Tag Archives: Social media marketing

May 17, 2017 · 3:27 pm

Is There Anybody Out There?

Over the years, I’ve been privy to a lot of data. My own business analytics (my website, blog posts, social presences, etc.), as well as those of my clients, kick off a lot of information. Combine that with the ongoing streams of data from the various marketing campaigns – both search Engine ads and social media ads – I’ve administered over the years and I’ve seen a lot of information about how readers are captured and interact.

Except I don’t believe much of it anymore. Let me explain why and what it means to you.

A few weeks ago, there was a report that Facebook was breaking up an “extensive fake account scam” targeting publisher pages with false “likes.” The idea was to obtain more “friends” for the scammers they could later spam. USA Today was the biggest page hit, losing nearly 6 million “likes.“ because they were fake accounts. Facebook also came under fire for giving publishers and advertisers faulty metrics to evaluate audience reach. Even in the last day, Facebook found an error in how its video carousel ads were reporting and is having to give back cash to advertisers. I don’t think it’s news to anyone that a huge percentage of Twitter accounts are bots, and impressions generated against those bots are a complete waste.

If you read web analytics, you’ve probably encountered “referrer spam.” This has the effect of goosing your visitor numbers up while providing no value. It skyrockets bounce rates and kills conversion rates among other things, but the worst part of it is the added time it takes to address, either through filtering or other means.

Programmatic advertising, which is now nearly all of display and other ads on the web, is rife with fraud. The industry is struggling to verify if ads are seen by humans or even if they’re visible at all. Middleman after middleman “clips the ticket” as money moves from advertiser to publisher, and with over 2/3 of those dollars going to just two entities (Google and Facebook), it’s slim pickings in the publishing world. That means the pressure is on the generate big numbers and bigger results. Of course, if you can’t believe the numbers, how can you evaluate anything anymore?

Here’s how. I know I’m old school and what I’m about to say isn’t as efficient as a trading desk’s programmatic solution, but it actually works. First, take the time to look at the only results that matter. It may be revenue, it may be downloads or app installs, it may be the phone ringing, it may be physical store traffic. I used to worry about conversion rates but since we don’t really know who’s a human out there, the conversion itself is what’s key. Make friends with the sales reps from key publications. Have face to face meetings. You don’t want your sales rep to be a bot either. Pay premiums for premium content and premium results. Programmatic is a race to the bottom, even after you cut through the fraud and waste.

We need to rely on people and only upon the data that can’t be subverted or corrupted. Yes, there are people out there. Let’s go find them.

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May 3, 2017 · 1:52 pm

You Calling Me A Liar?

The screed is a little late today because I’ve been tied up on the phone trying to get the central air conditioning fixed. This saga started a week ago when I noticed that the house seemed rather warm. While the vents were blowing air, it was not cold air. I called the American Home Shield folks with whom we have a warranty and they set me up with a local repair firm. This is where the fun – and today’s business point – begin.

Last Wednesday, I set up an appointment for yesterday. They were supposed to arrive between 3 pm and 5 pm. I was not happy that it would take them almost a week to get to me, but I was told that’s the first appointment. On my calendar it went (not knowing that AHS has a 48-hour service policy, by the way, and that I could have asked them to set me up elsewhere. Doh!).

At 4:30 yesterday when no one had arrived or called to say they’d be arriving, I called the repair folks. The customer service rep had my info from AHS but didn’t have my appointment. In fact, she said they’d tried to call me, failed to reach me, and never set anything up.Obviously, someone screwed up and didn’t write down the initial appointment. I was told that after 8 minutes on hold, a hang-up, and calling them back. Needless to say, I wasn’t happy, but I became far less happy when I was told that the next available appointment was next week sometime, two weeks after I initially set up a repair with them. The manager got on the phone to inform me that I was making the whole appointment up. I offered to email him screenshots of my phone’s call log, showing that I spoke with them twice last week but he didn’t care. I asked him if he was in the habit of making up appointments and adding them to his calendar because I certainly wasn’t. He wasn’t either. I asked him if he was calling me a liar and he said he didn’t know what I was but I certainly never had an appointment. Finally, I mentioned that I wrote a business blog and that he was providing me with great material for what a business shouldn’t do and he laughed and said: “as long as you tell the truth.”

So I’m here to tell you the truth. None of us can ever call our customers liars or make them feel that way. None of us can ignore evidence that someone on our end screwed up and blame the customer instead. None of us can shrug our shoulders and tell a customer who has been harmed to get to the back of the line. Finally, none of us can ignore the potential social media backlash. Not that the screed is read by millions, but it only takes a few readers to start a backlash against your business. Hey – don’t you know who I think I am? The odds are you don’t know anything about the megaphone any of your customers hold but you should know that it doesn’t take more than a few minutes of writing to do a great deal of damage to your reputation.

AHS reached out to these bozos this morning. They again denied I ever spoke to them. We set up an appointment with another repair company, who called me 10 minutes after I spoke with AHS. By the way – when the new guys couldn’t see me until next week, AHS escalated my issue to a unit they have that will call all the area vendors to find someone who can cool me off (in both the physical and psychological sense at this point) in 48 hours or less.

So to the folks at Modern Mechanical HVAC, hopefully this will help you see why you can’t call your customers liars, along with the bad Yelp review, the link to this screed I’ll be posting on Nextdoor (a local bulletin board), and a bunch of other local information and review sites that will advise people to stay away from you. I’m just doing as you asked: telling the truth.

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March 10, 2017 · 11:49 am

The Luck Of The Scottish

This Foodie Friday, we have a fail to discuss. I’ve been trying to figure out if this is a demonstration of abject stupidity or just a stunt designed to make some viral noise. If it’s the latter, it’s a very dangerous game they’re playing over at McDonald’s. Yes, they’re on the screed again!
As St.Patrick’s Day approaches, McDonald’s decided to promote its Irish Shamrock Shake – a combination of chocolate and mint – in Ireland. They did so with a little video clip they released on their official Twitter page ahead of St Patrick’s day, targeting their Irish customers. You can click through here to see it. What’s amazing is the number of things whoever did this screwed up in so short a period of time. It’s equally amazing that they managed to do so and offend their target audience.

The clip shows a man “playing” a Shamrock Shake like a set of bagpipes and there are multiple straws inserted in the shake cup to give the appearance of same. In the background, scenes of the countryside click through. The clip features the word “instrumint”, a play on the drink’s minty taste. Clever, right? Wrong. The man is wearing a Scottish style hat, playing a Scottish instrument to the very Scottish-sounding soundtrack. One of the scenes is of Stonehenge, which is in England, not Ireland. In short, just about everything in the clip is from somewhere other than Ireland.

The lessons are pretty clear. First, whoever did this could not have been Irish. When you’re targeting a specific group – and a country is a group! – have someone who is intimately familiar with the culture, preferably a member of the target group itself, review the work. The history of marketing is littered with mistakes by people who were writing in a language whose nuances eluded them or for a group of which they have no more than a passing knowledge. My favorite, by the way, is the introduction of the Chevy Nova into Mexico under that name. “No va” is Spanish for “won’t go”, not the best name for a car.

But let’s suppose this was done on purpose. Maybe the creators of this were trying to have the ad go viral and figured they could do that by making it so wrong. That’s a very dangerous game since the hit to McDonald’s reputation has been pretty severe, even as the ad gets tons of earned media. Setting yourself on fire in the street will get you lots of attention but it’s a tactic you can only use once since the damage is serious and usually fatal.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about the folks at Mickey D’s here on Foodie Friday and I thought that if I were to write about a drink that contains more calories than 4 Krispy Kreme donuts I’d do so on the basis of the chemical swamp it contains. Who would have thought that the ads could be worse than the drink itself?

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