Tag Archives: twitter

January 16, 2013 · 11:49 am

A Social Marketing Study

I’ve been meaning to write about the Chief Marketer 2012 Social Marketing Study for a little while now.  Even though it came out a couple of months back, what it found is pretty relevant and I think you might find some of those findings relevant to what might be on your marketing mind.  At least I hope so!

As one might infer from the name, the topic is brands’ use of social media for marketing purposes.  You can get the study by clicking this link (registration required) but here are some of the key findings:

  • 76% of overall respondents to the survey said their brands were conducting some level of marketing within social media, and a further 16% reported plans to begin do so by the end of this year, making for a potential social marketing contingent of 92%.
  • More than half of respondents cite the difficulty of calculating an accurate return on their social marketing outlays as a prime frustration with the channels. That difficulty in turn grows out of their second most often expressed complaint in this year’s survey: the difficulty of accurately tracking sales to social campaigns. Those response rates held true for both B2C and B2B marketers.
  • Marketers are also troubled by issues of content: specifically, by the amount of time their staffers spend curating social media and by the need to keep social media supplied with a constant stream of new, fresh, engaging content.

Other not so surprising data points are that the primary purpose marketers have for using social is to drive web traffic and that most of their efforts are on the big three social sites: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  What all of this said to me was not so much about how quickly marketers adopted social as a channel but how their efforts are really just sort of fumbling along.  Not every brand should be on Facebook yet all seem to be.  While I’m a firm believer in having measurable outcomes to help with ROI calculations, it seems from the study as if the standard to which social investments as being held are out of whack with both how social is being deployed as well as with the standards applied to other channels.  Finally, the emphasis on creating new content is a good one but it sounds to me as if that content is being used in the context of social media as a megaphone – yet another broadcast medium.  I could not disagree more with that approach.

Does your company use social media for marketing?  Are the study’s findings in line with your experience?  Am I missing anything?

Enhanced by Zemanta

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, digital media

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

December 20, 2012 · 10:58 am

Who Is Working For Whom?

Have you ever been in a clothing store where the customers were busy stitching together the goods?  Maybe there is a guy in the corner screening designs on to T-shirts or a grandmother doing embroidery on a scarf.  How about a restaurant where the customers cook the food (OK – I have been to one of those – many Korean places let you grill at the table but still…)?

I ask this because it’s something pretty common in the digital world.  After all, what would Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Quora, and dozens of other sites be without the user-generated content that makes them worth a visit?  Sure, each of those sites provides the platform and the tools with which to interact, but if no one ever posted anything what would they be?

What’s triggering this are a couple of things.  First, the Instagram fracas I discussed yesterday.  Second, Twitter is deigning to let users download all of their tweets as if Twitter had anything at all to do with the content itself.  It got me thinking of all the crappy students who got paired up with smart kids in school and got an “A” because the smart kid did all the work and wouldn’t let the team fail.  The least one can do is to have an appreciation of and respect for the horse that got you here.  The platform is a “C” student – it’s along for the ride in most cases.  The importance of the content to those sending and receiving it doesn’t change based on the platform although the platform can help get it into a form that makes it more digestible.

When any of us who run businesses start minimizing the contributions our customers make to us, we’re in trouble.  In the case of many digital businesses, where the customers literally make the stuff on which the business depends, we should be thinking of as many ways to reward those folks and how to say “thank you” each and every day.  Screwing around with privacy or your data use policy or being obnoxious about using your customers as currency (even though we all know we’re being sold) is a sure way to blow up the business.  You with me?

Enhanced by Zemanta

1 Comment

Filed under digital media, Helpful Hints, Reality checks

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

November 13, 2012 · 10:46 am

Service Vs. Social

When you’re connecting with your friends and relatives on Facebook or other social media, do you think of it as marketing?  I don’t.  I’m not certain what I call it but if marketing is the communication of a product’s value I’m definitely not trying to convey my value as a person to others.  Not consciously anyway.

Why I’m asking the question is our old friend “social media marketing.”  There was another study released a week or so ago, this one by the good folks at NM Incite (which is a joint venture between Nielsen and McKinsey so they ought to know!).  It covered customer service via social media and found (as summarized in this article) that:

The majority of Twitter and Facebook users — 83% and 71%, respectively — expect a response from a brand within the same day of posting. Some 71% of consumers who experience a quick and effective response are more likely to recommend that brand to others, compared with 19% who do not receive any response… The biggest issue: 36% report having problems solved quickly and effectively, while only 14% report that the company responds quickly but does not resolve the issue, and 10% report never receiving a response at all.

That data is presented in the context of a positive experience leading to positive posts which can be shared across other social spheres.   In other words, marketing.  What I find interesting is that this information  along with some additional thinking on social, is more about serving the brand’s own needs than those of the audience.  As I postulated at the top, while I’m very happy to help out my connections in any way I can I’m not monitoring social media with a marketing mindset.  Unless and until brands can approach social as we non-digital, non-corporate entities do (read that as humans), brands will always be seen much as we do a social connection we made at a party many years ago and with whom we have little or no bond.  Those connections are kind of creepy and I, for one, always wonder why I even have them.  A lot of folks “unfriend”, hide or block those people and you might not even know it if you are the one blocked.  Ouch, especially if you’re a brand.

If we’re going to use social media to connect with consumers, I can’t think of a better reason to do so than customer service.  Yes, that can be a gateway to shared, positive experiences, just as it can precipitate a storm of bad comments if done badly.  It’s not something I’d approach with a marketing mindset if you’re trying to humanize the brand.  Unless, of course, all of your real friends use their accounts mostly to sell you insurance, real-estate, or used cars.  Then you just might need a few new friends!

Enhanced by Zemanta

Leave a comment

Filed under digital media

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,