That said, WOMMA remains a leader
in the social media space, providing
education, best practices and ethical
guidelines to organizations that want to
play in the social networking sandbox.
For associations that want to launch
a social media marketing campaign to
reach members and prospects, it offers
the following tips, tricks and tactics:
Start;a;Conversation
If an association wants to launch a
social media campaign, Smith suggests
starting with an old-fashioned face-to-face conversation. Call a staff meeting
and talk first about expectations, then
about strategy.
“At the onset of engaging a chan-
nel or multiple channels, what do you
expect to get from it?” Smith asks.
“Whether you want more people to
become a fan, you want more follow-
ers on Twitter or you want to increase
conference attendance, you have to set
some basic expectations.”
One major obstacle to setting expec-
tations is that social media often leads
to the unexpected. While giving up
control frightens most associations,
WOMMA is very comfortable with the
feeling. According to Smith, social
media is based on a consumer’s authen-
tic response, which means the outcome
is unpredictable. Yet she recognizes
that control is a fundamental premise of
many marketing campaigns.
“I think the intricacy of all this is
that when a brand purchases a tradi-
tional paid ad, they know where it’s
going, they know when it’s going to
appear and they have a general idea
of what the expected results will be,”
Smith says. “[With social media,] the
consumer is in control.”
While social media may turn many
traditional marketing strategies on their
heads, it also opens opportunities for
creativity and consumer-brand interac-
tion. For example, Smith cites Zappos
as a leader in the for-profit space.
“Their business model is based on the
customer and they have been extremely
successful,” she says.
Be;Responsible
Most associations have already realized that social media is a club
they must join. But just joining isn’t
enough, according to Smith, who says
associations also must abide by the
club charter, which is based on the
same principle on which WOMMA was
founded: ethics.
“They get out there on Facebook and
have people responding on behalf of the
president, when it’s not the president,
and then somebody calls them out,”
Smith says of companies who fail to
abide by social media ethics.
Empower;Employees
When it comes to implementing social
media marketing campaigns, associations are slightly different because
“social media crosses over from marketing to membership,” Smith says.
In the area of staffing, this poses an
interesting problem. “At WOMMA, we
have a community manager that kind of
goes to both sections of marketing and
membership,” Smith continues. “He
recognizes how the outreach he does
via social media channels ties back to
membership.”
Although she realizes that not all
staffs are structured to allow for such
overlap, Smith nonetheless advises cog-
nizance of the crossover from marketing
to membership in a social media strat-
egy. “Do you want your internal team
out on social media channels?” she
asks. “And if you do, who do you want
out there and what do you want them
posting?”
Ethics: Best Practices
According to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, honesty and transparency are critical to all social media marketing plans. To learn more about
disclosure in social media, visit www.womma.org/ethics for a complimentary
guide that walks organizations through best practices in complying with Federal Trade Commission guidelines.
