Try explaining this one to your boss, the social media campaign failed, failed badly, if anything you are getting less traffic since starting your social media campaign than you were getting before you started your social media campaign.

I started a social media campaign with my bookstore startup and so far it has not only failed to generate any positive return, I am actually getting less traffic since starting it than I had before I started it. This is social media as marketing gone very wrong, so what happened?

Time to blog, trying to juggle the full time day job with part time blogging across multiple sites, guest blogging, participating in social networks, time was not available. While I should have focused on the startup, there was just not enough time to really focus on the startup and building out brand recognition. This was and remains the key killer, not enough time to write stuff that people would find interesting, not enough time to truly participate in the networks.

Hard time building out a viable brand, name recognition or brand recognition, even though the logo is cool. Part of social media is building out the brand, making the brand recognizable on the internet and building trust around the brand. If you do not have enough time to write, and not enough time to build out the social network and support it, then branding will not happen. It is not brand rejection, it is simply the failure to build out brand recognition and the trust that brand recognition entails.

Over reliance on “social media taking care of itself” was also a wrong fallacy in terms of thinking how social media would take care of itself. Without viable engagement, without doing the real heavy lifting of social media by actually participating, commenting back, talking to other people on other web sites with similar interests, social media will not take care of itself. Rather social media will immediately forget about you and go on to people who are more scintillating and are talking about their stuff, their products, and how those products work, function, or entertain.

Making a FriendFeed page, linking to Facebook, managing RSS, and the rest of it is not enough. If you are not writing great content that brings in the punters, there is no content for all the other social media systems you hook into. If your FriendFeed page is dull because there is no content, and there is no content because you are not writing on your sites blog, few will subscribe, and no one will come because there is nothing to see here, move along now.

The key to social media and building out brand recognition is to actually do stuff, start by writing and keep it up. This is what provides content into the subsequent social media channels that you have tied to your web site or organization. While there are some companies that can get by with a blog entry a month and start a conversation, for most of us this is just not going to happen. You have to provide content that people find interesting, if they are not finding the content interesting they will not come. You have to provide content all the time to keep your social media campaign from dying because there is no content to feed into subsequent social media channels. One PR announcement a month is not enough, you really need to be writing all the time.

You need to write about things that people want to read about. Keeping people engaged with interesting things is also part of the process. Few can truly write great blog entries, and readers will forgive most of the errors that will creep into blog entries, which is good. The bad side of this is that it is difficult to continually come up with great things to write about. The other bad side is that sometimes life does get in the way, things happen, unexpected demands on your time that can derail you for weeks and keep you from writing. These things happen, but the longer you go without writing, the harder it is to pick back up and start writing again. In the mean time your social network is dying because you are not writing content, not participating, and not engaging with potential buyers for your product or service.

It all starts with what you put into your social network, if your campaign is dying look back at the root cause of why it is dying. Are people not writing enough, are they not engaging others on the internet, how many times do you comment on other people’s blogs and web sites. Have you started subscribing to other people that make sense for your social media campaign? What are you doing to engage with other people beyond struggling to make great content? If you can answer all these things, then it is time to sit back and work on realistic expectations for your campaign.

If you know you are pressed for time and cannot spend a lot of time writing, can you get guest bloggers or others to help you write great content? Can you enlist others to help you comment and support the social network as a company? Can you reset expectations to meet the demands on time and the other things you have to do to meet your social obligations? Can you talk to your boss about getting more support? Getting back on track is the important part, and it is normal for new social media people to underestimate the amount of time or effort that social media takes. The thing you need to do now is work out how to fix the problem, do it realistically, and then execute on the plan. Failure is ok, under estimating the amount of time is ok, but once you know the real numbers, it is time to get a little help and start rebuilding the campaign you started with.

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