Tag Archives: Social media marketing

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 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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