How do I persuade my Board and CEO to embrace social media?

Sit them down with a cup of coffee and play them the video ‘The Social Media Revolution’.

If this doesn’t convince them, then there are a number of ways you can approach this. It’s about putting their minds at ease, explaining why social media is important, and giving them tangible examples of how social media can have a positive impact.

It is your job to spend some time persuasively documenting how it will work, who and how many people it is likely to reach, what your targets would be, how it fits in with your marketing objectives, how you will manage it efficiently, and what the policies will be.

I find that the objections and fears follow similar themes. Here are some common ones and suggested responses from me.

"We’re opening ourselves up to negative feedback"

The people providing saying negative things about you are doing it anyway. By allowing them this expression on social media, you can hear what they are saying and have the opportunity to respond in a positive way. If you do social media well, you will build a supportive community over time. It is well-documented that if an unreasonable person says something extremely negative in an online community, others will step in to support you. People, particularly the younger generations, no longer accept being “talked at” by organisations or advertisers. They also no longer expect them to be perfect, as long as they are honest and responsive. Keep it real and embrace the negative feedback. Which, by the way, in my experience is very infrequent.

"I don’t believe in social networking – people should communicate face to face"

This one I strike quite frequently. The General Manager or Marketing Manager doesn’t use, or believe in, online social networking, so therefore in their eyes their organisation shouldn’t use it.  To me this is getting it all wrong. Are we not supposed to be putting ourselves in the shoes of our target audiences and delivering relevant messages to them in a way that works for them? My favourite answer to this one is “your target audiences are there (on Facebook, Bebo, Twitter etc) several times a day reading updates and forwarding interesting things to their friends. Wouldn’t we want to be there too?”

"We don’t have the resources"

Sooner or later, we are going to have to wake up to the fact that ploughing resources into designing beautiful posters and billboards, and producing endless copies of expensive high-quality subscription brochures, is ceasing to become the most effective use of our budget and staff resource. The very fact that we are starting to see specific job titles of ‘Social Media Manager” or “Social Media Specialist” advertised here and in Australia shows the early adopters recognising the importance and value of investing resource in this area. Streamline your resources and plan ahead, and you will find that the investment can start out in a very minimal way. An existing staff member in a relevant area (comms, marketing, online) can add this into their role and possibly consider spending less time on something that is not providing return on investment. If you look at the stats, vast tracts of our up-and-coming audiences are using social media as a key tool in their daily lives. They’re not reading newspapers, watching TV commercials or receiving direct mail. Why would we not invest in this?

I’d better stop before I get too impassioned! For more of my views on social media, you can read my blog post about it on NZLive.com.

I need to acknowledge my colleague Josie Campbell, Communications Manager at THE EDGE who has done a superb job of integrating our social media sites into her daily work and our organisation’s marketing. And who has made it very clear to me in a tangible way that this is a crucial and manageable element of an arts organisation’s strategy.

Please do share your stories - what objections have you come up against and how have you overcome them? Anyone have some really persuasive evidence to share?

Vicki Allpress Hill Connecting audiences to the arts va@vickiallpress.com

Hi Jackie

Thanks for sharing the Obama example. Observing how he used social media was an incredible experience. It is definitely an example we can apply to the arts.

You all might be interested to view a presentation by a guy called Igor Beuker who spoke at the SRM Guru meeting in Amsterdam last February about the case study of Barack Obama’s brand interaction and consumer connectivity program.

A couple of lines I really love out of it:

"Consumers have so many options. They have first learned to trust each other."

"Powered by the web, not advertised on it"

Some salient messages for us!

You can view the full presentation here - you just flick through the slides using the arrows.

Vicki

Vicki Allpress Hill Connecting audiences to the arts va@vickiallpress.com

When conversing with your organisation's Board about any new marketing activity it is best to back up your decision with some statistical analysis. As with any campaign it is important to remove as much as the guesswork as possible so before you select a marketing channel you need to research your target audience to find out what channels they are likely to view (be it print media, TV, radio, web or social media).

Ask yourself some questions... Is your product (performance, show, etc) relevant to the users of the marketing channel you're going to adopt. Even the different social media networks have different target audiences, so make sure that whichever one you're using is targeting the kind of people you product is aimed at. If strategically your organsation is seeking new audience that your research shows use social media, and you have a product that is relevant and attractive to that audience, you should have more than enough tools to persaude your Board.

I agree with Vicki that social media is already hugely important to the way we communicate with our audience but it's still very important to understand the types of people we are communicating with, and conversely the types of people we miss out on, marketing in this way; so that we ensure the message we are communicating is the right one. It's easy to think "there aren't enough 25-30 year-olds at this show" but is the reason because you didn't Tweet about it or because the way the show was presented was not relevant to that demographic?

If our message is inappropriate to the audience we're targeting, it doesn't matter if we Tweet every 10 seconds or have 10,000 fans on Facebook or MySpace, we still won't engage new people. Somewhere in my brain dump there is a message to say that your Board will embrace any marketing initiative if you can show evidence that it will target the right audience for your show/performance/exhibition. The danger is that if you don't consider the needs of the audience you target through social media you may offer them things that are not relevant to them and risk alienating them or worse you get consigned to their spammer list!

Yes, I totally agree with both Vicki and Jooles that we shouldn't engage with social media just because we can - it has to be meaningful, relevant and targeted and we have to be able to measure it.

One organisation (not an arts one) that was an early adopter of Twitter, got hounded for being too boring! So you really have to know your audience and what interests them.