The story of social media is sexy from a marketer’s perspective. As traditional media fragmented and mass audiences scattered, along comes a new technology offering access to huge numbers and at a low cost. Companies were ready to hop in bed straight away as the opportunities became obvious: Crowdsourcing, free video distribution, product evaluation, coupon distribution, followers and friends, even the chance to be seen as ‘liked’ by millions.

More recently, the headlines have started to move on. Facebook and Twitter are old news and the social media elite are now talking about other socially-enhanced topics like business operations. Yet I don’t believe we’re far enough along yet to drop the topic of social media and marketing. Social media, it seems to me, is being held hostage by the past.

I am not a number, I am a free man.
Every marketer worth his/her weight will utter the words, “It’s all about the customer and solving the customer’s problem.” While it’s never occupied the proportion it deserves on the proverbial creative brief, the ‘Target Audience’ heading is omnipresent. Marketing and advertising – ever since their hands were forced by fragmenting media – have been trying to laser in on a customer-centric, target-marketing approach.

Ironically customer-centrism seems to take second seat in much of the dialog around social media.

Have you noticed that social media hype is always about numbers? Millions of views, tens of thousands of followers, memberships the size of nations? Is it me or do these all seem like old-school, mass media ways of thinking about this stuff? The equivalent of Super Bowl viewership stats for the 21st century. I have to ask myself, ‘If we all talk about it this way, are we collectively opting for a cognitive box from the mass media era?’ What would happen if size didn’t matter?  Or more importantly, when we strip out size, what are we left to work with?

Technology today has enabled people to fully customize their exposure to media and yet the marketing industry clings to the old discussions based on volume. One would expect as we transition into this brave new world, we’d let go of the traditional worth-as-measured-by-volume discourse. Have we?

Pedaling Influence.
To hear it sold, the value of social media is predicated on its ability to deliver access to communities. These communities are often self-organized thanks to social media tools. Each community has its own value system and world view which, according to the Marketing 101 noted above must be understood. Access to the broader membership of a community is granted through its leadership, often called ‘Influencers’ in the jargon. Someone with influence and respect within a community is in a position to impact that community’s opinion and behavior around a brand, product, cause, etc. Naturally, social media strategy then has much to do with engaging Influencers.

Identifying these Influencers can be tricky though. Many of the measurement tools I’ve worked with use traditional quantitative measures like number of posts, number of comments, number of inbound links, etc. All of these in various combinations might well point to influence however these measurement are most appropriate to bloggers and perhaps forums. Unfortunately, bloggers (and by this I mean those who tend to blogs followed by more than a handful of their family and friends) and heavy forum participants are a small proportion of the social media space that is advertised as beings hundreds of millions strong.

Most of the citizens of the social sphere belong to the networks like Facebook. Another sizable subset (with significant overlap) use popular tools like Twitter and increasingly Foursquare. These are the social media masses advertisers are promised access to. On the surface, these sites and tools are the new NBC’s of the world, the place where mass groups gather (even if now, they gather for very different reasons and sort themselves into millions of subset groups). My question is, do we as marketers know more about these people than we did about the TV viewer of the mass media world? I would say yes, we do, but not as much as is often advertised. For this reason, we should give pause to consider a few things. Let me explain:

For privacy reasons, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace are reluctant to grant automated systems access to user profile pages or information through their APIs. When these companies even hint at it, their memberships protest quite loudly. What they do offer is access to groups, fan pages, video pages (on MySpace) and the like. The trouble here is that these types of pages are notoriously static (fan it and forget it behaviors) and in addition these pages provide little information on the people who are associated with them (basically their name and anything these people post on the comment boards which in turn tends to be minimal, see ‘fan it and forget it’ above).

For tools like Twitter, profile information is by its nature shallow. In addition the posts are short, making evaluation difficult. Sentiment dictionaries, used by automated tools to guess at the overall positive or negative nature of a collection of words, are at best only ‘somewhat accurate’ owing to the complexities and ambiguity of so many words in our language. With only 140 characters to work with, determining sentiment is very difficult. To take sentiment numbers at face value can be very misleading. Add to this that being ‘the shit’ in some communities is good while in others its bad. Slang matters too.

The result in both these cases is that identifying influencers in social networks and Twitter-type tools through any sort of automated process is quite difficult to do and comes with a significant margin of error. This is through no lack of effort on behalf of the tool creators, its just that the really useful information is not being made available that way.

By way of example, if you wanted to find the opinion leaders of urban, inner city males aged 18-22 with an interest in video gaming, it would be impossible to do this through any of the automated tools. Yet this is precisely the type of target profile many brands (rightly) are building their marketing strategies around. A quick search for ‘urban youth’ on Facebook is disappointing. So too is a search on ‘video game fans’ which returns no shortage of groups (1900+) but their memberships are in the double-digits.

That leaves blogs and forums which are indeed good places to look for opinion leaders. Here the automated tools deliver even greater value. The nice part about blogs and forums is that they tend to be topical which means by tracking a specific URL you’re already honed in a little. On the downside, the reality is that consistent, steady bloggers and forum participants are a significant minority of the massive numbers sold as accessible through social media. The Internet, being a longtail technology, has millions of blogs but most only have a handful of followers. The number of mass blogs delivering access to large communities is a much smaller proportion. Again, those mass media expectations are inappropriate for social media.

In this way, all the talk of access to millions sounds a lot more cut and dry than it is if you’re trying to tie your market strategy down to a well-defined customer set.

Managing social media: Less money, more manpower.
Compared to traditional advertising which has for decades been trending more expensive and less effective, social media definitely costs less money. However, despite the advertising of access to hundreds of millions of people, its reach is not nearly as great as the old mass media used to be. This means reaching a large community meaningfully through social media will require an investment, even if its not as heavily on cash.

What a company will save in hard costs it will make up for in softer costs, namely people and processes. This is the part that’s often overlooked on proposals and strategic plans. Unlike advertising campaigns which have a beginning and an end and a media schedule and a concrete list of deliverables, social media outreach is an ongoing commitment that requires continual monitoring and manual intervention if its to be used well.

Making this commitment means installing processes for listening, filtering, responding, measuring, making sense of the measurements, acting on the outcomes of the measurement and finally keeping management in the loop. By corporate standards that’s a tall order and not an insignificant amount of work. Therefore that social media budget adds up in different ways.

Social media also sets up an expectation with customers. Like good advertising for a bad product, to tease interest and then disappoint can be a big misstep and do more harm than having not participated in social media at all.

Return on social media investment.
It is true, making social media work means identifying the influencers and engaging them. It also means having proper expectation about how great a group any one influencer will reach and how long it will take to propagate a message through a community. Despite the ‘instant success’ nature of public relations around social media, most initiatives take time to propagate across the Internet.

Today’s automated tools can only do half of the necessary work in managing a social media effort. In some ways, I would say they are even dangerous in the wrong hands. If you have an old-school mass-media mind, its easy to get all excited by a simple keyword search whereby your brand is mentioned thousands of times. On the surface this looks good right? But mentioned by whom? At what sentiment? Are the people talking about your brand the people you’re targeting with that customer-centric strategy you have? It’s tempting to say all chatter is good chatter and who cares who is talking as long as they are talking. This is a slippery slope. Talk to everyone in one voice and you talk to no one – that’s a lasting outcome of the decline of mass media. People expect to be addressed on their terms, not generic ones. In fact, we all tune out anything that doesn’t speak to us on our own terms. (Ask a 16 year old how many diaper ads they’ve seen vs. a new mother.)

So casting wide social media nets to accrue stacks of mentions in some aggregate score card might begin dumbing down your strategy, making it generic and eventually impotent. The numbers thrown around in social media presentations can easily lead one astray because, God love them, those big numbers feel like the security of the old mass media world we’ve been dragged away from kicking and screaming.

‘Socializing’ a brand means aligning it with a constituency.
To make social media work it needs to remain customer-centric – otherwise its noise and shallow tactics, neither of which offer enduring value. Companies need a concrete strategy based on constituency insights that go deeper than having a Twitter feed and being a Millennial. People don’t organize themselves that crudely online and neither should companies in their outreach strategies. This means acknowledging that the measurement tools of social media are an initial filter and that manual intervention by someone trained in the company strategy is required.

Those constituency insights become ever more important once you’ve identified a real influencer. Engaging that person, who is savvy and ahead of the curve by definition, will take some skill. It’s mandatory that what you’re offering is aligned with their own values and world view, otherwise they’ll pass. You have to know what makes them tick beyond just the fact that they use social media a lot and well.

What makes people tick is more anthropological and psychological than it is technological. Technology is a means to an end, not the end itself. Views on government and institutions (of which corporations are included), concepts of success, wealth and status, definitions of family and community… these are the real drivers that make influencers and by extension their communities act. Aligning with these drivers therefore is critical.

The social media measurement tools of today can bluntly separate wheat from chaff but they are not well set up to provide insight into the individuals within a community. For that, you need to begin with a deep investigation into the constituency you want to reach. You the must map your company’s vision and values to that constituency group and align your offer with their action drivers. Finally you have to investigate the people behind the numbers returned in your social media reports to ferret out the influencers. Done right, the power of social media to create preference in a grassroots, authentic way is unleashed.

Social media isn’t about access to 500 million people. That’s yesterday’s measure from yesterday’s dynamics. Social media today should be viewed as the conduit, a tool, used by people within their self-defined communities. From a marketers perspective it brings the added benefit of allowing us to catalog some of people’s behaviors and to find places where they organize around other like-minded people.

The word ‘media’ itself might even be part of the problem because it makes us think this is a marketing tool like TV, radio and print. It’s really not. It wasn’t created to be and despite ad units sold in the margins (with their abysmal click through rates), it still isn’t thought of that way by anyone but marketers. People don’t like being sold to as a rule of thumb.

This isn’t to say using social media as media doesn’t work. Companies have succeeded in using it for tried-and-true tactics like sampling, coupon distribution, sweepstakes, etc. How deep the relationship with the brand or company is because of this is suspect in my mind though. You may get my attention by offering me a sale but now we’re competing on price which is another slippery slope (and brutal on margins).

When the strategy changes to engaging a community its best to look less at the gross numbers spit out by systems measuring clicks and comments and to look instead at the behaviors of the people you want to reach and how they might be happening in social media. Then you can create an engagement that is about something more personal than winning a prize or getting 20% off.

The mass media age was about size and numbers. Today context is king.