Page 113 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

Sometimes the best way to discover whether you need an SMM voice is by scan-
ning the conversations about your brand across the social web. You’ll probably
find people talking about you or your product category, at the very least. That can
give you a sense of how important it is, and the volume of conversations may
serve as a guide to how quickly you need to establish your SMM voice.

Defining SMM Voice Characteristics

The SMM voice is fundamentally the voice through which you engage with your
consumers in the social web. Every conversation touchpoint on any social plat-
form from YouTube (www.youtube.com) and Facebook (www.facebook.com) to
Twitter (www.twitter.com) and Instagram (www.instagram.com) and your own
discussion forums needs to be in the SMM voice. This strategy can take the form
of one voice, or it can be several employees who work closely together. But all
SMM voices share certain characteristics that are in contrast to a traditional brand
voice. In the next few sections, we look at some of those key characteristics.

Multiple and authentic

Most companies have multiple, authentic SMM voices. The reason is obvious.
They are generally too large to have one person representing them digitally in all
the conversations. Multiple people focus on different conversation areas, whether
it’s customer support, industry insights, product information, or awareness
building. In some cases, each person represents the company on different social
environments. Each person talks in her own voice and loosely follows centralized
guidelines. Zappos (https://www.zappos.com/beyondthebox) is a good example
of a company with multiple SMM voices. The company is proud of its multiple
SMM voices and trusts those employees to represent the brand effectively without
losing their own authenticity. Another example is the Virgin Atlantic blog called
“Ruby” (https://blog.virginatlantic.com/), which uses multiple social
media marketing voices that still conforms to general tone and voice guidelines
while being deeply engaging.

Transparent and easy to find

Your SMM voices can’t be anonymous voices. They have to be real people who are
traceable; otherwise, they won’t be taken seriously. Now, this may seem to be a bad
strategy because so much is invested in the one person or very small group who’s

CHAPTER 5 Developing Your SMM Voice 97