Why and how to raze and rebuild your social media strategy

There are times you simply have to destroy what exists and replace it with something better. Such is the case with social media.

The past seven years have been so full of mistaken beliefs, poor assumptions and outright misinformation that the time has come to reassess completely what social media is, how it works, how consumers use it and what it means for brands.

Much of the social media dogma we take as gospel has been wrong from the start. As a result, brands are wasting good money to chase irrelevant or even damaging social media outcomes, and the required improvements are not minor adjustments. In many cases, the wrong departments have hired the wrong people to do the wrong things evaluated with the wrong measures.

The key to success is to stop most of what today passes for social media strategy and rebuild social media plans from the ground up.

Here’s what you need to know to conduct social media marketing properly:

1. Create and measure a new definition of word-of-mouth.

An individual who recommends your brand based on actual experience is gold; a customer who clicks the “heart” button on a pretty photo posted by your brand isn’t even tin.