Four Misunderstandings About Social Media

Posted on April 15, 2013 by Keith

As you’ve probably aware if you’ve spent any time here on the screed, I take a great interest in how business folks think about social media.

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase

I am one of those people who believe that over time the word “social” will vanish as all media becomes more social and what we classify today as “social” media becomes more mainstream (although I’m not sure how Facebook could become more mainstream when it seems damn near everyone is on it!).  How businesses can use social media is one of the areas in which I advise clients and so I took great interest in an info-graphic I came across the other day entitled “How Small Businesses Are Using Social Media (and why they may be getting it wrong).  If you click through I think you’ll find some good information on it but you’ll also find four terrible misunderstandings.

In the section labelled “Why Small Businesses Are Using Social Media” there are four points.  Each one is, I guess, something that these businesses believe to be true.  Unfortunately, they’re not.  Take point one:  it’s inexpensive.  Sure the tools are free but supporting your business on each platform is not free.  In fact, to do social well and to cover all the potential social bases (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google+ for starters) in an active way that will engage your customers requires planning, writing, and responding.  It all takes time, and as we all know, time is money.

Point two: it’s easy to use.  Another half truth although I’m sure businesses believe it.   The tools are not overly complicated but creating great, engaging content is hard, as you can probably tell from the attempts to do so in this space.

Point three:  their customers use social media.  Yes they do, but as the term “media” indicates  they’re in a lot of places doing so.  The aforementioned “big” guys are just the tip of the iceberg, and new players emerge and grow every day.  Reddit, Vine, and Stumble Upon are just three places where a lot of the customers are but the brands aren’t.  Add to that the fact that to gain any sort of visibility with the majority of your customers on the big guys (Facebook and Twitter in particular) requires you to be a paying customer.  So much for “free.”

Point four:  It doesn’t take a lot of time.  Totally wrong unless you add “to do it badly” to the end of that phrase.  Supporting multiple platforms with engaging content and responding to consumer interactions takes a lot of time – ask any of the brands that do social media well.

That’s my take – what’s yours?

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The Bluetooth Runaround

Posted on March 21, 2013 by Keith

Today we have yet another tale of consumer woe and multiple corporate failures.  This one is a doozy, since it affects a couple of popular products and is generating a lot of chatter on the interwebs.  In fact, one popular site has over a hundred comments on this topic and that’s just a subset of the problem.

Android invasion, Sydney, Australia

(Photo credit: Pranav Bhatt)

As our featured players we have a very popular phone, a couple of very popular families of cars, every cell phone carrier (notice I didn’t use the term “popular” with them) and a LOT of consumers.  Let me explain.

A coupe of months ago I upgraded my phone to the Galaxy SG3.  I love the phone – great display, very fast – no complaints at all.  It came with the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android and I use AT&T as my carrier.  When I got the phone I linked it to my car – a Nissan Altima Hybrid – using Bluetooth and was happily using the car’s built-in hand’s free system to chat and drive safely.

A month ago I became even happier when AT&T pushed an upgrade to Android, installing the Jelly Bean version.  The phone seemed even faster, I got Google Now, and  I was happy to be running a more current version.  Until I received a phone call in the car.  It sounded like an alien calling and I had to pull over to pick up the phone and talk.  I rebooted the phone, it connected to the car, but the sound was bad.  Unusable, actually.  I tried pairing it again to the car, hard resets of the phone and a few other tricks but the audio is completely garbled.

A search on the topic showed me that we have a multiple part blame game going on.  It is an issue affecting not just Nissans but VW/Audi, Inifinitis and a few other models.  Just this phone, every carrier, and only when the phone is upgraded to Jelly Bean.  The carriers say it’s Samsung’s fault.  Samsung says the auto guys need to upgrade the Bluetooth software in their cars.  They all blame Android for not making the Bluetooth version in Jelly Bean backward compatible.

Here is what none of them are doing:  taking responsibility for fixing it.  What they’re not seeing is that it’s costing them money as well as massive amounts of goodwill.  At a minimum  it’s hundreds of calls to customer service, each of which costs money   In the case of the carriers, many people are demanding new phones (which have the older version of Android) to replace the upgraded one.  That’s expensive.  Does any business have too many customers?  There are a lot of cars/phones/carriers from which one can choose, and while very few people are going to make an immediate change to their car or carrier, people don’t forget how they were supported when the time for that evaluation comes.

I’m not sure how I’m going to deal with this.  Maybe I’ll just try to use the phone’s speaker if I get a call while driving.  Maybe I’ll go get a new S3 and not upgrade it until I see this is fixed or they push another version of Android (the rumors are 4.2.2. fixes it).  I’m really interested to see if any party to this mess steps up and does something other than point fingers.  Why am I not surprised?  Isn’t that sad?

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Social and Shopping

Posted on January 21, 2013 by Keith

How do you think social media influences what people buy?  If you believe a recent report on the influence of social media on shopping this past holiday season, the answer is not much.  As the article said:

online shoppers mostly ignored social channels as purchase influencers,according to survey results from Baynote. Pinterest and Twitter influenced online and in-store purchases for just 1 in 10 shoppers surveyed, with Facebook garnering only slightly more interest. Instead, online ratings and reviews were most likely to influence both online and in-store purchases (33% and 24%, respectively), with Google search results including a pictured product available by the retailer coming in next for online purchases (26%) and paper catalogs (21%) second for in-store purchases. Not surprisingly, social channels were most influential among younger consumers (aged 25-34), while paper catalogs got the attention of the 45+ crowd.

This was accompanied by another piece which announced that “only 2% of traffic to retailers during the holiday season came from social networks, per figures released by Adobe Systems.”   The article then goes on to say “Adobe isn’t the first to detail social media’s rather small influence over the holiday season.”

I could be wrong about this but given that Adobe is the parent company of one of the large analytics firms, I’m assuming they looked for traffic into shopping carts from social media.  Their question – is social media converting into sales – isn’t the right one.  How about “does social media influence sales?”  I’m willing to bet that a large percentage of what’s on Pinterest is aspirational - something the user wants or acknowledges as desirable.  Maybe it’s a place people use to research gifts for friends?   You will have a hard time convincing me, just based on what crosses my Twitter stream and Facebook news feeds, that people aren’t researching purchases via social media.

The Baynote data is a survey – let’s always remember that what people say and what they do sometimes don’t align.  That said, I think taking “catalogs” as a whole while segmenting digital into pieces (search vs. social vs online stores) is a bit misleading.  It also doesn’t reflect how users may begin with a search, move over to social to check out their connections’ thinking on what they’ve found, and then their use of the online store to buy, perhaps several days (and sessions) later.

Given the continuing and impressive growth of online shopping during the last holiday season I’m a believer in social as a influence.  People spend more of their lives online and that includes shopping.  Maybe these folks are asking the wrong questions.  I’m sure they’d have just as hard  time proving that TV or print resulted in the conversions they’re discussing yet very few people deny those media have an impact.  What do you think?

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Filed under: digital media, Thinking Aloud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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