A lot has been written about social media as a conversation tool, but from my perspective there still seems to be a great deal of misconceptions about what this means. This came across in a case study I saw at a marketing roundtable discussion in Palo Alto, CA, a few weeks ago.

The context of this case study was the familiar marketing cycle beginning with Awareness and progressing to an Opportunity, and it described the use of social media as a highly effective way to generate awareness. The ultimate goal: generating leads, and it came with metrics showing the benefit of using LinkedIn and Twitter – but specifically not Facebook — to socialize a webinar. Pretty much the very last thing mentioned (almost as a disclaimer) is that social media is a conversation medium. Unfortunately, little else in the presentation addressed this.

A similar approach to social media seems to happen when companies who are running lean marketing organizations turn to bolt-on social media programs (generally placed on the shoulders of Public Relations) that begin with a Twitter account or two, a blog, and blog commenting. Of course, these are all appropriate social media tactics, but the first thing that needs to happen is for product marketing to frame and selectively participate in “the conversation.” Here’s why.

When product marketing doesn’t flesh out the target personas in enough detail “me-isms” creep into the on-line dialog and topics tend to gravitate toward product and company “messaging” at the expense of delving into topics more relevant to the target role or business function. The problem is that on the Internet people expect insights from social media that they can’t get from the mainstream. This is why social media is generally NOT the place for traditional PR and carefully-crafted messages. More importantly, these insights need to map into their needs, and generally “let me tell you about me,” isn’t the way to approach this interaction. The rub — doing this effectively requires a much deeper understanding of the target customer than most b2b companies are accustomed and many don’t understand the relevance of a customer persona beyond the limited scope of their product.

As obvious as this seems, it doesn’t always translate into programs that intend to use social media as a branding tool but confuse it with “inbound marketing.” This is not just a debate about semantics. Associating social media with lead generation appeals only to the portion of your audience pre-disposed to thinking along this track. Consumers recognize this and interpret these programs as advertisements that they are not likely to pass along through their network. As a result, these programs do not leverage the viral nature of social media to reach a substantially new and much broader audience.

Sure, you can use social media to juice the results of outbound lead generation programs (e.g., advertising webinars via LinkedIn groups), but let’s agree there’s not a lot of conversation in that approach. Worse yet, because the program will most likely be viewed as advertising it can alienate the vast majority of your target audience that is conditioned to tune out advertisers. This is not to say that all advertising via social media is bad, but it’s just one component of what an optimal social media program should be.

By using social media to engage in open conversations (exposed to competitors, detractors, advocates, etc.) about the challenges, goals, and unmet needs of your “target persona,” brands can and do use social media to engage people they would not ordinarily be able to reach. This establishes a degree of relevance between them and your brand that advertising in any form generally cannot produce. On the other hand, Awareness is a binary thing — either you are aware or unaware of a brand. But the beauty of social media is that it can do something more that build awareness by establishing the relevance of your brand to a whole spectrum of unmet needs, which is why most people turn to social media in the first place.