Tag Archives: social media

May 16, 2012 · 8:45 am

Fadbook?

One of the themes we touch upon here is the repeating nature of events.  Or as Peter Allen put it, everything old is new again (so much so that Barenaked Ladieswrote a song by the same name).

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Today’s meditation on this concerns Facebook, or rather an interesting bit of research that came out from the AP and CNBC concerning Facebook’s future.  They conducted the poll in anticipation of Facebook going public and my immediate reaction was AOL‘s trajectory morphing to MySpace‘s morphing to…???   The AP piece summed it up with this question:

Is Facebook A Fad?

You’re laughing?  46% of the poll respondents believe Facebook  will fade away as new companies come along, and it’s not just the old farts – younger adults are no more apt than their older counterparts to expect Facebook’s long-term success; 51 percent think it will fade.

For those of us who have been in digital since the start of the commercial era, it’s not a weird question.  Fifteen years ago, one would have asked the same of AOL and could not have imagined that it would pretty much be a blip.  The rise and fall of MySpace is much more recent but illustrative.  So quit your laughing and think about how the nature of the beast is changing.  Facebook is going from a company built to attract and service folks like you and me to a company that’s built to attract and service marketers.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing except that Facebook seem to be bad at it.

You might have read that General Motors is pulling its advertising from Facebook.  That’s a $10 million deal — not massive in terms of value — but very embarrassing for the social network because apparently it was too hard for GM to quantify their ROI.  The poll data supports that thinking – 57% of users say they never click on ads or sponsored content, while 26 percent “hardly ever” click on them.

Like AOL long ago, there are some other underlying factors that might portend bad things.

  • Just 13 percent say they trust Facebook completely or a lot to keep their personal information private.
  • A large majority (59 percent) say they have little or no faith in the company to protect their privacy.
  • Even among the site’s most frequent users — those who use it multiple times a day —half say they would not feel safe making purchases through the site.

There’s another great analysis from Forrester here and I’m sure more will be written as Facebook’s IPO happens later this week.  So is Facebook a fad?  I’ll let you respond via the comments, but my thinking is that while “fad” might not be the right term, it’s definitely not invulnerable.  Given the underlying concerns from users and marketers, someone ought to spend an hour reviewing the history of AOL and recall that MySpace went from “the most popular site in the US” in 2006 to losing half its traffic between 2009 and 2010.  What’s your thinking?

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May 15, 2012 · 8:27 am

4 Ways To Anger Customers

A little research today although frankly it falls into the range of that common sense thing we talk about from time to time. The good folks at American Express have published some findings on how social media raises the stakes for customer service. You can read the full release herebut I wanted to focus on one aspect of their work in particular.

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Not surprisingly, Americans are growing more frustrated with customer service and businesses are hearing about it as consumers tell an increasing number of people about both their positive and poor service experiences.  How many of the folks you follow have reported on an interaction with a company?  What I found of particular note were the things Amex cited as the big four service gripes:

  • Rudeness:  An insensitive or unresponsive customer service representative – 33%
  • Passing the Buck: Being shuffled around with no resolution of the issue – 26%
  • The Waiting Game: Waiting too long to have an issue resolved – 10%
  • Being Boomeranged: Forced to continually follow-up on an issue – 10%

They’re all sort of cousins in the “we just don’t care about you as much as we do our own bottom line” family.  The key is to align the interests of the folks providing customer service of any sort with the customers themselves.  Pay them based on positive feedback, not on incremental sales.  Nearly half the respondents said that they will use social media to praise a company for a great experience (which sort of flies in the face of the widely held assumption that only complainers go public).  Nearly an equal number will vent publicly about a negative experience.  With other research telling us how most folks now do their pre-purchase research about brands and companies using social tools, none of us can afford to have anything out there that convinces consumers to do business elsewhere.

The study shows that folks who have used social media for customer service in the last year are willing to spend substantially more with companies they believe provide great service. They are also far more vocal about service experiences, both good and bad. Why aren’t we doing everything we can to be sure about the outcome?  Given the above “Big Four,” there’s still a way to go.

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May 10, 2012 · 8:58 am

More News From The Digital Divide

Another week, another study on how marketers are trying to keep pace with the changes in consumer media behavior.  This one comes from PulsePoint, a digital ad tech company, and finds that the same issues others have discovered over the last few years remain unsolved for the most part.  You can download a copy of the study here.  I think this quote sums up the key finding:

According to PulsePoint CMO Rose Ann Haran, “Consumers are moving freely across channels and devices, interacting with brands and content in real-time.  The digital industry is not flowing as easily with this liquid audience. Channel-centric technologies and processes are causing a divide between our marketing capabilities and our ability to truly engage the consumer in a real-time interactive manner.”

In other words, consumers are “fluid” and “channel-agnostic,” while the current state of digital marketing practices designed to reach them can be best described as being too “channel-centric.” It goes on to cite “overwhelming complexity” and a “lack of unified measurement” as key challenges in preventing the industry from being properly aligned with the consumer, and those challenges make it difficult to track consumers across channels.

My first reaction was “oh, boo hoo.”  Yes, those pesky consumers keep changing their habits and the ongoing game of attention hide-and-seek can be really frustrating.  But look at the opportunities that game has fostered, both in terms of new businesses that have emerged as well as new ways to engage consumers.  What this is really about is marketers’ inability to change their own business methods and models as rapidly as required.  Planning and buying are “silo-ed” in the words of the study.  There is a whiff of turf wars throughout, in my opinion – departments within agencies, agencies vs. one another, creative v. media – you know the drill.  Maybe you even live it!

Then there’s this: “Other factors driving the divide include a misalignment of priorities the industry sees as important to improving their digital marketing practices.”  It’s nice that research such as this is conducted regularly.  It’s an excellent mirror to those of us who are charged with staying in touch with and engaging consumers.  Now, let’s commit to doing something about it so the divide between marketing and those it’s meant to reach closes a lot more rapidly.

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