Dermot McCormack is the executive vice president of digital media at MTV Music & Logo Group.
Many brands and companies are still struggling with how to develop a successful social media engagement model — one that goes beyond spitting out corporate messages and instead develops a two-way dialog with the audience.
Since MTV’s inception, we’ve been fully committed to providing the audience with a voice across all our screens. Like many big media companies and brands, we saw the potential power of social media and were quick to jump on the social bandwagon. While our numbers were high (this time last year, we had 1 million “Likes” on Facebook and 450,000 followers on Twitter), we saw the staggering number of followers and “Likes” that personalities like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber were grabbing and knew we still had a lot of work to do.
Over the course of last year, we completely overhauled our social strategy and, as a result, grew our followers across all platforms. It’s not easy. Actually, it’s downright hard, and requires investment in human and financial capital, as well as the support of a leadership team that’s willing to take risks and possibly fail. Here are a few of the lessons we learned this past year.
1. Get Organizational Buy-In and Investment.
This is by far the most important factor. Any company or big media brand looking to grow their social media reach must first get organizational buy-in and the capital needed to implement their strategy. There’s a common misconception that engaging fans and building communities via social media is cheap, or even free. It’s not.
At MTV, content is now created, products are developed, news is broken, shows are premiered and tentpole events are planned with platforms like Twitter and Facebook in mind. You can find a lot of blog posts on how to convince your C-level executives that social media is worthwhile. We don’t have that problem. Everyone at the company, CEO down, believes in the power of social media to impact and grow our audience. This has lead to investment, not just from a product standpoint (where it has been heavy, and has yielded products like our Twitter Tracker, Music Meter, numerous iPhone apps, etc.), but in manpower and tools. Participating in the pop culture conversation, all day, every day, is time and resource intensive. MTV has invested in human resources, and the social media management and listening tools necessary to continually optimize and measure its efforts to engage and grow our social community.
2. Develop an Intelligent and Flexible Organization Structure
Big companies oftentimes suffer from a silo effect where each department carves out its own territory and operates in its own bubble. Social media combines elements of existing groups — like marketing, content distribution, PR and press — and can greatly amplify the efforts of those groups. But we also recognize that social is more than that, and unique.
With this in mind, companies must create a flexible organizational structure that prevents the social media group from sitting squarely in any of those departments, but rather works closely with all of them. In our experience, this has empowered the social media team to stay true to its own unique strategic course and overall commitment to authenticity and community advocacy. While we’re always trying to figure out innovative and organic integrations for sponsors, we’ve found our approach ensures our tweets never become too corporate or commercial.
3. Diversify Content to Appeal to a Range of Interests
In day-to-day discourse, we chat with our family, friends and co-workers about myriad topics that reflect our wide array of interests. This also holds true in the social media space. If you’re looking to develop a longstanding dialog, you need to switch up the topics or the conversation will become stale and boring. As strange as this might sound, it’s okay not to keep the focus solely on your company and its products.
At MTV, we tweet a lot of our own content, but we also tweet funny things overheard in the office, content from other sources, and re-tweet and reply to fans. This can include retweeting a band (like New Kids on the Block announcing a show in Fenway Park), asking our fans to weigh in on various pop culture news (like the rumor that Robert Pattison will play Jeff Buckley), to congratulating our audience on their accomplishments (like doing well on a test or landing the lead in the school play) to offering words of condolence and encouragement after events like a breakup or the death of a pet.
4. Speak in an Authentic Voice
Social media is not a business press release and companies need to be constantly cognizant of having an authentic voice and not sounding like a corporate bot that’s devoid of any real emotion. In order to do this, companies must develop a voice that resonates with your audience. Tell stories, crack jokes, laugh at other people’s jokes, give words of encouragement, tweet at celebs you don’t really know, and most importantly, recognize and cheer on your followers. Aim to be human in the social space.
5. Listen and Take Notes
Companies who use social media to just push out marketing messages are sadly missing out on the opportunity to have a continual dialog with the consumer and get their thoughts on what they like (and more importantly don’t like) about your product offerings, as well as likes and dislikes that extend well outside of your company.
At MTV, we take the feedback (solicited and unsolicited) and feed it to multiple departments in order to drive change. We also make it a priority to respond. For example, one recent viewer tweeted that he wasn’t a fan of Jersey Shore. Instead of ignoring him, we thanked him for giving the show a chance and suggested he check out a different show instead. A few days later he responded that he loved the show and thanked us for recommending it.
We also regularly ask our audience to share with us on topics ranging from what band they’re loving right now to their thoughts on current issues. Understanding your audience’s values and opinions is an incredible asset that will help you hone every piece of content you produce.
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Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr, Felipe Bachomo.
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