What’s worse than a community slating a brand? Being ignored by them maybe?

One of the first questions we need to always ask ourselves before planning a social media campaign is:

"Who do we want to reach and what's in it for them?”

One of the mistakes that many marketing-types make is creating Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, applications, forums, the list goes on, of mindless ‘stuff’ that does not engage with the community and offers no incentive for users to participate – the pages end up being yet another shop front like a 48 or press ad.

Not that there is anything wrong with 48's and press ad's but when you have the chance of doing so much more why not, errr, do some much more?

First and foremost, social media sites are about community and while everyone is jumping around waving their arms waiting to be noticed, it never occurs to them that the first way to get into a group is to get to know people, then ask permission – treat it like a drinkers pub. You wouldn’t run in there shouting ‘look at me, look at me’ because you would get punched and thrown out. Why do it in a social media community?

We all need to remember that the true power of social media lies in the peer-to-peer activity. People will pass on links and applications to people within their group that share their interest if they are relevant and helpful.

So, understanding who actually gives a toss about what you have to say or sell is key to any campaign. If you ignore personalisation I will never forgive you.

Finally, we must be prepared to not only push out a campaign and hope (and pray!) that the users will drive its success; we must be willing and ready to participate – it has to be a two-way street. Engagement with the community will send the message that not only have we taken the trouble to get to know the groups interests, we also want to stick around, be helpful and authentic (not transparent, that’s for accountants) and therefore we want to gain their trust. We’ll probably get it too.

An undervalued element in social media is trust.

Many brands try to coax users away from their community and push them toward external brand sites, and measure the success of a campaign on whether or not users leave the community and push up the traffic numbers on corporate sites.

A bolder tactic is to stay within the community and engage where users feel more comfortable, thus establishing trust.

As highlighted by Forrester Research recently, this is a tactic employed by Intel with great success. Marketing manager David Veneski made the gutsy move of not linking back to the Intel corporate site through his social marketing efforts, in an attempt to actively join a community and get them to engage with the brand on their own turf.

So, what is a good social media marketing strategy?

It’s remembering that people are only consumers when they’re consuming, that true communication is a two way street and that social media as the name implies is first and foremost about individuals using technology to communicate with other groups of individuals who share a common interest.

If we want to be involved, we need an invitation first and we’re only going to get one if we stop treating people like figures in a segment.

Demographics in this arena are talked about as being meaningless so only when we get that idea and understand will people open the door and let us join the party.