Secrets to effective consumer engagement on social media- Dan Mason

Dan Mason is a British multimedia, trainer journalist (he worked for Daily Mail among other media houses)media consultant and with bias for social media and digital journalism.
In this interview with UCHE AKOLISA, Mason who is currently in Nigeria  to conduct training for select journalists in four cities in Nigeria under the  Airtel ‘ChangeYour Story’ project shares insights on how journalists and brand handlers can deploy the social media for more impact:

You have been to Nigeria before now?
Yes, I first came to Nigeria, four years ago. I came to train in a project with British Council in Lagos and Abuja.

How many people did you train then?
I trained 25 people in Lagos and 25 people in Abuja. It was during that training that the journalists bestowed on me the title, ‘Otunba'(laughs.) They also offered me the choicest of women as wife but I declined.

Why is the knowledge of social media important to the Nigerian journalist of today?
Social media is big and is becoming bigger. It is where real people are meeting and exchanging ideas and being influenced by ideas. As journalists, we don’t have a choice. We have to fish where the fish are. If our audience is on social media and we really want to make a difference, that is where we will be. It is not about saying, the print is dead, television is declining. It is about saying, our audience is moving, let’s move with them.

You have been here before and you are here are again. From your interactions with Nigerian journalists, what gaps have you identified in terms of social media, ICT, technology deployment?
In terms of journalism itself, you have tremendously bright talented journalists. In fact, you have an incredibly vigorous media scene. Actually, you will find that Nigerian journalists would rank among other journalists that I have worked with anywhere in the world. I have a lot of respect for a lot of journalists in Nigeria. There are some things that influence journalism in Nigeria. One of them is salaries. It is the same in a lot of other countries, but it has influence on the way journalists operate and the way it is difficult for journalists to make a living only from working for one media outlet. That is an issue that influences journalists. Another one leaning off from that is the money that journalists have to invest in technology, for example, mobile phones which are absolutely at the core of where our audience are heading it.  It is improving but if a lot of journalists have not been able to afford smart phones. If we have more journalists with smart phones and the connectivity is better, they too will too achieve .
They(Nigerian journalists) may not have the kind of access to training as you have in other places, but what you do have here is a tremendous, competitive, vigorous media which means a lot of learning is going, a lot of mistakes, a lot of mistakes being made, a lot of people(entrepreneurs) trying new things. That is fantastic if you have the technology and a few more skills to back you up.

For someone who is covering a specific beat like Brands and Marketing, are there specific social media tools that will help the person up his game?
Yes, they are tools but they will depend on what kind of journalist that you are. For example: let’s put aside, social media tools like Twitter and Instagram which will help you report events from wherever you are,  there are tools to enable you make and share video or audio more quickly, or create interactive video easily.

Are their social media tools for looking at the market to measure better how consumers are responding to particular brand?
There are few simple tools to help you monitor the conversation around your brand. If you are handling communication for a brand, you’ll want to know if people are talking about your brand on social media. There are very easy tools for making sure you get to know about it. Then, it is about having a strategy for how to deal with responding to those posts on social media.

Because the social media is kind of anonymous and unregulated such that anybody can put out just about anything online, brands are worried about how to manage what is flowing out from the social media. What advice will you give brand handlers managing communication online?
It is a hard thing to do- to learn how to lose control. That is exactly what happens when you put out your information on the social media, you are allowing the community decide  how it is shared, how it is viewed, what they are saying about it. This is just an extension of other social networking. Social media is about real people. Those people are going to respect you, trust or distrust you, just like they are in real life. The simple task of every brand is not to simply enter the social media market place and start shouting, “Here I am, buy me,” because you are on social media. If you enter a cybercafé and start shouting like that, everybody would think you have gone completely crazy.
You have to earn your place to be there. You have to go in and listen to the conversation before you join it and when you join it, you have to add value to it. So, that is why brands have moved from having controlled messages to push out, to saying, ‘what can we do to add value to our community?’  There are a lot of examples where brands have developed resources, started blogging, blogging in a way that was add value to their community. Once they build a community around adding value, that gives you the right as a brand to say, “Remember folks, you can have half the price your flight ticket from us.’  I have three words that sum up the way brands should interact with consumers on the social media: Give to get.