Tag Archives: facebook

June 3, 2013 · 8:40 am

Social And Small Business

I’ve mentioned before that I keep a “blog this” file which contains articles that piqued a thought.  I went through the file over the weekend and came across a press release from the folks at Constant Contact.  They do a study about the state of small businesses and the ways they connect with and grow their audiences.  Results include responses from respondents across a range of business-to-business and business-to-consumer industries.  wkL_ccWhat piqued my interest was this:

While small business interest in, and appreciation for, social media is on the rise, small business owners continue to lack confidence in their social media skills.  More than half (54 percent) chose social media marketing as the marketing activity they need the most help with, which might explain why their frequency of use with social media is not where it needs to be.  Only 13 percent of survey respondents post to Twitter daily and ten percent post weekly to LinkedIn.

Aside from the obvious point that clearly I need to make my phone number and email address more prominent (I can help – call me, you guys!) that research shows me that these folks are being smarter than others.  They recognize that value of the various platforms and aren’t shooting the messengers due to their inability to capitalize on what those platforms offer.

Social is a conversation.  If you’re only engaging on an irregular basis (once a week) and only a fraction are even engaging that often, it’s not going to work.

The study is unclear with respect to how they’re defining social media marketing.  The owners were asked “which social media platform is the most effective for their organization” and that’s kind of nebulous.  Is it paid advertising and the “effectiveness” is measured by responses?  Or is it some other engagement metric?  One hopes the respondents can answer how they’re defining “effective” but I suspect they can’t.

Social media is not like any other form.  It requires commitment and resources far beyond what many folks have experienced buying print, TV, radio, or even display ads.  Doing it badly can do more than be ineffective – it can hurt your business (no one likes to be ignored!).  Can we agree on that?

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May 23, 2013 · 9:35 am

Off The Social Rails

One of the things I made a note to rant about was some data that came out of the 2013 Doremus Decision Dynamics study.  This is an annual survey of senior marketing executives and one of the things it found is that these folks aren’t that enthusiastic about social media marketing.  In fact, 51% of respondents feel that advertising in social media is more intrusive than advertising in a magazine or newspaper, while only one-third believe that a social media presence enhances a company’s reputation.  I find  a certain amount of irony in those results since the respondents are, in most cases, the people responsible for their company’s efforts in social.  If those efforts are lacking, maybe we ought to think about it for a second before we shoot the messenger?

My thinking is that marketers don’t like any medium they can’t really control.  Social media is a mirror and I suspect that a certain portion of the negativity about social is the result of some poor effort on the brand‘s part which is just being reflected.  As we used to say in TV, “due to circumstances beyond our control” Facebook pages get hijacked, Twitter feeds get overwhelmed, and other channels are filled with comments from consumers that may not be on brand message (to say the least).  Yes, ads in social are more intrusive but unlike those other media they’re not viewed as welcome because they’re not easily avoidable.  Which is entirely the point.

Social media evolved as ways for people to connect with one another.  Smart brands spotted that and began to use the various social channels to interact.   They listened and replied when appropriate with useful  helpful information.  In other words, brands became humanized and engaged in conversation.  At some point, it went off the rails and social became just another place to fire up the ad megaphone.  This is the equivalent of using a shoe to drive a nail.  It might work but it’s clearly not as effective as using the right tool in the right way.

I’m not surprised most marketers don’t think social is helpful.  It’s resource intensive, it’s out of their control to a large extent, and most are using it badly.  Would you agree?

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April 17, 2013 · 9:31 am

Is Facebook Becoming A Ghost Town?

How many of you are familiar with Facebook?  OK, silly question.  After all, it’s the biggest social media site.  Let’s try again.

"Ghost" Town - NARA - 543356

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

How many of you are familiar with Wanelo, Vine, Snapchat, Kik, or 4chan?  If you have a teen in the house, you might be, since these are, according to a Piper Jaffray study, the social sites in which teen interest is rapidly growing.  Final question:  how many of you are familiar with, and used to frequent, Friendster, MySpace, or Second Life?  Emphasis on the “used to” since they’re pretty much gone.

If I was a Facebook shareholder (which I’m not), I’d be very concerned.  Not just about a couple of things I’m going to mention but also about management’s plans to grow revenues.  Let me explain.

First, the research.  According to Tech Crunch’s reporting of the aforementioned study:

Interest in Facebook seems to be declining heavily among teens. Though teens still dub Facebook their most important social network, Piper Jaffray reports that the numbers are down regarding how many teens see Facebook as the most important social media website. Over the past year, the number of teens who deem Facebook as the most important social media site has dropped from more than 30 percent to just over 20 percent.

I realize teens are fickle, but they’re also trendsetters in a lot of ways.  They’re also a notoriously difficult group to reach via ads, and the social media chatter about brands—positive or negative—is a big factor in their purchasing decisions.  Which leads to my second concern.

AdAge reported on Facebook’s plans to insert video ads in users’ news feeds:

While the format of the units isn’t totally nailed down, it’s widely assumed that they’ll be autoplay and presented in a video player that expands beyond the main news-feed real estate to cover the right- and left-hand rails of users’ screens on the desktop version of Facebook.

It won’t matter if the user or any of his or her friends have engaged with the brand on Facebook.  Users will at most see three ads a day. Now I will shut almost any site that autoplays video, especially if it’s advertising.  Let’s think about how strong the user backlash is going to be if the autoplay report is accurate, and will that backlash spill over to affect the sponsors as well as Facebook?  It just might.

One doesn’t have to look too far into the future to see the beginnings of a ghost town in the making.  If a town’s young citizens are moving away for greener pastures, can businesses and their parents be too far behind?  What do you think?

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