Social media mindset 2

Hi. My name is Julie Atherton. I'm the founder of the social media advisory and marketing consultancy, Small Wonder. I also write books on social media strategy and social media marketing. Today, we're going to talk about the social media mindset, Part Two.

In Part One of social media mindset, we talked about the organisational structure for social media. Today, we're going to talk about the culture, and particularly, we're going to talk about AI and risk. The type of organisational structure adopted will often depend on the size of your organisation and the budgets available. However, the culture of the organisation will also have an impact. How closely do you want to control social activity from a central source? How flexible do you want that social media activity to be? And how quickly do you want it to respond and be attuned to local markets and changing conditions? These decisions will affect the choice of organisational structure. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Let's talk about the culture in a bit more detail. Social media marketing is unique when we compare it to other types of marketing activities. When we're communicating through social media channels, we are in a dialogue environment with our followers and community. That means that they have the opportunity to respond, comment, and influence the type of content that's being shared about our brand across those channels. The culture of our organisation will change the way that we operate within those channels, and how open the brand is to involving its community, its followers, customers, etc., in that conversation in an open way. One of the ways to think about this culture is to think about it in terms of relationship theory. Co-dependency. Co-dependent relationships are controlling. They have an imbalance of power, and they are averse to change and reluctant to trust each other. If we think about this in terms of the way brands behave in social media, brands that are highly controlled on social media will not allow influencers, for example, to post without approving the content that's going out from them and take most of the conversations that they have offline, perhaps even closing down messaging and response to messages on their channels, will be able to tell their followers exactly what they want to say, and share their thoughts on social media, but will not be open to wider discussions and encourage things like user-generated content and interaction on their posts and in their communities. Brands which have much more interdependent relationships with their communities, which are positive relationships involving active listening and clear communication, and being open and approachable to conversations, whether those are positive or negative about the brand, have a much more open relationship with their followers. They're also not afraid to stand up and say what they believe. If something was happening in the wider community that they didn't think aligned with their values, they would stand up and be counted for this. Think about when Nike supported Colin Kaepernick taking the knee. That was a really strong stand by the brand that its community accepted, believed in, and responded positively to. They could have just ignored it, or they could have stopped supporting him as an influencer and brand ambassador. When we're thinking about success in social media, the higher that interdependent relationship is between a brand and its community, the more successful it will be in using social media channels actively. However, many organizations, particularly those in restrictive areas, such as gambling, alcohol, and financial services, find it difficult to allow those interdependent relationships and, perhaps, will operate behaviours much more close to co-dependency.