Tag Archives: Marketing and Advertising

January 3, 2013 · 11:41 am

The Social Media Team

One of the areas that will continue to grow this year is corporate use of social media. I know – big, bold prediction on my part. In any event, it was because of this that I read the recent release of data from Ragan/NASDAQ OMX Corporate Solutions. You can read the study called “Structuring A Social Media Team” here.  The research asked a couple of thousand respondents about how their company uses social media and how they’re structured to support those efforts.  The results are not particularly surprising.  In fact, I find them a bit alarming.  Let’s see what you think.

  • Sixty-five percent of respondents do social media on top of their other duties. For those who do social media exclusively, nearly eighty-three percent work on teams of three or fewer.
  • Sixty-nine percent are dissatisfied or only “somewhat satisfied” with how they measure social media. Only thirty-one percent are satisfied or very satisfied. And many say they lack the time to track data or aren’t even sure what to measure.
  • Only thirteen percent describe their efforts as advanced. Slightly more than half agreed with the statement, “We keep our heads above water, but not by much.”
  • “Ownership” of social media is murky, and the question may even become passé as numerous departments within organizations jump in.

So most organizations don’t have an employee who focuses exclusively on social media. It appears from the data that it’s an added responsibility for someone who is assisted by interns. While as a manager I understand the “efficiency” of this, I’m not sure I’d trust what is becoming my organizations public face to someone who is doing it as an afterthought.  Think about some of the social media disasters we’ve seen – how often is an intern involved?  The fact that marketing, PR, and other departments all lay claim to a piece of these efforts makes it a difficult task to get goals clearly defined too.

I’m not quite sure what to say about the lack of measurement   I don’t believe in doing anything in business without some method of accountability and not having any idea about what to track much less how to track it is disturbing.  Only thirty-one percent of firms report measuring sales while everyone else seems focused on “likes” and followers – a measure of quantity, not necessarily quality or response.  the lack of time and/or manpower is also cited (by nearly 2/3) as the main reasons why there isn’t more and better measurement.

It’s a pretty comprehensive study and if you use social media for business you might give it a read.  Then hit the comments to let us know what you think.

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December 27, 2012 · 9:49 am

Most Read Posts Of The Year – 2

One of the posts you all read and shard the most this year was a recent one from October.  It was a response to an article about how some charlatan was passing himself off as a social media consultant and taking his clients’ money while providing almost nothing in the way of value.  The screed was an extended invitation for he and those like him to go away.  It was called “Crappy Consultants” and is all about everything I certainly don’t want to be.

The screed today hits close to home since I want to throw a little sunlight on something going on in the consulting world.  While it’s been on my mind for a bit I read a piece this morning called How Social Media Consultants Dupe Their Corporate Clients from Dave Copeland of ReadWriteWeb that brought it front and center.  The piece talks about how a friend of Dave’s was underwhelmed by a consultant brought in to get the company up to speed with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and the rest.  Not only was the presentation the consultant made stunningly simplistic, but it may have been wrong.  As the article put it:

…the company has little digital expertise. That leaves it open to exploitation by so-called social media experts who take a one-size-fits-all approach to every client. These consultants often bill tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars before anyone realizes there is little or no return on the investment.

Amen.  As I’m out meeting with potential clients I often run into the work of some “consultant” who knows how to post on Facebook but doesn’t understand how Facebook is used as part of a business.  Forget knowing about the social graph – these folks don’t have a clue about asking the most important question – why social media in the first place?  After all, it’s not right for every business and there certainly is no standard implementation that’s going to work across the board.

I’ve had prospective clients hand me the “white paper” some other consultant did that was nothing more than a document grabbed off the web.  I’ve had another client think that someone had built them a solution when all they were doing was using a white-label provider and marking up the cost.  In each case the warning signs were there – the person they’d hired didn’t have a lot of business experience (it’s hard to claim a ton of social media experience – it’s s new medium!) and treated social as just another marketing megaphone.

It’s hard to convince anyone that there is an ROI to social, especially since it’s very resource intensive if done well.  It requires someone who can digest a 360 degree view of the business and align social with other marketing efforts, including the analytics to evaluate it all.  The charlatans identified in the article hurt clients.  They hurt folks like me who have to battle against their failures to get hired (usually to clean up a mess).  They hurt the industry.  I wish they’d go away – maybe a little sunlight will scare them off.

Have you had an experience with someone like this?

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December 12, 2012 · 11:25 am

Click Here

We’ve discussed the disconnect between marketers and consumers here on the screed more than once and I had set aside a research study a couple of weeks ago to do so again.  It’s a document from the Adobe folks called “Click Here: The State Of Online Advertising” and it makes for a brief, interesting read.  As one might expect, consumers don’t exactly rave about their love for advertising.  That said, they do seem to recognize the need for advertising and prefer professionally created ads over user-generated marketing:

Consumers and marketing professionals agree that marketing is valued, strategic to business and paramount to driving sales.  Professional advertising is the most effective form of advertising, but 27% of marketers believe that user-generated content is the most popular form of online advertising.

Of course, 53% agree that most marketing is a bunch of B.S. (the study’s term, not mine).  The key to me is, as eMarketer reported:

Marketers and the consumers they are trying to reach disagreed on the effectiveness of a wide variety of ad types, according to the survey. Though both groups thought the best ads were those created by professional marketers, nearly half of marketers said this, compared with just 36% of internet users. There was large disagreement about the effectiveness of paid search ads (touted by marketers, played down by web users) and outdoor advertising (the reverse). Internet users were also much more likely to say there were no good or effective ads—positions which marketers were extremely unlikely to hold, for obvious reasons.

Why are the senders so out of sync with the receivers?  As the study shows, people prefer to get information from people they trust.  The issue, then, is how does a brand penetrate that circle?  Does anyone believe it’s through fake “likes” on Facebook where we see friends (even dead ones!) shilling for stuff they wouldn’t ever use?  Maybe we need to be less lazy – tell better stories, do better creative – since 68% of consumers find online ads “annoying” and “distracting” and 54% say banner ads don’t work. I suspect this dichotomy has ever been so to a certain extent.  For people in the market for various products, marketing messages are important and welcome.  For everyone else, they’re an annoying fact of life.

Here’s the thing – EVERYONE is in the market for something nearly all the time.  Food and entertainment, for example, are daily “purchases”.  As the research shows, until we on the marketing side do a better job of connecting, our ability to influence those decisions will always be less than it could be.   You agree?

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