Tag Archives: Social media marketing

July 24, 2012 · 8:41 am

Painting A More Complete Picture

Two pieces from eMarketer caught my eye last week.  Both have to do with marketers’ usage of social media.  From the first, you might be tempted to short Facebook stock and wonder why Google is spending so much time on G+.  From the second, you might just realize that once again we find that getting beyond a sexy headline and into some facts can help paint a very different picture.

The first piece was all gloom and doom:

Social Media Usage Plateaus Among Marketers

Oh no!  Is this whole sector of the digital economy heading right down the tubes??:

When the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) surveyed US marketers this year, 90% said they were using social networks for their efforts—about even with last year, at 89%. While this percentage has risen dramatically since 2007, when just 20% of marketers used social media, growth has plateaued—and shifted to other new digital media platforms instead.

It goes on to talk about mobile and location-based services.  Of course, it also mentions that the investment in social was $3.63 billion in the US and over $4 billion more in the rest of the world. And that’s just paid ad spending.  Which leads to the other piece, which asks the obvious question:

What Are Marketers Spending on Social Media?

It turns out that:

most marketers have less than 20% of their marketing budget set aside for outreach on social sites—including advertising and maintaining a social media presence…While these percentages may seem small, marketers reported that budgets were increasing. AdAge and Citigroup found that 72.9% of respondents said they expected their overall social media budget to increase over the next year. This is in line with data from Useful Social Media, which, in April 2012, found that 54% of US companies planned to increase their social media budgets by up to 25% in 2012.

If 90% of marketers are, in fact, already using social (and there’s an entire book to be written on how badly most of them are doing so), of course the growth rate is slow – there’s hardly any room to grow.  If nearly 3/4 of them are expanding their budgets, the dollars flowing to social are going to be the envy of many other media.  It’s on the social companies and the marketers’ agencies (and consultants!) to help develop metrics and other criteria to assure and measure success so the investment pays off.

Interesting when we get past the headlines and start asking questions, right?

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June 19, 2012 · 8:50 am

Fear Of Flying

I used to travel by airplane a lot. 100,000 miles in a year was not unusual for a while there.

English: The view from a window of an airplane...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In general I got used to flying but like a lot of people I always had the panic button go off when we’d hit a rough patch or when landing in so-so conditions.

I bring this up today because a number of pieces I’ve been reading in corporate uses of social media remind me of the primary driver behind that occasional fear of flying: the sense of not being in control can be terrifying.

Media, and marketing media in particular, have always been subject to enormous control.  After all, what’s more important than the company message and how it’s presented?  Using social media is like raising a child.  You do the best you can before you send it out into the world, but once it’s out there anything can happen.

I’m struck by how many companies are investing in social media (according to one study, as many as 23 team members supporting social in big companies) and yet they might be doing so incredibly inefficiently.  I’ve found that social media teams tend to be decentralized and they often are a mix of in-house staff (who may or may not have much training), consultants and even community members. As a result there’s often confusion and off-message posts.  And that’s before the social sphere starts responding.  Marketers are doing a better job of monitoring relevant social activity but are often terrorized by what comes back (ask McDonald’s, LG, and other’s who’ve had hashtags hijacked).

We still need to get from point A to point B quickly so we get on the airplanes.  It’s the same with social media: we need to engage our customers and potential customers and social is becoming a major part of the marketing plan.  We make airplanes safer – we can do the same with social by doing a better job of monitoring and measuring results (and stop thinking that “likes” and “followers” are good metrics!).  We’re never going to get full control of either the plane or the social sphere, but we can get on board knowing we’ve done everything we can to assure a safe trip.

You on board?

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May 31, 2012 · 8:48 am

Likejacking

Fascinating piece in Business Week on some of the spam practices within social media.  While the focus is on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, it reminds all of us who create content sites that we need to be vigilant about protecting our sites and our users from these dirt bags.  The piece cites an executive from an anti-spam software company who stated that spammers create as many as 40 percent of the accounts on social media sites. About 8 percent of messages sent via social pages are spam, approximately twice the volume of six months ago.  Because the email providers have become pretty good about filtering out obvious spam, the spammer have moved on to social.

What they’re doing now is embedding code that forces a “like” into a link to a page with something such as a video as bait.  Likejacking.  On Twitter, it’s provocative text linking to spam; on Pinterest it’s a photo that links to a virus or other spam.  I don’t think many of us are engaged in doing this – it seems to be a few rotten apples, some of whom have been sued.  Or are we?

There is still a tendency for marketers to use social media as we used to use traditional media – we talk, they listen.  We broadcast messages and wait for the register to ring.  Today, doing that on a Facebook brand page or within a Twitter feed is a sure way to get blocked, unfriended, hidden, or ignored.  To a certain extent, any sort of one-sided discussion is seen as spam in many folks’ minds.

We spend too much time wondering if social is marketing or PR or customer service.  We might argue about which department ought to control it.  Those are good discussions to have but what we can’t be doing in the interim is flooding our fans’ news feeds with off-target messages about us when we ought to be listening and engaging where appropriate with them.    Otherwise, how are we different from the likejackers?

Thoughts?

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