Social Marketing Myths

I was chatting with a client last week and something he said really set me back. He is a marketing person at a family owned company and he was hoping to get a family member to be the face of the company so they could start doing social marketing. When I asked him why he needed this specific person, he replied that in order for the company to communicate "like a person", they actually needed a spokesperson, "a face" to do it.

This misconception reminded me of a recent blog post on Convince&Convert about dangerous fallacies of Social Media.

His six dangerous fallacies are:

1. Social Media is Inexpensive
2. Social Media is Fast
3. Social Media is “Viral Marketing”
4. Social Media results can’t be measured
5. Social Media is optional
6. Social media is hard

(Learn about all the dangerous fallacies here. It's a great and valuable read.)

So if I were to add my own dangerous fallacy it would be: You don't need a visible spokesperson - or one single person - for your company to act like a person - that's not what it is about.

This portion of the post post makes the point perfectly:

It’s about having a strategy for making your company or organization more like a person and less like a machine. It’s about humanization.

If your customers and prospects feel like your company is more human and actually cares about them, they’ll want to be part of it.