Tag Archives: Brand

January 16, 2013 · 11:49 am

A Social Marketing Study

I’ve been meaning to write about the Chief Marketer 2012 Social Marketing Study for a little while now.  Even though it came out a couple of months back, what it found is pretty relevant and I think you might find some of those findings relevant to what might be on your marketing mind.  At least I hope so!

As one might infer from the name, the topic is brands’ use of social media for marketing purposes.  You can get the study by clicking this link (registration required) but here are some of the key findings:

  • 76% of overall respondents to the survey said their brands were conducting some level of marketing within social media, and a further 16% reported plans to begin do so by the end of this year, making for a potential social marketing contingent of 92%.
  • More than half of respondents cite the difficulty of calculating an accurate return on their social marketing outlays as a prime frustration with the channels. That difficulty in turn grows out of their second most often expressed complaint in this year’s survey: the difficulty of accurately tracking sales to social campaigns. Those response rates held true for both B2C and B2B marketers.
  • Marketers are also troubled by issues of content: specifically, by the amount of time their staffers spend curating social media and by the need to keep social media supplied with a constant stream of new, fresh, engaging content.

Other not so surprising data points are that the primary purpose marketers have for using social is to drive web traffic and that most of their efforts are on the big three social sites: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  What all of this said to me was not so much about how quickly marketers adopted social as a channel but how their efforts are really just sort of fumbling along.  Not every brand should be on Facebook yet all seem to be.  While I’m a firm believer in having measurable outcomes to help with ROI calculations, it seems from the study as if the standard to which social investments as being held are out of whack with both how social is being deployed as well as with the standards applied to other channels.  Finally, the emphasis on creating new content is a good one but it sounds to me as if that content is being used in the context of social media as a megaphone – yet another broadcast medium.  I could not disagree more with that approach.

Does your company use social media for marketing?  Are the study’s findings in line with your experience?  Am I missing anything?

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December 3, 2012 · 11:22 am

Caveat Venditor

We’ve all heard the Latin term “caveat emptor” – buyer beware. It’s a phrase used in commerce to indicate (at least in my non-legally trained mind) that the buyer needs to make sure of their purchase because they may not have any recourse to fix any issues later. This holds true unless the seller went out of their way to hide defects. Today, however, I want to flip that notion on its head and explain why sellers need to beware.

I read a report this morning from the folks at Pitney Bowes Software about the use by brands of social media.  While I’m not really surprised by the data I am kind of disappointed.  The poll of consumers found “that marketers need to be careful to make sure they are not overcommitting to social channels, and, moreover, that their actions on social media are aligned with consumer preferences.”  As eMarketer reported:

Adding to the need for marketers to approach social marketing somewhat cautiously, consumers have displayed time and again an indifference to—or at worst, annoyance at—marketing messages pushed at them on social media, instead preferring to use such platforms to engage in more conversational interactions. And it should come as no surprise that consumers were predisposed to marketing messages from brands and companies that they had already chosen to “follow” or “like.”

The annoyance rate of consumers who saw ads from brands they followed was 11%, but jumped to 24% for those confronted with social media marketing messages from brands they didn’t follow, showing that tolerance for unsolicited messages was noticeably lower.

The alarming thing is that another survey showed 57% of those who had seen a sponsored story on Facebook thought it appeared as content in a misleading way, while 45% thought the same about Promoted Tweets.  This sort of activity has a residual effect on consumers.  They don’t like being mislead and retain negative feelings about the brand that sent out the commercial message under the guise of a social interaction.

Every few days it seems I have a conversation with a marketer who wants to use a social channel as yet another megaphone the way we used to use older media.  The paradigm shift doesn’t seem to have happened yet in many marketers’ minds.  As the research shows, consumers know the difference and aren’t appreciative when brands misuse a social channel.  Sellers need to beware – the long-term effects will be a problem.

Make sense?  So what are you going to do about it?

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November 13, 2012 · 10:46 am

Service Vs. Social

When you’re connecting with your friends and relatives on Facebook or other social media, do you think of it as marketing?  I don’t.  I’m not certain what I call it but if marketing is the communication of a product’s value I’m definitely not trying to convey my value as a person to others.  Not consciously anyway.

Why I’m asking the question is our old friend “social media marketing.”  There was another study released a week or so ago, this one by the good folks at NM Incite (which is a joint venture between Nielsen and McKinsey so they ought to know!).  It covered customer service via social media and found (as summarized in this article) that:

The majority of Twitter and Facebook users — 83% and 71%, respectively — expect a response from a brand within the same day of posting. Some 71% of consumers who experience a quick and effective response are more likely to recommend that brand to others, compared with 19% who do not receive any response… The biggest issue: 36% report having problems solved quickly and effectively, while only 14% report that the company responds quickly but does not resolve the issue, and 10% report never receiving a response at all.

That data is presented in the context of a positive experience leading to positive posts which can be shared across other social spheres.   In other words, marketing.  What I find interesting is that this information  along with some additional thinking on social, is more about serving the brand’s own needs than those of the audience.  As I postulated at the top, while I’m very happy to help out my connections in any way I can I’m not monitoring social media with a marketing mindset.  Unless and until brands can approach social as we non-digital, non-corporate entities do (read that as humans), brands will always be seen much as we do a social connection we made at a party many years ago and with whom we have little or no bond.  Those connections are kind of creepy and I, for one, always wonder why I even have them.  A lot of folks “unfriend”, hide or block those people and you might not even know it if you are the one blocked.  Ouch, especially if you’re a brand.

If we’re going to use social media to connect with consumers, I can’t think of a better reason to do so than customer service.  Yes, that can be a gateway to shared, positive experiences, just as it can precipitate a storm of bad comments if done badly.  It’s not something I’d approach with a marketing mindset if you’re trying to humanize the brand.  Unless, of course, all of your real friends use their accounts mostly to sell you insurance, real-estate, or used cars.  Then you just might need a few new friends!

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