years the young twenty somethings will be taking their Snaps with them into management. 

It is, for business to business sales and marketing professionals, critical to understand the way media is working today and how it is being consumed.  The social element of communication is important, but the engagement tends to be more of a natural skill set for sales and marketing.  What can be foreign to them is managing their efforts across an array of publishing alternatives.  And this is the task before them.  To not only decide where to be, but how to communicate over each channel, when to do so organically, how to inject advertisement spending into the mix, how to spread that advertising budget around, and how to select the right priorities.

It can be daunting, and what many companies do is simply decide not to play at all. Or redirect their efforts to something small and easily measured.  For instance I know of one company that invested all of their efforts inflating their profiles on review sites such as Glassdoor.  They were content to do so, it had a positive effect on the employment brand as it was reflected on Glassdoor, but it was neither social nor media.  I would argue they completely missed the point, and traded in genuine organic influence for gaming a system that is easily gamed.

So how do we develop a media strategy?  By understanding first and foremost how we need to be communicating to our marketplace in the context of how they arrive at their buying decisions.  Not in a sterile marketing funnel or stales stage approach, but in an intimate people really do matter approach that challenges your audience to think differently.  This should guide us as we are creating our go to market strategies, and it should serve to help us navigate to that very personal buying process that is owned not at all by our company but by our customers. 

With these details sorted out the decision to publish becomes easier because the narrative and the story that will move our customers to action becomes centric.  The distribution becomes not a strategy at all but a delivery tactic.