When it comes to social-media approaches, you name it and I’ve done it: Spray-and-pray, retweet-and-refer, the Streetcar Named Desire approach, conversational, confrontational, paid, unpaid, video-centered, visual-heavy, wordplay-based, conservative, very conservative, very, very conservative, and invisible. I’ve taught all these approaches, too, plus a few others.

Unfortunately, social media has changed significantly over the last several years, and many approaches – including some of the approaches you’re taking, no doubt – don’t work as well as they used to.

As the year ends and a new year nears, it’s a good time to examine your core social-media approach and see if it still fits your organization.

Do you even need social media?

It’s a fair question. Two years ago, I’d have said any organization would be crazy for eschewing social media. Now, with certain organizations under certain circumstances, I could make a definite case for walking away.

The problem isn’t you. It’s the channels.

Paid Facebook is a swampy mush of spam, unless you don’t care about meaningful metrics, in which case, by all means. Be my guest.
Unpaid Facebook is a problem for brands because Facebook doesn’t want you intruding on people’s endless feeds of dog pictures, political cartoons, and inspirational messages.
Twitter has folded in on itself. If you want to reach people who are on Twitter, Twitter is the place to do it, but so what?
Instagram is great if you have a highly visual brand; if you don’t, you’ll spend all your time on Instagram trying to convince people you have a highly visual brand, and generally failing.
Ditto Pinterest.
LinkedIn is becoming an SFW Facebook, for better and worse.

If your brand decides it wants to avoid all that, I get it.

Social media is in its awkward tween years. It’s okay to leave it alone and let it mature for a couple of years before returning.

But what if you have to do social media?

You might get that social media has become socially awkward media, but your organization might not. And didn’t you just spend the last five years convincing your organization it needs to do social media?

Plus there are the higher-ups, the change-resistant ones and the self-taught marketers who say things like, “But don’t you know? Social media makes brands.”

You can argue with these people; you can even ask them to name a brand that social media “made.”

(Responses to that question are almost always wrong. You’ll hear Apple, Zappos, Red Bull, maybe something like KFC, but Zappos was made through customer service and the others were made through humungous marketing and advertising budgets with a relatively small amount of social.)

Unfortunately, you’re probably going to lose these arguments, and you’ll be back doing social media, trying to come up with a strategy that works for your organization.

If you’re tasked with doing social media despite your well-placed reluctance, here are some approaches you can take that are actually good for your organization.

Do no harm

Few people approach social media from this perspective. More people should.

When I launched Delta Dental of Wisconsin’s social-media program, my initial goals were to A) not waste anyone’s time and B) do no harm.

That’s a little counter-intuitive, since time-wasting is one of social media’s chief goals, but I figured anyone looking to waste time on social media is not looking to waste time with a dental-insurance company.

Also, since I knew from research that Delta Dental of Wisconsin had a strong brand perception as an expert in dental benefits and oral health, it made sense to only participate in social media to the extent that we could reinforce those perceptions.

The result? Delta Dental failed to socially observe Halloween, Independence Day, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Veterans’ Day, Flag Day, Groundhog Day, and Pi Day. However, we did post when we gave money to fund non-profit dental clinics, or when an oral-health breakthrough was announced.

Sure, we probably failed to influence a couple of influencers, but they weren’t going to be bothering with dental insurance anyway. And in the end we built a following, created a platform for a more ambitious campaign if we ever thought we needed one, and stayed true to our brand.

There are many, many outcomes worse than that – especially in social media.

Leverage existing assets

It’s foolish to spend a lot of time and resources creating assets specifically for social media. Especially with video, it makes much more sense to create multi-purpose-built assets.

However, you need to take this approach right from the start. In your initial sessions with your writers, your graphics team, and your in-house videographer (or a sharp outside firm, like Thousand Lumens Productions), design and build and script your assets so they can live on your website, be cut into pieces for social sharing, be used for training, be emailed to customers, or be linked to in a newsletter. Make tentative cuts and reworks with your drafts and storyboards, just to see how they might go.

And by all means demand this of an outside agency.

By creating videos, infographics, imagery, web copy, and more that can be used and reused and shared via social media, you’re hedging your bets while giving these channels the easily digestible and sharable content they require.

Tell stories

I’m a Don Quixote, I admit. I throw up a lot of content without really caring if thousands of people read it, because these things need to be said and these stories need to be told.

Social media has more than a touch of the quixotic about it. It’s a storytelling medium, but to commit to it as such means a brand has to be truly dedicated to telling stories, and equally ready to accept the possibility that few people want to hear its stories.

Finding and telling the stories in an organization can be revelatory, a process that can define and heal and celebrate. If an organization can appreciate those end results at least as much as it appreciates likes and shares, it should absolutely use social media as a storytelling platform.

On the other hand, if an organization has the idea that storytelling via social media is the shortest distance between a customer and a sale, they need to realize that this ain’t the Field of Dreams School of Marketing. If you build it they may not come, and you need to be okay with that.

Here’s a great rule of thumb for tempering expectations of social media as a storytelling vehicle: If you wouldn’t expect a certain outcome out of a press release, you can’t expect it out of social media. It rarely works that way.

Early on, people thought social media could work miracles; for a little sweat equity, social could lift your brand into the rarefied air breathed by Nike and Coke and the rest of the world’s great corporate names.

We know better now. Now social media is just another hammer in the toolbox – but if the whole world looks like a nail, that’s on you.

Social-Media Reality Check: Calling It A Day On Spray-And-Pray (Part 1)