Monthly Archives: July 2012

July 26, 2012 · 11:37 am

How NOT To Do Social Media

 

Sometimes you see something that reminds you to start a folder called “stupid corporate tricks.”

Chick-Fil-A

(Photo credit: Link576)

What I’m writing about today would be top of that heap.  In fact, it sets a new kind of standard for stupid behavior but let’s see what you think.

Gizmodo published a piece yesterday about Chick-Fil-A and their social efforts.  As you might know, that company is engaged in a controversy with the gay community over same-sex marriage.  Now since we don’t do politics here, let’s put aside the cause of the controversy and just acknowledge that there is one.  This issue caused another company – The Jim Henson Company – to announce that it would no longer allow Chick-Fil-A to distribute miniature muppets in its children’s meals.  Again, let’s not argue right,wrong, good, or bad – those are the facts.  As a preemptive move, Chick-Fil-A announced it was ceasing to distribute the toys because of a safety issue – kids were getting their fingers stuck in the puppets.  With me so far?

Now comes the business part.  On Chick-Fil-A’s Facebook page, there were quite a few comments.  One commenter accused the company of making up a lie about the cause and asked them to admit they were dumped because they were “bigots.”  I suppose we could have a long chat here about how to handle negative comments in social media and that would be a valuable discussion.  However, I bet we would all agree that one way we would never endorse is to have a PR staffer create a fake Facebook account in the personality of a teenaged girl and respond with corporate talking points through that mechanism.  Want to guess what Chick-Fil-A did?

The company denied having done it.  However, the account was created hours before it began posting and the profile picture is from a stock photo house – a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that this is not a real person.  Regardless, it’s a lesson on how NOT to handle a problem is social media.  Yes, we need to respond quickly but not by hiding or lying about who is talking.  Transparency is one imperative; knowing that if you’re using social you no longer control the conversation is another.

I don’t suppose we’ll know for sure if this was a corporate flack or not.  We do know for sure that in addition to the original controversy there now is another.  Thoughts?

 

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July 25, 2012 · 9:03 am

Facebook And Browsers

Anyone here still using Netscape Navigator to read the screed today?  Oh sure, you might be using one of its descendants but that browser is long gone.  What you just might be using is Internet Explorer, so let’s pause for a minute and think about some numbers.  Five years ago, in July of 2007, there was roughly an 80% chance that you would be accessing the web via that browser.  It had a dominant market share although a relative newcomer named Firefox was chipping away.  IE was buggy, full of security issues, and consumers hated it.  Of course 10 years prior, in July of 1997, one would have said the same about Netscape – it had 72% of the market then when IE declared war.  Today, IE has about 30% market share, about the same as Chrome.  Firefox is not far behind, and a few others make up the rest of the desktop web browser world.

I raise this today because of a few articles last week about Facebook.  Obviously it’s the dominant social network but it can’t seem to get any love.  Both pieces talked about customer dissatisfaction with the service.  Here is the first from MediaPost:

Facebook doesn’t seem to be particularly well-liked by its own users, according to the latest figures from the American Customer Satisfaction Index E-Business Report, which was produced in partnership with customer experience analytics firm ForeSee. Overall, Facebook scored a 61 out of 100 in terms of customer satisfaction — down 8 points from 69 last year. That’s a new record low for companies in the social media category.

Most interesting to me are the comments which demonstrate the dissatisfaction within the ad community as well.  Your users and your customers both unhappy isn’t the best situation.  The second piece from CNet adds another angle:

Now Google+, which has been dubbed by some as a ghost town, is gaining some traction with a higher customer satisfaction rating, according to the numbers released from the American Customer Satisfaction Index today. According to the new numbers, Facebook’s rating drops 8 percent to 61 on a 100-point scale, while Google+ makes its index debut with a 78, putting it in line with Wikipedia.

In other words, we’re only on Facebook because that’s where our friends and family are.  Sound like a browser you know?  Hard as it might be to imagine, Facebook is in a pretty precarious situation.  No, they’re not gong to implode, but history has a way of repeating itself.

What do you think?  How do you feel about Facebook lately?  Are you using other networks in lieu of it?

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July 24, 2012 · 8:41 am

Painting A More Complete Picture

Two pieces from eMarketer caught my eye last week.  Both have to do with marketers’ usage of social media.  From the first, you might be tempted to short Facebook stock and wonder why Google is spending so much time on G+.  From the second, you might just realize that once again we find that getting beyond a sexy headline and into some facts can help paint a very different picture.

The first piece was all gloom and doom:

Social Media Usage Plateaus Among Marketers

Oh no!  Is this whole sector of the digital economy heading right down the tubes??:

When the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) surveyed US marketers this year, 90% said they were using social networks for their efforts—about even with last year, at 89%. While this percentage has risen dramatically since 2007, when just 20% of marketers used social media, growth has plateaued—and shifted to other new digital media platforms instead.

It goes on to talk about mobile and location-based services.  Of course, it also mentions that the investment in social was $3.63 billion in the US and over $4 billion more in the rest of the world. And that’s just paid ad spending.  Which leads to the other piece, which asks the obvious question:

What Are Marketers Spending on Social Media?

It turns out that:

most marketers have less than 20% of their marketing budget set aside for outreach on social sites—including advertising and maintaining a social media presence…While these percentages may seem small, marketers reported that budgets were increasing. AdAge and Citigroup found that 72.9% of respondents said they expected their overall social media budget to increase over the next year. This is in line with data from Useful Social Media, which, in April 2012, found that 54% of US companies planned to increase their social media budgets by up to 25% in 2012.

If 90% of marketers are, in fact, already using social (and there’s an entire book to be written on how badly most of them are doing so), of course the growth rate is slow – there’s hardly any room to grow.  If nearly 3/4 of them are expanding their budgets, the dollars flowing to social are going to be the envy of many other media.  It’s on the social companies and the marketers’ agencies (and consultants!) to help develop metrics and other criteria to assure and measure success so the investment pays off.

Interesting when we get past the headlines and start asking questions, right?

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