Yeah, social media’s all the rage these days… Yeah you have to be on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and 15 0ther communities if you’re a business owner… Yeah it’s changing the way marketing happens online… Yeah, yeah yeah!
I’m not immuned. I think these things,I do all these things, I believe it…I’m active in these channels, I’m tryin to make it happen…
But somewhere in the depths of my brain, my psyche perhaps lives a little Andrew, a pseudo Andrew… a timid little fellow who hides under the blankets through every conversation about social media. He’s scared. And the more I think of him, the more I think he has a bloody good reason to be!
3 things actually inspired this post:
1. I saw some statistic in a Tweet (ironically) that said Ford Motor Company would be, in the coming fiscal year, allocating something like 15% (might have been 10%, might have been 25% – forgive my inability to find the source. Suffice it to say the number was enormous) of their online advertising budget to social media.
2. One of the activities I do for my own social media “presence” daily is to use the service MrTweet to help me add followers to Twitter who are in the same circles as me, who like the same stuff and are followed by similar people. Going through these people it’s just ASTOUNDING to see how many “social media experts” there are. It’s out of control. Every second person is social media consultant, social media expert, social media manager for SOMETHING.
3. Some comments by John Reese in a recent blog post about social media that I think were well over due.
Before we delve into the heart of my “fear” about social media, let’s start with a hypothesis.
I contend that not more than 0.5% of people who claim to have any expertise in social media REALLY know what it takes to create a campaign for a business or individual that will not only result in a positive ROI and ROT (return on time) but a GREATER ROI than a similar investment in a campaign of search marketing, JV marketing, or ad buying.
There, I said it.
I don’t know what it takes, I’m a self confessed social media noob. But I know what it DOESN’T take.
In fact I think I can give you a list of things that despite the hype, are NOT “social media marketing” (meaning, using social media to generate a real ROI that’s significant compared to other online marketing methods)
1. It most certainly has nothing to do with the ability go get followers, friends or any similar alternative. Number of friends/followers says literally zero about what level of traffic you might be able to generate or how that traffic might interact with your site or what you sell.
2. It most certainly has nothing to do with how well you can get people to “share” “retweet” or pass along any message of yours, including of your brand. It doesn’t matter if a million people see your “message” because it was funny or stupid. That doesn’t mean they’re going to want to have a business relationship with you.
We’ve all seen the number of “viral videos” that are lamely trying to capitalize on their success by sticking up a link to buy their shirt at cafepress because they have no clue what else to do.
Take the recent, and in my opinion appallingly shallow, attempt at some press by MillerCoors – donating 1c per tweet to cancer research for everyone who retweeted a message that said something like “MillerCoors is helping fight breast cancer so retweet this”.
I don’t know about their results, but let’s say they got 2 million retweets (highly unlikely) – they effectively paid $20 000 (donated to breast cancer yes, but really it’s just money they’re spending on exposure) to have their brand name on Twitter’s “Trending Topics” and have people MAYBE talk about their brand in a few extra conversations for one single day in time.
Do you think they made a return on that $20k? It’s hard to say. But how did they even test it?? How COULD they test how sales increased from a promotion like that?
Maybe it was an honest (albeit weak) philanthropic effort too, but there’s other companies who are spending much more money than that doing the EXACT same thing for far less altruistic aims.
3. It doesn’t REALLY even mean the ability to use social media to bring visitors to your site. Most people who’ve done testing with social media traffic agree that it’s some of the worst, lowest converting traffic you can find, right up there with that of crappy traffic exchanges. Of course it matters alot to conversions and actions HOW you drive that traffic, through what strategy, and what you do with it, but as a whole…
The point I’m making is that I just don’t think many people yet have REALLY understood social media in the marketing context. I sure don’t, I’m not saying that I do. I’m just saying that I don’t think many other people, even “experts” do either.
Because when you think about it, it’s the most unique form of “media” that’s ever come into existence.
Looking right back to the printing press, and the TV you get an insight as to it’s uniqueness. These are things that came from within the establishment, BY the establishment, totally “centralized”. It was obvious to the creators of the TV for example, how this device could be applied for the benefit of business; how it could be leveraged to increase business profits..
But social media started at the grass roots, totally decentralized, completely by the people. And it’s put business and marketing minds on the back foot. Suddenly they’re trying to catch up. All the people are using this new form of media and they have to hustle to work out how to make it work for them, and they don’t have much experience in doing that!
And that process, I think, is still playing out. In fact it’s in it’s absolute infancy. BUT…
Why It Scares Me
It scares me the same way all kinds of people jumping onto the web, investing TOO big into the web, and making rash decisions about buying websites would have scared me if I was in online business before the tech bubble of the 90’s.
People are getting TOO into this social media thing before they really understand what they’re doing or why.
They’re spending 10% of their ad budget just because everyone else is doing it; Because it’s the new train comin through town and if they don’t hop on they’ll be left behind!
I bet the tech bubble was built by people claiming to be “internet experts” too. People who had all the answers for how you could start up a website and exit in a year’s time with millions in buyout profits.
I’m sure the parallels aren’t perfect, but for me, or at least, for that little Andrew deep down inside me, they are similar enough to be cause for alarm.
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At last!
Someone with the guts and honesty to tell the truth.
I always think of the Emperor’s New Clothes when I read about Social Media and then I panic and wonder if I am the only one who doesn’t get it?
Ok it’s back to the tried and tested and stop wasting time.
Thanks Andrew
The figure you saw for Ford is that 25% of our marketing budget is allocated to digital efforts – some of which is social media. It was a story by BusinessWeek.
Scott Monty
Global Digital Communications
Ford Motor Company
@ScottMonty
Thanks for the clarification Scott. You might be an interesting one to ask – do you have a formula for measuring your ROI from social media activities? Love to hear your thoughts.
Andrew
Social media is about building and strengthening a community for your brand or for yourself. It’s about building trust and making your community feel closer to you. It’s not about numbers, it’s about quality.
Online communities for a brand or niche are powerful marketing platforms. You get a ton of people together all in one place voluntarily who are all interested in the same thing… and there is money to be made in more ways than one. Social media like twitter and facebook strengthens the bonds of that community, and increases their receptiveness.
If you have a niche blog or a personal blog and you push aff products or something, using social media increases your credibility. Video blogging puts a face to the words, twitter lets people connect to you instantly and form relationships, facebook lets them network. You become a trust agent on a specific topic, and your words carry more weight when you mention affiliate products = more money in your pocket.
For us internet marketers, when it comes to the big bucks in social media, it’s about providing that platform and building that community. If you can build a strong community around a niche, using every means at your disposal to reach people and connect them together, then you can get a big piece of the Advertising Budget Pie that major corporations like Ford are throwing around. Sites like Ning.com are goldmines for those who know how to use it.
Aside from that… social media is pretty much worthless.
You know, as someone who wants to start doing “social media administration” for local artists and small businesses in the NYC area, I still have to agree with you.
But my goal with it, in the same way I want clients, is for everything to be personal. I believe in ethical marketing and personal touches. Do I think clients should have YouTube accounts. Sure. But to make viral videos? No. To make videos to show that there are real people behind their art or products.
I think a lot of people are jumping into things for sure. A lot of people are experts because they read a book or two and read blogs about it. I think social media has it’s worth in a community. Do I think that my clients should advertise to the thousands of NYC Twitter users. Sure. All of them? Of course not.
It’s about community. It’s about face time. It’s about feeling. It’s about memories. It’s nt about friends, followers and retweets. Social media should be leverage to get people in your store. To get people to buy your work. Merely to get it out there. The real connection comes from the people, not a number.
Apologies for the typos by the way!
Andrew I think the problem with social media is the way newbies such as myself are being taught to exploit it rather than use it . I feel that most of us are guilty of this,some more than others with multiple accounts with every web 2.0 platform there is.Hence the rise of the so called experts and Gurus who,s sole aim is to sell the their crappy products to the 1000,s of gullible newbies who only buy because they are familiar with most of the social media platforms.
Until they realise such as I did, most of their time will be spent managing these accounts and not focusing on the main issue we will see more and more self promoting, shallow and mostly failures in the real world claiming the title of expert.
I worked for 30 years in B2B sales off line and in that time only met about 20 real masters in the art of selling. My first day on Twitter I met over 1000. If they are so successful why are they using software to harvest followers?
Mark
Well said Mark, I totally agree.
Andrew
Maybe one day I’ll find a use for social media. I set up a new facebook acount, joined two fan pages and played a game (Yoville). In 3 weeks I had over 200 new friends none of whom I knew previously. I tried twitter ,500 followers of no relevence whatso ever. The biggest downside was the time lost in trying to keep up with it all. Any ‘links’ are gone in a nano second after the latest post, poke, tweet, retweet etc. The only good thing to come out of it is we made a real-life friend who works in our local police station. Damn – now I’ll have to behave myself.