Feb/120
Social Media Is a Branding Tool. Nothing More. Nothing Less.
TV ROI vs Social ROI. It's all the f**king same!
The honeymoon phase is over. Marketers are beginning to look for accountability from their spending in social. “What’s the ROI?” It’s probably not a foreign question to you at this point. If it is, then God bless you, and however long you have before it’s asked.
We jumped into the space head first in an attempt to stake a claim in the new frontier. The cost of entry was so low, and the standards so undefined; everyone had a bit of fun. We wrote the rule book as we went along. And nobody asked questions. It was an exciting few years. But as experimental as the budgets still appear to be, clients are starting to ask questions about where their money is going.
An argument can definitely be made that budgets simply aren’t large enough yet to justify holding it to the same level of accountability as other forms of major media spending. But why not? The fact is, if you spend money advertising — regardless of platform — you expect some kind of return. The KIND of return is where we as social marketers have stumbled.
This conversation was as inevitable as the discussion about the birds and the bees. It was coming, and you knew it. So, you either pled ignorance or prepared a pandering response. Where we messed up was in trying to give them answers. Instead of telling the truth, we said social can definitively deliver against your bottom line goals and then some! Then we ran off to build measurement tools in an attempt to back up our statements.
The truth? Unless you’re linking sales figures to coupons distributed via social, there’s no way to make a DIRECT correlation between what you do in social and a scaled effect on your bottom line. At least not yet.
Cue the cries of horror and verbal pelting.
So what the Hell is social good for? It’s good for all the same reasons as television and magazine ad spending. Social is a branding tool. Nothing more. Nothing less.
The sooner we stop treating it as a direct marketing tool for sales, the sooner we will begin to see more amazing work that will far outpace the engagement of any television ad ever made.
I don’t mean to discount the value of social. In fact, I ask that marketers begin to look at social the same exact way you do your beloved television commercials. You can’t really link it to sales — but people see it, and it’s important. Without it, your brand awareness would plummet. The difference is, social is interactive, intrinsically viral, and is more reliably measurable.
At my current employer, we’ve been developing a platform for measuring the effectiveness of your efforts in social. What the platform DOESN’T do is tell you the ROI (in dollars) of your social escapades. What it DOES do is attempt to translate all the chatter about your brand into familiar top-line brand building metrics — brand awareness, brand love, brand mindshare, and brand advocacy.
But would you look at that. Not one metric ties what you do in social to moving the sales needle. And it should stay that way.
We’ve all been chasing the same pipe dream of correlating your $400,000 spent on social to a $600,000 spike in sales. But can you honestly say that every sale following a TV ad campaign can irrefutably be attributed to that 30-second spot? You can’t, because television is a branding tool. The case is the same with social.
Stop trying to squeeze out of it what you can’t, or you’ll end up killing it. Social is good for many things. Running interference for your call center. Kicking off campaigns with people at the center (not your product). And yes, even ousting dictators.
What it’s not good for is putting in two dollars and hoping to get three back. So, marketers should stop expecting it. And the sooner we stop telling them they can, the sooner we can move on to making work that gets people thinking about brands in ways they never have before.
Sep/110
The Commoditization of Social Media
Remember when this counted for something?
It was bound to happen. Although social media isn’t getting the lion’s share of anyone’s media budget, it doesn’t stop the fact that most are scrambling to get something, anything, off the ground in social. This presents great opportunities (especially for my employer) to redefine the way brands engage people. But it also sows the seeds of massive issues down the line.
When television debuted, it was a game-changer for the advertising business. Soon, everyone was clamoring to produce their own television spots. If you weren’t on TV, you weren’t anybody. And thus, 60 and 30-second spots flooded the airwaves. By the new millennium, television commercials were a commodity, spilling over onto the Internet, disguised as “web videos.”
It happened again in the “digital age” with the microsite. Not to say there’s anything intrinsically wrong with microsites, as Calle Sjonell at BBH argues. But they did become a commodity.
It seems that social is headed for the same fate. And it’s no surprise. As humans, we have a long and terrible history of settling fruitful lands, only to sap the life from them. We milked the television spot to death. We milked the microsite to death. And now we’ve set our sights on social media.
Any brand can get on Facebook and create a page; which they have. And that is problem No. 1. The issue isn’t with providing accessibility. That’s something I celebrate, as it flattens the world and at least gives smaller brands a chance to shine. It’s an issue of standards.
Conglomerates create pages for every brand they own, but fail to adequately invest in most of them. It costs nothing to get in on the game. Which in turn attracts a whole lot of people to the table who don’t have the chips to play, or aren’t willing to bet big. That is the commoditization of social media; and it’s only going to get worse as time marches on.
But it’s a dangerous game we’re playing. Because now, more than ever, the work we do has to touch people. It has to inspire them and incite their imagination.
The television spot was about absorption. The microsite was about interaction. But social media is about sharing. And in order to complete that conversion, you have to ignite your audience’s spirit. That’s what makes social media marketing the most difficult form of advertising to master.
It’s a culmination of everything that has preceded it. Good social marketing combines the storytelling of television, the interaction and involvement of a microsite, and the inspiration necessary to encourage someone to share what they experienced with all of their friends.
That’s not at all an easy task. In an era where social sharing makes or breaks a campaign, what you do has to truly capture people’s imagination and arouse their curiosity. And the brands who believe the answer is doing a massive media buy on Facebook, will be in for a rude awakening. That will get you the audience numbers (which, don’t get me wrong, is a necessity), but that’s in no way an indication of your ability to inspire them. Ultimately, that spark is needed to drive meaningful behavior.
This post is for naught. Our history has shown that it’s in our nature to ruin good things that come to us. Social media will be exploited and twisted until it’s as perverse as the microsite and television spot before it. But like its predecessors, a few will get it right. There will be a few gems. There already are. And I hope to help craft some of the ones we have yet to see, before the death knell rings.
Aug/110
The Semantic Web and Its Limitations on New Human Experiences
If it were up to the semantic web, I would have never discovered Coldplay.
I was having a conversation with a co-worker about what was going to be my next blog post, and something she said inspired me to switch gears and take a slight detour.
Not that I’m an expert on the subject, but I find the semantic web, and its theorized possibilities, absolutely fascinating. Imagine a world where everything is meticulously tailored to you. Not just the advertising. But search results; music and films; and even new friends. THAT is what I think social is here to do. It’s not just a breakthrough in communication. That’s far too limiting, and honestly, I think a bit shortsighted.
We’ve been seeing it for years in targeted ads, Amazon recommendations, and Netflix suggestions. The internet has made enormous strides in personalizing its recommendations based on our connections and experiences. But that’s exactly what scares my colleague about the semantic web. When is the internet no longer connecting us with the things it believes we will enjoy, but instead shielding us from wildly different experiences that we may in fact love?
My co-worker is a Groupon junkie, and prides herself on having no niche. The deals she buys vary far and wide, and if the semantic web were to try to tailor experiences to her it would brilliantly fail.
For most, the semantic web isn’t a problem. But for those who don’t want to be put in a box; for those who never want to do the same thing twice; the semantic web has an ugly side. For all the relevance it promises to bring, an argument can be made that it also threatens to bring an insular view of the world.
I pretty much exclusively listen to Hip-Hop and R&B. And if it weren’t for a conversation between two co-workers I overheard years ago, I would have never downloaded Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida”. An album I love, and which led me to buy all of their previous works, as well as discover John Mayer, Jason Mraz, and Jack Johnson. Don’t judge me.
There’s a fine line between what’s junk, and what could be a new, and interesting experience. Where is that line drawn? The more you submit yourself to the wonders of this new way of the web, the more custom-fit your experience becomes. But at what cost?