Recently, I spoke at a conference where I got to hear from Eric Weaver, a brilliant digital marketing strategist who makes simple, but profound, observations about the impact and future of social media tools. In his presentation, he referred to the “Social Media Holy War”. It was an attempt to define the 2 sides of the discussion with one side talking about how social media is essential as a tool to influence and drive the market’s discussion and the other saying that social media is ultimately useless because it is impossible to track ROI. The extremes unfortunately drive the conversation. Social media gurus claim you have to tweet and post about making the bus on time while the other side says that social media is a fad. There is some truth to both arguments, but each position can claim some legitimacy. Facebook has over 600 million users worldwide and Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and other social media tools are continuing to carve their respective niches. Many businesses, however, continue to invest millions in their social media strategies, resulting in poor returns. What do you think?
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I believe there is a huge difference between BEING a social media property such as Facebook or Youtube, and being any other type of business that us USING social media to drive some business goal. You’re comparing apples to oranges here. For any social media campaign to be successful, the business making the attempt has to actually be doing something that’s worth talking about. For organizations which provide some kind of entertainment or informational service, using social media may be a good fit. For generic, commodity services social media would likely be a waste of resources unless they’re doing something especially innovative. Even for those where it’s a good fit, the use has to be constant enough and interesting enough to keep people’s attention. Social media is not, as some would have us believe, the be-all end-all solution to Internet marketing needs. It’s just one tool out of many that are available, and it’s not always the right tool depending on the business. As with anything else on the Internet, I suppose it just boils down to the right tool for the right job. If social media meets the goals, great, but don’t waste resources on it if you’re not seeing returns.
I believe the primary failure in typical social media strategies is because these large corporations define the interaction as a “strategy” and not merely two-way, honest communication. Social networking itself isn’t new. We’ve had real-life social networks since the beginning of language. We’ve been able to communicate to each other with online media for more than 10 years communicating with others around the world. What social media introduced was the “persona” – a single place that represented a person and provided an outlet for their voice with little effort or invest. Later the face of large corporations joined the conversation. But corporations are faceless – the corporation isn’t a personal system, people are (and the people in those corporations). Social media campaigns become successful when they are about people. All too often corporations look to social media to continue the exact same conversation they do in brochures or billboards – a one way conversation that further allows the corporation to force their opinion on the consumer. When opinions are forced on consumers they begin to build the same mental barriers they do to other forms of advertising and the conversation fails.
Having a successful social media presence comes with building trust (social currency), listening to the consumer, and integrating their feedback into the business. Additionally, there is something to those “making the bus on time” posts because they build a level of camaraderie and create a level of humanity. Consider Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos – I’ve read tweets from him on Twitter that talk about his ride in a taxi, a basic action that people do. Human behavior tells us that we buy from two types of people: those who are most like us (because they are less risky and don’t engage fight or flight) and those whom we are sexually attracted to (hoping self-explanatory). Creating a sense of being humanity reminds those that are interested in our business that we aren’t much different from them and we can be trusted. We can either increase that trust or we can destroy it based on how we continue to behave.
Organizations too should be hiring people they trust to represent the organization personally and fire the paper-pushers. If you require a staff to use scripts to solve problems and don’t empower them to help customers to their greatest ability (online or in real life) – you are doing your organization and customers a disservice. If you have a choice between two great job applicants – hire the best writer. When engaging in technologies like Twitter or Facebook, an organization should fully engage. As an example, AFLAC can be found on Twitter. Their support team remains faceless behind the Twitter account merely jumping in the conversation when they see a negative comment, yet they have never posted an actual tweet on their account – being completely reactive rather then engaging with customers.
Since the 80′s and the “decade of the MBA” many organizations have been biased to the idea of measurement and ROI, claiming that “if it can be measured it can be managed” (a quote often incorrectly attributed to management author Peter Drucker, who never actually said it). Customer happiness has been a mystery long wished to be measured. Though because of its subjective definition and the biases consumers have in surveys (likely to never give a perfect score) most attempts remain unreliable. Before worrying about the numbers corporations should be focusing on building happiness and delight in their customers making them passionate about engaging with the organization – that will continue to build them success both offline and online.
[“Many businesses, however, continue to invest millions in their social media strategies, resulting in poor returns.”]
I think this is a problem; companies shouldn’t be investing THAT much money in their social media. Sure, social media takes some resources, mainly in the set-up, and the time to post and engage the visitors, but the two main things that should be driving it and giving it momentum are: 1. The users (customers, constituents, fans, etc.); the idea/model behind social marketing is USER-generated content and 2. Your other marketing/branding efforts should be driving/feeding it.
It is hard to measure something subjective by objective means, and I don’t think social media was ever meant to be measured that way –that is to say, quantitatively. It was meant to be a qualitative space. This is a place where the sorely neglected right brain gets to come out and play without the confines of traditional business and marketing constructs – primarily dictated by left-brainers.