Mostly rant, partly question.
I'm a writer by trade, and started doing social media as an add-on for one of my clients earlier this year. It's usually fun, I like it. I don't claim to be an expert, but I figure people are people and relational marketing works on similar principles no matter what the medium is.
We're a nonprofit, and we've had very good real-world results - when I post that we need supplies, a box from Shipt or Prime shows up the next day. When I post that we're having a work day, a couple dozen people show up with tools and snacks. When I posted about a national event, somebody bought airfare and hotel rooms for 2 of our staff to attend. They're a great audience, their hearts are all-in.
So our fundraising committee is full of very young, driven Type-A folks. One of them runs social media for a church, and seems to be trying to be a local influencer. They decided it would be great to host an alternative-genre concert with a local indie band as a fundraiser this month, because they all like it and think it's really cool.
None of our donor base has ever heard of this band. They are not interested in indie music, and they are mostly either retirees or young parents with kids. You want someone to hold a ladder at 7am on Saturday? They're in. You want someone to pay $300 a head to play golf on a Tuesday morning? They're in.
But they aren't going out to a no-name concert on Friday night.
On top of that, the committee scheduled this concert 2 weeks after our huge annual golf outing, that we've been shilling heavily from every conceivable angle for the last 3 months.
But the committee chair has been breathing down my neck for a few weeks to promote this concert at the same time. I do what I can - I rewrite the stilted, typo-laden copy they gave me and add the relevant links and research some appropriate high-traffic local hashtags. Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do about the terrible, low-res graphics they sent me. I tag the band on all the posts. The band does not engage or re-share.
I try to tag the committee members so they will know to share the posts. None of them are even following us. I hunt down as many as I can find from their email addresses. A couple of them follow back. One of them re-shares one post.
The Director finally told the committee chair to back off, because all our promotion was going toward the annual event. From what I hear, the golf outing did fantastic numbers.
So then we have 2 weeks to try to sell tickets to this dad-blamed concert. I start posting more, switching up the copy, switching up the hashtags, tagging everybody I can think of. Still not a peep from the committee members, except that the "influencer" and chair email my boss to complain. The Director approves an ad spend. I boost the event post. (I've never known a bad idea to turn into a good idea by throwing money at it, but hey - social media is magical, right?)
So Monday, the influencer calls me to discuss our "social media strategy." I grit my teeth, because I figure if you wanted a strategy, you'd have called me in June. Not five days before the event. She wants to know if we've considered boosting the post. I told her we did, and we're spending $100 per week, and that seemed like a lot to me. She agreed.
Then she asked if we were doing Instagram stories, because we should be doing daily (daily, sweet Jesus I ask you) IG stories with video. I politely informed her that the amount of time that would take was well beyond my contractual limits. I also mentioned that none of the committee members appeared to be sharing anything about the event, unless they were doing it without tagging us.
So she asked if she could have the IG login to post stories herself. I said it was fine with me if the Director approved (which she did).
No stories Monday. No stories Tuesday. So far, no stories today.
I think this woman is delusional, not only about the amount of work and planning a campaign takes, but about the power of social media and paid advertising to change real-world behavior. I think she believed that everybody who "likes" a post is automatically going to cough up money for event tickets - even if the event is not something they are interested in.
Oh, she also created a second Facebook event (with a typo in the title) and invited the org to co-host. I accepted so I could fix the typo. But I have no idea why she thinks a second event listing is going to improve anything?
So thanks for listening. And as an admittedly inexperienced SMM, am I the one who's out of touch here? Is there some magic this "influencer" knows about that I am fundamentally missing?
[link] [comments]
from
https://www.reddit.com/r/socialmedia/comments/diul1z/is_my_stakeholder_being_stupid_or_is_it_just_me/
No comments:
Post a Comment