I was tagged recently by SuzeMuse for a meme started by Mitch Joel. I noticed the folks over at Inside PR also got in on the action, as well as number of other podcasters and bloggers.
The meme in question is “share your social media marketing best practice.” Mitch is apparently compiling these into a master list that will ultimately be shared on his blog.
Okay, so, here’s my little rant on this…
I really don’t like the term “best practices.” Working in marketing as I do, I find it is one of the many buzz terms I and others use regularly, and I find increasingly that the idea of best practices is irrelevant, and perhaps even dangerous. While best practices can be bad on many fronts, because the focus of Mitch’s original ask was this social media marketing best practices project, I’m going to focus on that in explaining my position:
- CONTEXT — Things that are called best practices often don’t have appropriate context. One of the best practices shared on Inside PR for this meme was “timeliness” — that is, reacting to things in a timely fashion. They give the example of a post on a McDonald’s blog that was left to languish over a weekend, and generated a lot of negative discussion because it appeared McDonald’s was censoring the comments that were critical of them, when in truth they just hadn’t got around to approving those comments because, well, it was the weekend. Great example — IF you’re a big multinational corporation that already tends to be a lightning rod for negative opinion, and you post something on your corporate responsibilities blog that some folks might take offense to. A little while back on the One Degree blog, I talked about a somewhat similar situation where NOT responding immediately to negative criticism ended up serving as the better solution IF you have a community who might come to your defense. So what’s the best practice — answering as quickly as possible, or waiting to see if your community will defend you? Depends on the context.
- CHANGES — Best practices change, even in established arenas. At Podcasters Across Borders this summer, I talked about an old radio “best practice” that was still being taught in the 90s when I studied broadcasting — never play two female music artists back-to-back. This was a real rule in the old days of radio when there were relatively few women cutting records, but is clearly ridiculous now that there are so many different wonderful female artists to choose from. In the world of new media and social media where things are changing so quickly, the established rules can get equally ridiculous within months, sometimes even days. A great example of this is Facebook. Our agency 58Ninety does a lot of work with clients using Facebook, and sometimes we are asked about best practices around use of their features and ad units. Unfortunately, these things change so quickly that it is almost impossible to provide any sort of guidelines that will be relevant by the time the client gets around to their next execution. Luckily, they have a smart digital agency keeping track of these changes!
- PRIORITIES, GOALS AND RESOURCES — A social media best practice often takes the form of a particular tactic. SuzeMuse lists “comment on other people’s blogs” as a best practice. Nice idea, but what’s the relative importance of this vs. for example starting your own blog? Should you start your own blog first, and then start commenting as a way to generate links back to your blog, or should you start commenting early and then start your blog later once some people know about you? It depends on your priorities, goals and resources. In fact, perhaps it’s better for you to concentrate solely on your own blog as a way of communicating with your stakeholders, and perhaps commenting would just take time away from providing value through doing more posting on your own blog. So is commenting a best practice for YOU? Maybe, maybe not.
So to close, I say this not (only!) to be cheeky, but because I believe it’s true. My social media marketing best practice is:
IGNORE BEST PRACTICES!
In the spirit of this post, I’m tagging no one.
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And, I’ll counter your last point by posting a comment on your blog about it!
You raise a great point here about best practices in general. I would prefer to call them “recommendations”, “suggestions” or “guidelines”…or simply “here’s what has worked for me in the past”.
You are absolutely right - so-called best practices do come and go with the times, and I don’t advocate stating that a best practice MUST happen or even SHOULD happen.
Would I challenge people to ignore best practices altogether? Probably not. Would I challenge them to evaluate, scrutinize and make their own judgments on whether a best practice can work for them? Absolutely.
Thanks for responding to my tag, Jay!
I’ve never liked the idea of “best practices.” (1) Who decides what’s “best”? All it means is “it worked for this company, at least in the short term.” (2) “Best practices” are inherently conservative and tend to suppress innovation.
Cheeky Monkey.
Jay Moonah is wrong (man, that felt good
… ok, so it’s more of an inside joke between Jay and I 
Seriously, I didn’t ask for “permanent” best practices, but as of now, I think Social Media Marketing has established some best practices - things that must be present for an initiative to be successful.
I also think that the spirit of a best practice is just that - it’s not a law (black or white) and they are based on the context of the program and the goals that you hope to achieve from it.
The whole point of doing it in this channel (maybe turning it into a wiki) is to keep on it, to keep updating it, to add to it and to remove from it - for it to be organic (as I stated in my original post).
So while “commenting” may be a best practice, it’s definition should include a “when it’s good to”/”when it’s not” description.
My clients do want to know what’s working, what’s not and why. People have gone before us and made an impact. I think - as Marketers - to move this channel forward we do need to document and acknowledge the types of best practices that we have (transparency, consistency, authenticity, speed of response, type of voice, etc…).
We can call them guidelines, suggestions or best practices (that’s just semantics), but I have to disagree with you Jay. If you ignore the best practices we have to date, then we’re back to having Sony PSP and Wal-Mart fake Blogs.
To me a best practice in Social Media Marketing would be to not create a fake Blog based on best practices. If you goal is to drive traffic and earn search engine ranking at any cost, then yes, this best practice is not relevant to you. That being said, it’s still a best practice.
Suze and Mitch, as the folks who spurred my participation in this, thanks so much for responding to this in the spirit in which it was intended, as a conversation starter.
Mitch, I definitely agree there’s tremendous value in recording things that work or don’t, and learning from those things. For example, I love great case studies for this because they provide that context I was talking about. You mention the WalMart and PSP blogs. Great examples! So what is the best practice there? Is it “always be authentic”? Okay, maybe… but what if you are promoting Halo 2 and you launch a site called “I Love Bees”? I don’t remember Microsoft getting criticized for launching a fake bee-keeping site… yes, of course the context is completely different, but that is exactly my point! So does the generalizable best practice becomes something like “be authentic, unless it makes sense not to be authentic” or something equally inane? Personally I don’t see much value in that.
I also don’t agree that using a term like “BEST practice” is just semantics. Jim sums it up very nicely – “who decides what’s ‘best’”? Best is simply NOT a relative term.
Suze, I thought your point of saying people should “…evaluate, scrutinize and make their own judgments on whether a best practice can work…” for them is right on the money. What I would would say is that sounds much more like a set of guidelines than something that is “best.”
BTW, I’m not just making this argument academically. I have had clients reject ideas on the basis of them being “not best practice” because they pushed the envelop of what had been done before. To Jim’s second point, calling something a best practice can also stifle creativity. “Why,” your client may ask, “would you not follow the best practice?” Or in other words, take the safe route ‘cus it’s worked before.
Again, to be clear, I’m not against learning, especially having spent much of my career in education! Mitch, I think the idea of recording things that have worked and haven’t is a very worthy one indeed, and I do like the idea of doing it in a wiki so it can grow and change. But putting any kind of “best” label on things in this space, at this stage of the game, to me that’s an extremely dodgy prospect.
Fair enough Jay.
I do think “best” is decided by the users. If the initiative works, the community embraces it, they share it, they pass it along, then they - as a group - decided so.
I also happen to think I do have several “best” practices and they don’t stifle my creativity at all, they tend to push me to surpass what worked “best” before.
But that could well be me.
Lastly, I’m all for the clients who push “best practices” aside - no doubt that’s how newer best practices get created
I have a term for clients who push “best practices” aside. That term is “awesome clients.”
It’s the ones who use best practices as an excuse _not_ to do new things that I was expressing a concern about, sorry if that wasn’t clear.
There are, clearly, amazing case study examples that are “best” in what they did for a particular brand at a particular time under a particular set of circumstances. All of these have things we can learn from them, but trying to reduce these down to a pithy rule like “be transparent” or “always respond immediately” looses the context of why those things worked. That’s my fear.
But we do agree on the fact there is PLENTY to be learned from what has happened before, no question about that.
This is great stuff. Just reading the thread is educational.
I tend to look at it like building a house or some sort of building.
The reason there are standards that have to be met is because over time ‘best practices’ (or what ever we want to call them) were identified. Once identified some group of people determined that they should be followed by all who build.
Now, that doesn’t mean the guidelines are in stone - they change as new tools and materials surface.
Social media is so new that true best practices are hard to nail down. And the industry changes so quickly that it will likely be difficult to have ‘the world’ agree to any set of standards.
At the end of the day its all about us sharing our findings and using the guidelines when they should be used - each step of the way we should be evaluating and learning.
Good stuff!
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http://twitter.com/franswaa
Perhaps what we are really talking about here is not identifying best practices themselves but discovering ways that we can improve upon what’s been learned already.
In a certain sense, best practices can be interpreted as ” maintaining the status quo as the most effective way to succeed”. However, by using best practices as a guideline, then moving beyond them, you can truly start to be innovative.
If that’s the case, then aren’t best practices merely a foundation for real progress?
I still get hung up on the “best” thing. Frank likens them to standards, which are minimums as opposed guidelines or principles, which are something that you can evolve from. I think that’s still my problem with the whole idea of best practices.
[…] Personally, I don’t intend to slice hairs about the phrase “best practices.” If you’re reading this blog, you probably have a good idea of when things go well in social media and when they don’t (or at least you’re interested to learn). Let’s take our best practices from the times when things go well. […]
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