The true scope of social media by Robin Houghton

‘Social media’ and ‘social media marketing’ have widely become seen as synonymous. But our adherence to traditional marketing ways of thinking hampers our ability to see the true scope of social media, says Robin Houghton

Much of what passes for social media marketing is flawed, and even what appears to be successful only draws attention to the corresponding missed opportunities. At the same time, ‘social’ is stripping away the glamorous surface of 20th century marketing and revealing some massive cracks. Social media marketing might just be the dying throes of marketing as we know it.

People can tell when you don’t really care about them

Try going into your local high street bank or retail chain and asking them to sponsor a local community initiative to the tune of £200. Almost every time, it will be referred to the company’s head office, where the marketing or PR teams are so tied up with the latest TV ad that your tiny request will hardly get past the admin in-tray. A recent study found that 25% of companies do not respond to customer service questions posted on their Facebook wall, and 65% never reply to questions asked as comments on their posts. Some even delete customers’ questions. The difference between these two examples of customers being ignored is that in the first case no-one else would have known about it. But when questions are ignored on Facebook, onlookers see it and form their own opinions, and things can escalate quickly. There is a publicly visible communications trail: online, there’s nowhere to hide,marketer) are among equals, whether you acknowledge it or not.

Knowing Big Data about people won’t make them trust you

Let’s say that marketing is about knowing the target audience and moving them from prospect to customer to advocate to ambassador. The idea of building trust in the hope of generating lifelong loyalty to a brand is not new. Yet evidence suggests there is a tendency for marketing to think not about people but about segments, and even when drilling down to an individual level, the picture is a dehumanised one: consumers as bundles of data, ready to be presented with ever more personalised offers. “What’s wrong with that?” you may ask. The better we can personalise the offers, the better we can target, the better marketing will be for everyone… right? There’s a danger that the ‘scientification’ of marketing creates further distance between marketers and the people they are trying to get closer to. The alternative is to admit that marketing is more nuanced than this. That the more a brand is prepared to form relationships with individuals where there is real trust, the greater the value of marketing to the business. Social media gives us the opportunity to bring this about, but we don’t – mainly because we’re still figuring out how, but also because we don’t know how to express it on a profit and loss sheet. So for now, we carry on shoehorning our square 20th century marketing initiatives into 21st century round holes. Why?

Shiny new stuff distracts us

There is nothing more exciting to a marketer than the word ‘new’. Everybody wants to know about the newest gadgetry, award-winning campaign creative or social network. Big Data has brought its own stresses, and social media has opened up an immense mine ofinformation. Add to this the sheer speed at which technology appears to progress and it’s no wonder many marketers are overwhelmed. It is hard to stay focused.

It’s relatively easy to apply technological solutions in crude ways

There are countless free or nearly free tools available to marketers, from blog platforms to Google Analytics to social media monitoring dashboards. Many of these are sophisticated and packed with functionality. But they are often deployed in their most basic form, under-utilised and the data misinterpreted. Even apparently quite clever technology, such as retargeting (on the web, serving ads for sites after someone has visited but not bought anything) can be unsubtle, disconcerting and deployed inaccurately, and techniques such as sentiment analysis have a long way to go before they become reliable. But technology is not only seductive, it is cheap (relative to the cost of people).

Everything must be quantifiable

Because there are so many factors that can be measured, and because of the pressure on marketers to present quantifiable results for each and every initiative, it is tempting to measure the easy stuff and present this as being significant. Marketers need ammunition to get buy-in internally, which means there’s an urgent need for accountability, ‘hard facts’ and quick wins. When social media is seen as just another marketing channel, as is more often than not the case, there is a misplaced emphasis on campaigns and short-term, creative-driven projects. The results of social media campaigns are presented like ad campaigns, complete with impressions, click through rates and cost-per-engagement. The advantage of this is that social media activity can be explained, evaluated and benchmarked in terms that everyone understands. But is it useful to reduce the real value of human interaction to these kinds of metrics? What do ad campaign numbers mean to other areas of the business – how do ‘rate of engagement’ figures translate into actionable insights to share with HR, with corporate communications, with customer services or with product development? Stefan Olander, vice-president of digital sport for Nike, observed that “a whole industry is stuck on trying to force old metrics on to new channelsAdvertising is an old model that is being squeezed into the new framework of social media, when the fact is that people don’t want to be interrupted”.

Social media metrics: taking the easy options

One of the reasons social networks are so successful is they appeal to many of our basic needs: to connect with others, to discover new things, to show off, to create and share things, and to observe others doing these things. There are inbuilt features that facilitate this and allow us to judge ‘how we’re doing’ relative to others. When we attract new followers or ‘likes’, we see this and it is both a source of pleasure and reinforcement of our sense of worth within the community. New friendships and groups are formed and pecking orders are established based on information about ourselves presented to us by the social network. When companies create profiles and pages on social networks, the most obvious metrics are staring them in the face: Facebook likes and comments, LinkedIn company page followers, Twitter followers and retweets. So they are used as a metric, without really having to think about what they mean.

‘Digital’ and ‘social’ are not the same thing

One consequence of marketing’s love affair with data and technology is to reduce social media to that-whichcan- be-measured. In other words, its digital component, with ‘digital’ and ‘social’ being used interchangeably. So if social media is digital, it therefore must be measurable. But a real understanding of social media needs to take into account how networks of people evolve, behave, change and interconnect, and how cultural and social forces operate on those networks. Are we confusing the delivery mechanisms with the complex networks of human relationships and behaviour that form the social web?

Marketers need to walk the engagement talk

There’s another kind of doublespeak we hear in marketing. Although marketers talk about social media as a way of forging closer relationships with customers, and about engagement, research still indicates that most businesses and brands are using social as just another channel for getting marketing messages out, sometimes regardless of whatever reputation management crisis the communications team is facing. Earlier this year, the Bosch Siemens Twitter account @BoschHomeUK inexplicably underwent a personality change that was evidenced in its Twitter feed. From being 80% conversations with individual customers about their appliance care in real time, it turned into a purely promotional feed, with questions or complaints being met with a standard response to contact an email address, sometimes over a week later (while the promotional tweets carried on). When Barclays posted its apology on Facebook for the Libor interest-rate fixing scandal, it was only after attracting adverse attention for its ‘frugal man Dan’ campaign, which had been launched on the same day the scandal broke. Bad timing? Maybe, but the Dan campaign carried on, regardless of the scornful comments, as if marketing and corporate communications were sat in their silos, unaware that their efforts were visible to the same audience. In the online environment, customers not only have a voice but control over their relationship with brands and organisations. Customers decide where and when a conversation takes place. If brands can’t or won’t take part, the conversations happen anyway – and customers have the power to escalate them. In July this year, thousands of O2 customers were affected by a sudden outage. O2 made an announcement to the effect that “our engineers are dealing with the problem” and apologised for the inconvenience. Eighteen hours later, many customers were still affected, but by this time there were over 7,000 comments on O2’s Facebook page and the Twittersphere was alive not just with complaints but with tips, advice and workarounds as suggested by customers. Even price comparison sites took advantage of the #O2fail hashtag and started urging people to check for a better deal. The classic response of many companies in this situation is to keep quiet until the crisis blows over and issue only official statements. Unfortunately, the ‘official statement’ voice, disengaged manner and seeming disregard for customers’ pain tend to make things much worse. But social media offers a fantastic opportunity to turn things around. A short-form channel such as Twitter makes it possible to address individual queries in a timely way, with minimum resources. O2 made good use of social media to do just that, handling what was clearly a major incident with impressive willingness to address individuals, take on board people’s contributions and show genuine regret. Their positive, proactive and above all human approach showed respect for the audience, demonstrated an ability to listen and turned a potential disaster into a boost for the brand.

Social conversations need to be listened to and shared across the organisation

Although listening is acknowledged as the first step to engagement on social networks, few businesses are as advanced as Dell. Opened in 2010, its Social Media Listening Command Center monitors upwards of 22,000 brand mentions in 11 languages. On the other end of the scale, a survey of 1,200 European and US companies earlier this year found just 40% were monitoring conversations on social media about their organisation, brand or sector, and a third of those were not sharing their findings with others in their company. That’s a lot of businesses who are not even paying attention to the very basics of social media. IBM is noted as a trailblazer in the move towards social business. One of its tenets is that a social business “embraces and cultivates a spirit of collaboration and community throughout its organisation – both internally and externally”. When insights gathered on social media are shared internally, the company can build a far more rounded picture of the people within its ecosystem – not just customers and prospects, but employees and prospective employees, suppliers and all stakeholders.

ROI: are we asking the wrong question?

In 2009, it was reported that in the preceding two years Dell achieved revenues of over $2 million through its use of Twitter, generating widespread excitement throughout the web as evidence that money could be made via social media. Interestingly, Dell no longer announces updates to this figure. Why not? Because it’s no longer seen as significant. Dell has moved on from putting Twitter coupons and promotions centre stage and instead is focusing on building itself into a fully functional, 21st century social business. And yet, the question of ROI continues to hamper business confidence in social media. Every now and again a formula is created that we’re told measures the value of a Facebook ‘like’, or a particular frequency or timing of tweets is said to have an optimum effect on sales. And yet, as we have already seen, the obvious social media metrics were never intended to measure the success of marketing initiatives. As the saying goes: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” Social media is awash with user data – dashboards enable companies to run their own mini version of the Dell Command Center, monitoring everything from brand mentions across hundreds of social networks, blogs and communities to sentiment analysis and influencer scores. The downside is that all this data needs interpretation by human beings to decide what is significant and what isn’t, and what action to take – if any. Rather than helping, management and monitoring tools can contribute to the general feeling of being overwhelmed. With too many variables and no easily understood or agreed metrics, no wonder lack of time and resources are among the most commonly stated barriers to improving social media efforts. Regarding the ROI question, various alternatives have been proposed. Sean Jackson of Copyblogger claims there is no return on investment in marketing because marketing is an expense, not an investment. Brian Solis of the Altimeter Group claims the question itself is limiting and that organisations first need to understand what can be achieved with social media other than a direct link to sales, and to set a value on that. Return on attention? Return on trust? Coca-Cola CMO Joseph Tripodi, speaking at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity in June, said his company has a fundamental belief that “if you get people talking about your brand in a positive way, then it will ultimately lead to more transactions. We haven’t cracked the formula yet and neither has the industry as to how you draw those direct conclusions. It’s a work in progress”.

Social media is where brand value can be created or lost

According to Millward Brown’s seventh annual BrandZ report in May this year, buying for price alone has declined from 16% to 7% over the past ten years. In the same period, buying for brand alone has increased from 43% to 59%. Brand value can be won and lost on the social web, and as long as we limit our thinking about social media to campaigns, tools, gadgets and even data, we are in danger of missing the real opportunity. The business of marketing in the 21st century is more about people, networks and trust than it has ever been.

Robin Houghton is an online communications consultant, writer and trainer [email protected]