Holy Trinity of Social Media Making - Actors vs. Concepts

Yesterday I went to check how the N2 social media hub is heating up after summer. Here few reflections of the hour and a half session of SoMe buzzing.

The hub started as always: you get there and find yourself in a middle of big room with only 10 anxious people in it. Then, sharply 2 minutes to five people rush to the event and soon it's too hot and heavy to breath. As one the fellows noted, people are in "the meeting manuscript mode" such like you get to the meeting, you attend the meeting and then you leave the meeting minding your other business. Yep, feel guilty!

Anyhow once again, the repertoire was entertaining and nicely bundled around one theme to which different actors bring insights. Yesterday, the focus was on what are the contributions of the holy trinity - media, advertising and digital agencies- to good SoMe marketing. 

From the very start the audience got best laughs of the simplifications over where digital advertising is at the moment: "Like us and win ..." is the easy option over challenging the customers' imagination. This is to say, firms are still buying customers rather than building a relationship which arises the dull question of what are the prospects of good marketing performance (awareness, differentiation, loyalty, phenomenal media coverage) when 50 other firms are using "the win the iPad 2" ?

Self-critical discussion also took off around the frames (budget and planning) within which SoMe monitoring and customer listening can actually succeed to impact marketing outcomes. In this sense, what are the possibilities to create ADHOC campaigns when treasury holder doesn't allow it as it's not planned?  Reactions, such like gin in a tin first aid transportation from Helsinki to Brighton as captured in Lonkero for People campaign from Hartwall last month, are not going happen too often as somebody rationalized. 

This is how the 2 week's first aid campaign started. What I would have wanted to see in the campaign pages was hooray for media coverage across countries - did it get any?

Continuing with the budget aspect further, heading off with this kind of reactive campaign is risky - what if it doesn't succeed? In this sense, budget must be flexible between both ends which holds that 'kill your darlings' is rather quick decision to avoid any further expenses. 

All of this (delivering triggering marketing content & social mechanics) finally comes to listening and understanding the customer. Today companies, projects and jobs are atomized to complex networks - often times the knowledge disappears in the chain. The company is orchestrating different agencies to deliver successful (SoMe) marketing for multiple brands: media buying, advertising design and finally those who actually build them together as the deliverable outocome. Agencies, on the other hand, are balancing between the threat of hyperspecialization and collaboration with competitors while dreaming of becoming a full house solutions partner. Orchestrating then again implies that the firm must hold the helicopter view of how different projects tune in the marketing strategy. 

Unfortunately, from industrial echoes organizations are still functioning through silos. In his sense, one might ask who is responsible for social media monitoring and how? If lucky, it's designated to one person or diced to one unit within a silo or even across silos. Not so good options could be that it's outsourced or it doesn't exist at all. Whatever the chosen option, the questions are: Do the people have listening skills? How the  information is moving across silos and different projects?

Often times the holy trinity of social media are though over channels where to be (Facebook/Twitter/Blogs) or what different concepts are involved in social media (technology/content/customers). For the firm though, it seems to be the mastering the different partners and actors involved doing it.

As for attending these small scale hubs and breakfast sessions, I highly recommend them as above all the presentations initiate good remarks and discussions in situ that are not present in the slides provided afterwords. Finnish networking then again... we can only for so long take lame excuses that it's a week day.

Measuring Social Media

I wouldn't have missed yesterday's N2 social media hub for anything. Hot topic of the day was measuring social media to which I have been eagerly focusing the past two years. As a  business it's new and evolving, but in everyday life an area where marketer needs to know one's stuff. Experts giving insights over the subject included Jari Jaanto representing both IRC-Galleria and IAB Finland, CEO Tommi Lehtonen from Whitevector & Digital Marketing Manager Jussi-Pekka Erkkola from Nokia.


When it comes to marketing and social media, the leading question is whether you can measure ROI for your campaign. Can traditional thinking of reach, frequency and return on investment work fully in the complex net of attitudes, motivations, associations, relationships, feelings and behavior? All of the speakers gave supporting answers but noted that it really depends on the product and whether its consumers are in social media. There is no winning formula that fits all but rather the success in social media should always be compared to firm's own business goals and past performance. What is our goal in raising awareness, discussion and sharing? Are we stimulating the viewers or engaging participants? What are our long term social media goals and how are they integrated to overall marketing strategy?


Another challenge with social media, in addition to accountability, is that there are so many metrics to choose from yet only some of them fit the specific needs of the firm, campaign or the uniqueness of one social medium. The time span is also important as usually campaigns and trends follow the long tail. The beauty of social media monitoring, however, is that you can follow the phases and act upon them. Even though consistency is the key in both monitoring and measuring, the ultimate advantage is that you act upon it whether it's customer support, brand management, changing your campaign core theme or observing weak signals. And acting requires understanding the qualitative side behind the numbers.  


Ultimately you're not measuring social media per se but your customers behaving and socializing within it. We all can jump around for skyrocketing sums of consumer responses but rarely have time to explore what explains the change and what does it mean for our strategy. Thus in addition to money talk, successful social media marketing should be measured also in terms of consumer behavior as Hoffman and Fodor point out. Social media marketing should aim to satisfy customers' needs to connect, create, consume and control. And in measuring marketers ought to know how to read the numbers behavior wise.


Overall the evening gave good insights from different angles from practical customer approach to the one of monitoring tool provider and finally to measurement standard development in the field. Let's stay tuned!


Finnish readers pls check the presentations here.

The Imperative of Social Media Marketing

Come down from you tower and realize the facts.  Social media is not a top-down channel but customer-driven. But don’t get too cozy either and think you can just survive by monitoring the online talk from your chair. Social media is also interactive and to engage your customers you need to be pro-active, too.


So get involved is still the chant of social media buzz. However, the discussion of social media marketing in general is medium driven in many ways. Everybody recognizes the top 3 biggest social media channels, but wonder which one of them is effective just for their business. Thus companies sort know where to go but what and how are still obscure.

In the heat of social media few years back, companies started blogs many of which now  have died out due to lack of participation from both parties. Oops, online brand awareness was more complicated than expected and building up customer relationship wasn’t that easy of a task after all, wasn’t it? If customers don’t accept the message the company is sending, the result does not fall far from traditional advertizing: no action, no community. The level of participation from a firm cannot be just news feeds but also providing real customer value.

Another cruel example of poor judgment comes from attitudes to crisis management. In the social media, companies need to have a clear strategy for mitigating any disasters—and preferably to prevent them from occurring in the first place. Finns know the urban legend of restaurant Lehtovaara. People talk about your business even though you’re not, and you need to participate in the discussion whether you like it or not. Whether a compliment or  a complaint, to show consumers that you’re listening and reacting can create loyalty.

Jessica Tsai also highlights the importance of relationships in her article Everyone’s Social (Already) (Customer Relationship Management, June 2009). Social media is foremost facilitating relationships and connecting people. These relationships stem from mutual interest and mutual gain, which also are powerful tools for customer loyalty. In mobilizing your customers to become your heralds is the fact that social media marketing is networking.

What does it take to get involved?

In practical level, another problem businesses face with social media is that they don’t have a strategy. But like any business decision, participating in social media requires a plan and a purpose. As Tsai acknowledges in the article, social media strategy requires operational, technological, and customer service resources—all of which extend beyond the marketer’s control. On the other end of the strategy, considerations of how social media will affect the company itself (brand-building, product development, marketing communication and advertising) ought to be analyzed, too.

Interesting prospect presented in the article was the growing role of company representatives. The brand is taking a backseat to the person representing the company. Social media is about people and personalization of content in both sides of the medium. This if anything stresses that social media is not some channel or crowd separated from the business; rather it’s the people representing the brand and the company. 

A common slant over getting involved is also the question of cost efficiency ratio. Whereas enterprises may have the resources to invest on research and social media experiment, small businesses can do only so much. However, as Jeremy Farber states in the article, social media provides a platform that can be just as effective. It requires knowledge of the mediums, the communities as well as best practices of communication in online environment. To me, succeeding in social media marketing is more dependent on the level of expertise in these areas rather than the size of the company and especially the content provided. Also, encouraging point raised in the article was that social networks themselves are struggling to establish revenue models, thus providing an opportune time for businesses to take advantage.

Warming up the conversation

Getting involved also means change in attitude. The confidence customers’ require demand authenticity and transparency from the companies they transact with. Many customers now feel entitled to talk to the brand - a phenomenon that Tsai predicts to only intensify as Millennials take over the market. 

Is there an art to channeling conversation into a meaningful activity for marketers? According to Adam Sarner, research director at Gartner, community members want freedom but they don’t mind ground rules. ‘If you’re all over the place, they don’t know why they’re there.’ stating that crowds need direction. ‘Tell them what you’re looking for and how they can benefit to create a sense of what’, this is what Sarner calls mutual purpose.

So what then? We have the purpose and the community, but do we really know who our customers are? David Dalka, independent marketing consultant, states that ‘social media still a giant blob of data not connected to individuals.’ Self-identity is required to know the customer. Tsai notes, that soon consumers will have a single online identity, such as OpenID. I, too, believe that in the future the ecommerce platforms and social mediums are brought to closer integration and co-operation e.g. in terms of user login and the overall purchasing process. But that future is still far ahead due to user identity development and security issues.

The reality

Let’s reflect how companies are performing social media marketing wise at the moment. Twitter, Facebook and Youtube are taken over by the 100 largest companies in Fortune 500 according to Burson-Marsteller, the first  being the most popular platform. Two-thirds of the Fortune 100 have at least one Twitter account and on average 4.2 Twitter accounts. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook are mostly West-oriented; Asia-Pacific companies don’t use them as much, instead preferring corporate blogs. 43% of Facebook fan pages had posts from fans. In fact, some of the pages were primarily set up for customers to post comments and questions to receive responses from the company.

However, a recent survey conducted on British small-to-medium sized companies (SMEs) gives some insight to the overall attitudes and the astray to social media. According to Forum of Private Business, where 52%of SMEs use social media, only 27% of respondents saw popular networking sites beneficial. Surprisingly, 21% described them as ‘not useful' and 6% labeled them ‘useless'. Only 7% respondents who use social media described it as ‘very useful' for their businesses.

Don’t lose your hope yet; it’s not about the size as noted earlier. In fact, young SMEs are spending more of their advertizing money online and have more aggressive social media strategies according to NetNewsCheck. Young SMEs are spending nearly three times as much of their marketing budget online as the older companies and want their money to be spent on iPad apps, reputation management, search engine optimization (SEO) and other new forms of marketing.

When it comes to social media strategy, 43 % of US companies with 500 or fewer employees report that their marketing department handles social networking outreach, followed by public relations (26%) and human resources (19%). Usually employers have 1-3 people communicating on behalf of their organization in social media, whilst 7 % report that 4-5 individuals and 11% more than 6 individuals to manage the communication.  Not surprisingly, 57% stated that they didn’t know.

How about the efficiency? According to Social Influence Benchmark Report by StrongMail , email proved to be the most popular method of sharing content, with 86% of the companies using that as their preferred sharing method. However, the percentage of information to go viral was much higher on non-email channels. Only 41% of email was re-shared whereas in Twitter the content was re-shared 1837% of the time. Also, personal links (i.e. embedded links for blogs) were more viral than Facebook. On the other hand, emails resulted in approximately 16% more clicks (e.g. purchases, sign-ups) than blogs and badges.

From these results it’s obvious that building presence in social media channels requires more than just company/product profile. More strategic and cross-media approach need to be taken to build the relationship and dialogue with consumers. As for the SMEs, the confusion that traditional SMEs are experiencing may be form the fact that they don’t know how to use the platforms; they don’t have Doers to advantage the new marketing channels. 

Conclusions

Whether companies like it or not, social media is impacting business. Not only the marketing functions and product development but attitudes, too. The follow-up and dialogue with consumers not only reinforces customer service but helps the company better understand the life of its product. More importantly, the focus should be in the future. To catch and assure purchase intents is more relevant than emphasizing past transactions.

However, it must be clear that social media cannot be ignored. Not every channel work for every business and thus early adoption is crucial. Getting involved in social media is more than presence and building brand awareness, and more importantly is creating value and being alert. Social media is changing and evolving all the time which highlights the need to participate in this co-creation. The sooner you jump in, the better you get.


Source: Tsai, J. (2009). Everyone’s Social (Already). Customer Relationship Management, June 2009, 34-38.