Iranian protesters

Even more interesting is the fact that the Iranian government is using social media for disinformation by setting up fraudulent rally locations and displaying violent protests that are pure fiction. But the fraud is recognized by the aggregate of social media consumers and exposed as quickly as it is revealed.

The lesson of this scenario is an allegory to the attempts of the marketing community to monetize social media.  There are many great examples of effective use of blogs, but success stories involving social apps such as Facebook and Twitter seem to be fewer because these concepts are still relatively new. My research of online marketers in the blogosphere seems to indicate they share more information about what NOT to do than examples of what you CAN do to successfully leverage social media.  Many marketers are understandably reluctant to use these tactics because the negatives of failure seem to outweigh the positives. They don’t want to be exposed as a fraud as we have seen in this instance with the Iranian government.

So what’s the best approach to leveraging social media? The first lesson is what bloggers have learned over the past decade; great content is consumed and everything else is ignored (or exposed as fraudulent). The second is that we need to understand that use of social media is just a tactic and not a strategy in itself. If you can fit social media into overall marketing strategy so that it is truly meaningful and has genuine value to your customers and prospects, it will be readily apparent. If not, you need to adjust the tactic or dismiss it altogether.