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Brands are finally starting to enter social media channels, and those that are yet to do so will have to in very near future. Social media provides some very real challenges for brands, but with these challenges comes some amazing opportunities.

It’s a complex game that requires some serious attention, skill and knowledge. Not unlike a game of Poker (yes Poker!)…

So what can Poker teach us about successful use of Social Media?

If you’ve never played before it’s a good idea to spend some time observing before you get involved. At the early stages of using social media, the best thing to do is simply observe. For one this process can aid learning about the various environments, on the other hand it can provide vital information. People are talking about your brand and you need to know what they’re saying. Find out what people think about your latest campaign or product, and take the feedback on-board. You can go to great lengths and at great cost to get feedback from customers, be sure to make use of the feedback that’s right at your fingertips.

When you start playing, you don’t play in one big high risk game, you go for lots of smaller low risk games where it doesn’t matter if you lose. You can’t just enter a social media environment and assume that as long as you spend the money and time you will be successful. You test the water with small campaigns or better still get involved at a level not representing the brand, set up twitter accounts, youtube pages, blog, find out what works and what doesn’t. It’s vital that you’re using these tools day in and day out if your going to be able to take things to the next level.

At the end of the day it’s always a gamble, but you often your chances of success will be higher than others. These days everyone wants to know the ROI, they want a guaranteed return on their investment. Unfortunately you can never guarantee success but you can use knowledge of what has worked and not worked in the past to inform your choices. It’s vital to keep track of other social media activity to help build this knowledge.

Timing is key. What will work within social media is completely context dependent. What might have worked a few months ago might not work this month, the right environment last week might not be the right environment this week, just because it worked yesterday doesn’t mean it’s going to work today.

Knowledge of etiquette is essential. If you don’t observe the un-written rules people won’t want to play with you, and you can’t play if you’ve got no-one to play with. There’s plenty of rules to follow set by social media sites such as copy-write rules on youtube and promotion rules on facebook. But just as important are the many unwritten rules which you can only discover by getting involved and actually using the tools. For example, Habitat learnt that you could use hash tags on twitter improve visibility in twitter search, but they didn’t realise the kind of backlash they would receive for mis-using these tags. As well as negative consequences not knowing the unwritten rules can also result in missed opportunity. For example, it’s generally considered unacceptable to communicate with customers via facebook, however the same cannot necessarily be said for some contexts within Twitter (in the case of an @reply). Assuming all reply options are out of bounds could result in a missed opportunity to communicate with your audience.

You have no control over the cards you get dealt and the decisions other players make, only the decisions you make. As much as you might wish you could control peoples behaviour and reactions to your decisions you have to accept that you can’t. Instead you need to be prepared to every reaction and learn how to respond when things don’t go the way you planned. For example when Pepsi were in hot water earlier this year over a potentially offensive ad they got straight on twitter to explain and apologise directly to those involved.

If you don’t play a hand at some point you’re not going to win. This game is happening, it’s going on right now, nobody is going to force you to get involved but if you don’t you will miss out.

You might get lucky once, but if you don’t know what your doing you’ll soon get found out. It’s not that common but sometimes you can just get lucky, the viral nature of the Internet means that content can almost come from anywhere. But hype dies even quicker than builds on the Internet, and unless you harness the power of any activity you won’t be seeing that success continue.

However…

It’s not all the same. Don’t think you can bluff your way through social media, bluffing can win you a game of poker, but it will only get you so far in social media. Transparency is essential, so lets see those cards.

Image: Kimberlyfaye