Tag Archives: Social media marketing

August 13, 2012 · 9:25 am

Stop Behaving Like A Brand

A research study I read last week got me thinking about how I work with my clients on their use of Facebook and other social media.

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

Wildfire, a company that makes software for social media interaction (Facebook contest pages, for example) conducted an analysis of 10,000 social media campaigns over the last 9 months and focused on the top 10% of performing efforts.  The point was to identify strategies that seemed to work well.  If you’re interested you can get the report (registration required) here.   As reported by The RealTime Report:

Wildfire finds that for each person who shares content from a campaign on Facebook, 14 new people will learn about that campaign in their news feed. In addition, for every 10 advocates (those who are capable of bringing new followers to a campaign) a brand gets to join its social campaign, they’ll get 13 other people to interact with the campaign in some way. Overall, brands that are highly effective in engaging with advocates and content-sharers via campaigns see three times the interaction (Likes, shares, comments) on their Facebook pages when compared to other brands.

Impressive although I wonder how the transition to Timeline and the inability to set a contest or other Wildfire-type tab as the default on a brand page has impacted the results.  Even so, only 17% of fans share brand activity.  Then again, why should they?  Too many brands are focused on building a bigger audience (generating “Likes”) and not on any sort of collaboration among the fan base.  The companies who use Facebook and other social media well aren’t using those platforms as glorified broadcast channels.  Ask yourself what brands you follow (if you follow any) engage you.  I don’t mean they keep you coming back looking for discounts but they almost seem to be people.  You’re interested in what’s going on with them.

One of the strategies suggested in the report is to provide clear calls to action.  I don’t disagree, but how many of your friends ONLY post messages asking you to sign a petition or do something else that they feel is important but might have little relevance to you?  Providing exclusive content is a great strategy but not if that content only has value to the brand.  What’s the user benefit?

Social media isn’t like other media.  As a company, it’s less about you than it is your consumer.  That can be a hard change of perspective but it’s one companies need to make.  Stop behaving like a brand and start behaving like a friend.  I know of companies that do this well – tell me which ones you think are on that list.

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August 9, 2012 · 9:07 am

What’s The Most Valuable Social Network?

Like many of you I’ve been following the ups and downs of Facebook‘s recent IPO and the stock’s performance subsequently. I thought about it again this morning as I read a release from The Incyte Group (via Research Brief) that states consumers want deeper connections with brands – but open social networks are not where they want to build these connections.  Facebook is the biggest of the bunch and while marketers put over $3B on to Facebook’s revenue line last year, if you speak with many marketers the ROI on that spending is unimpressive.  The notion that sort of pops into my head about marketers searching for the best social network to reach consumers is that of a drunken sailor bouncing from bar to bar, spending a little cash along the way, looking to get lucky.  Facebook to Twitter to Pinterest to LinkedIn.  Turns out that’s not what holds the most promise when we’re talking about reaching them via social networks:

(Consumers) do not expect, or even want, these communities to be part of an existing social network like Facebook or LinkedIn. Instead, their preference is for customer communities that are:

  • Run separately from open social networks, but have strong linkages to them so they can easily share information with like-minded friends
  • Proactively managed by companies
  • Tightly integrated with the company’s website

So what, in my mind, is the most valuable social network?  Amazon.  Think about it – much of the time when I’m on Amazon I’m not  actually sticking things in a shopping cart.  I’m researching.  I’m reading reviews to discover new books or music.  I’m commenting in things I’ve bought or used that are for sale.  When you look at the research findings, Amazon meets all the criteria plus it closes the circle by offering products for sale.  It’s not an ad-supported model but their sales were over $12B.  For a quarter. Several times what Facebook or any other social network’s were.

Amazon is the most valuable social network for marketers because it is for consumers.  Now ask the next logical question:  what’s your strategy on Amazon and is it the best one when you think about it as social and not as commerce?  Do you agree with my thinking here?

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July 26, 2012 · 11:37 am

How NOT To Do Social Media

 

Sometimes you see something that reminds you to start a folder called “stupid corporate tricks.”

Chick-Fil-A

(Photo credit: Link576)

What I’m writing about today would be top of that heap.  In fact, it sets a new kind of standard for stupid behavior but let’s see what you think.

Gizmodo published a piece yesterday about Chick-Fil-A and their social efforts.  As you might know, that company is engaged in a controversy with the gay community over same-sex marriage.  Now since we don’t do politics here, let’s put aside the cause of the controversy and just acknowledge that there is one.  This issue caused another company – The Jim Henson Company – to announce that it would no longer allow Chick-Fil-A to distribute miniature muppets in its children’s meals.  Again, let’s not argue right,wrong, good, or bad – those are the facts.  As a preemptive move, Chick-Fil-A announced it was ceasing to distribute the toys because of a safety issue – kids were getting their fingers stuck in the puppets.  With me so far?

Now comes the business part.  On Chick-Fil-A’s Facebook page, there were quite a few comments.  One commenter accused the company of making up a lie about the cause and asked them to admit they were dumped because they were “bigots.”  I suppose we could have a long chat here about how to handle negative comments in social media and that would be a valuable discussion.  However, I bet we would all agree that one way we would never endorse is to have a PR staffer create a fake Facebook account in the personality of a teenaged girl and respond with corporate talking points through that mechanism.  Want to guess what Chick-Fil-A did?

The company denied having done it.  However, the account was created hours before it began posting and the profile picture is from a stock photo house – a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that this is not a real person.  Regardless, it’s a lesson on how NOT to handle a problem is social media.  Yes, we need to respond quickly but not by hiding or lying about who is talking.  Transparency is one imperative; knowing that if you’re using social you no longer control the conversation is another.

I don’t suppose we’ll know for sure if this was a corporate flack or not.  We do know for sure that in addition to the original controversy there now is another.  Thoughts?

 

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