Social Times just published an article today titled, “The 4 P’s of Social Media“  It does such a great job of distilling social media down that I thought it was worth echoing here.

1. Presence
2. Personality
3. Patience
4. People

Seems easy enough.  But so many marketers just don’t understand these four things.  If you can’t get these four things right, you stand to have a social media campaign failure on your hands.

Presence - Anthony LaFauce, the author of the Social Times post, made this profound statement “Presence is more than just being on social media, you need to have an actual presence in social media.”  This means you can’t view this as a banner or PPC campaign.  You have to have a real presence.  It takes time, care, and feeding to make a successful social media campaign.  You can’t pay your insertion fee and forget about it while it runs.  You need to be engaged.

Personality - This one is simple.  You have to believe in your companies product.  You are an evangelist for the company.  If your attitude is artificial, like one of those guys in an infomercial, no one will believe you.  You will sound like a shady used car salesman.

Patience - I would go so far as to use the term Perseverance.  Community building is not a project, but an extension of your company.  A community is not built overnight, it takes time and lots of care.   If you aren’t dedicated to building a community from the start, then don’t waste your time and money.  You need to be in it for the long haul.

People - Basically this point is just building on the rest.  Engagement of real people can only happen from a real person.  Putting up a message board and then never posting to it yourself is not going to build a community that you want.  You need to be involved, honestly and passionately.  You might want to read about Participation Inequality to help you understand the type of people that get involved in a community.

I encourage everyone to read the article on the Social Times site for more perspective.