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Where does content fit in Facebook’s new marketing model?

12.03.05

While marketers everywhere seem to be focused on Facebook Timelines for brands, the latest changes to Facebook’s advertising model represent just as significant a change for brands – if not even more so.

How so, you ask? Let’s start by

A marketer’s journey on Facebook: from engagement to advertising

Facebook has a saying that, “this journey is 1% finished.” Following that mantra, if you look at the changes Facebook has made over the last year as a continuum, the company has significantly tilted the scales away from engaging content – from brands creating communities with their customers – and towards paid advertising.

There’s nothing new in the fact that the vast majority of user/brand interactions come through the news feed.  The fact is that few people actually visit your page on an ongoing basis – even those who do visit once, rarely do again. For that reason, capturing peoples’ “likes” at that time has been critical for a while, so companies can continue to interact with people in their newsfeeds. This, on its own, means that anything Facebook does that affects content is hugely significant for marketers.

Mid-way through 2011, the company changed its approach to determining what people saw in their newsfeeds, with the result that the number of people seeing posts from brands dropped significantly – by up to 75%, in fact. While many marketers may be focused on the nice shiny number of total “likes” they have, the reality is that brands’ posts are only seen by a small minority of their fans.

Sound crazy? While impressions/reach aren’t publicly visible numbers, Fangager put out an analysis of the “100 most engaging brands on Facebook” late last year, showing that even the engaging brands generally had between 0.3% and 2% “active fans”. Here’s the top ten:

Disclosure: several of these brands are Edelman clients

The average percentage of ‘active fans’ in the top ten most engaging brands is 1.5%. If you go by the maxim that 1% of people create content; 9% comment and 90% lurk, those numbers multiply up to roughly 16% of people seeing these brands’ content (consistent with the numbers that Facebook discussed at their fMC event last week..

I’ll say that again – even if you’re on the high end of the scale, only one in five fans of your Page will see your content.

Enter Facebook’s new advertising products. Distilled down to two points, the latest advertising announcements from Facebook are:

Simply put, Facebook first degraded brand content over the last year, and has now released a advertising products to let companies pay to offset the changes they’ve made.

Let’s think about this in terms of customer touchpoints. Before the latest round of changes, if you set aside the Open Graph there were four primary ways to proactively reach your company’s fans on Facebook:

  1. Content (proactive and engagement-focused)
  2. Paid advertising
  3. Creative assets (via tabs)
  4. Apps

While agencies made money from all of the above, Facebook only made money off one of those. Combined with the new Timeline for brands, Facebook in one fell swoop has both expanded the overlap of advertising with content, and has reduced the impact of other creative assets (for example, you can no longer direct people to a default tab other than your wall) in one fell swoop.

Implications of Facebook’s advertising changes

I’m not saying these changes from Facebook are a bad thing. Regardless, we can’t exactly blame Facebook for making them – Facebook is a business and, as much as users may like it, engaging content on its own doesn’t generate revenue for the business.

Still, companies (and community managers) do need to pay attention. Here’s what I think we’re likely to see:

  1. Staffing – community managers/analysts: Companies will need to apply new rigor to their content to optimize its performance in Facebook’s new ad products. While the more socially-advanced companies with significant investments are already doing this, this will become important for all companies with paid investments in Facebook. For those with smaller social media teams, that means community managers will find that stats and analysis are even more important skillsets, and that partnership with measurement teams is critical.
  2. Processes – integration and an “and, not or” approach: Success in this new Facebook will depend on even tighter integration between community managers, content teams and paid media in order to find the right balance of engagement, business results-driven content and advertising.
  3. Users – seeing more push-focused content:Yes, companies could promote engagement-focused content, but given that brands will be measuring the effectiveness of their advertising in driving business results, and weighing the opportunity cost of increased Facebook investment against other paid media, users are likely to see more push-focused posts with a clear call to action being published by brands for this purpose.
  4. Lazy – some companies go the paid route: Some companies will choose to take the easy route out. Rather than optimizing their content to increase engagement in order to drive reach, they’ll simply choose to go the paid route, investing in reach generator and the new premium ads to increase the visibility of their content. Whether this will be cost-effective remains to be seen.

Posted in: facebook, marketing, social media

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Smart Location-Based Marketing By Home Depot

11.07.03

Update: Sigh — turns out Ben was just larking around — my dreams are crushed. Still, even though this was a prank (#DammitLucier!), this is the sort of things that retailers who are starting to play around with location-based loyalty marketing should be considering.

Just saw this photo on my friend Ben Lucier’s Posterous site – hardware retailer Home Depot reserved a parking spot for him at his local store in the “Pro” parking section. Why? Because he was the mayor.

Smart way to reward their most loyal customer (well, the most loyal customer using Foursquare, anyway) with something that has zero cost to Home Depot but a nice benefit for the customer, all the while encouraging other people to compete for that benefit.

Posted in: location, marketing

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Yeah, Well Your Agency Is Killing Unicorns

11.04.26

Daniel Stein recently wrote an attention-grabbing post over at Digiday entitled “HypeBusters: PR Agencies Are Ruining Facebook.” His basic argument: PR agencies are boring and uncreative, and their attempts at engagement are doomed to fail. The right people to manage Facebook pages are, apparently ad agencies. Guess which he works for.

I’m not going to lie — I’m dismayed at the juvenile back-and-forth that’s going on between different marketing disciplines over social media, with posts like this one or like this from Search Engine Journal previously. Didn’t people ever learn how to play nicely with others?

A tale of false arguments

Let’s start with the particular post in question. The primary issue here is the false dichotomies that are put forward. Why does everything have to be black and white?

Why does content have to be purely either “news, offers and the occasional contest” or “developing a brand’s purpose”? Can’t it be a blend, with some variety?

Where is the evidence that PR agencies can’t “do” creative? Isn’t it possible that agencies of all stripes could be creative?

The reality is that multiple partners are often involved in a successful Facebook effort. We frequently work closely with agencies of multiple stripes, and often help clients to develop governance frameworks so that each can bring their respective strengths to the table across multiple activities within a single channel.

Rather than throw up false assumptions about other agencies, look around. These over-generalizations just don’t hold true.

Shades of grey

I could point to Facebook pages we manage with hundreds of thousands or even millions of fans; or to multiple highly-engaged Twitter accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers, and use that as evidence you that only PR agencies can do this well.

I could point to examples of advertising agency-driven properties that completely fail because there’s nothing but superficial style over substance, and use that as evidence that ad agencies are ruining social media.

This would fit with the approach of the posts I mentioned above.

I won’t, because neither of these claims are true. This isn’t black and white.

Integrate for success

People who argue that only their discipline can “do” social media and that XYZ discipline is ruining it either have no idea what they’re talking about or are lying to you to get attention.

I’ve argued for a long time that effective social media, conducted over the long term and with actual business value, is derived from the integration and cooperation of agency partners. It doesn’t come from petty bickering and competition — from “my agency type is better than yours” behaviour — between so-called partners who don’t play nicely in the sandbox.

Enough with the attention-grabbing BS headlines and false arguments of superiority, already. Acknowledge that different disciplines can learn from each other, that there’s no “one ring to rule them all” and work nicely with your agency partners to do the best job you can for the client.

You know, cooperate. Like adults do.

Posted in: marketing, pr, public relations, social media

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The Greatest TED Talk Riposte Ever Posted

11.04.11

This post was meant to be a regular “Monday Morning Reads” post, but then I found myself writing something a little more in-depth on one piece so I scrapped the rest. Enjoy…

A colleague of mine recently drew my attention to a TED Talk by Morgan Spurlock (you know, the guy behind Super Size Me and a host of other films). The talk is entitled, “The Greatest TED Talk Ever Sold.” If you have a spare 20 minutes, check it out:

So, here’s why I got a little… animated… then scrapped the rest of the Monday Morning Reads post and focused on this video:

  1. On one hand: Spurlock’s talk is entertaining, interesting and, well, funny. There’s a reason we know his name – he’s good at what he does.
  2. On the other hand: The talk is replete with broad, unsubstantiated false assumptions about the subject matter at the heart of the talk, i.e. marketing

Here’s my take…

The “Opportunity”

Spurlock lays out a host of reasons why companies wouldn’t want to get involved in his project, and then attacks them for not wanting to get involved. He even describes his TED Talk, which he invited companies to sponsor, as:

“My TED Talk that you have no idea what the subject is and depending on the content could ultimately blow up in your face especially if I make you or your company look stupid for doing it – that being said, it’s a very good media opportunity.”

He then suggests that the reason companies didn’t want to get involved was “transparency.” Umm… how about because it actually WASN’T a good “opportunity” for the companies? You giving them a bad offer doesn’t make them bad guys for not taking it.

“Reach” doesn’t cut it

The idea that this was a “very good media opportunity” depends on you only considering the reach of the movie, not the tone or content towards the people involved.

To say that this is a “good opportunity” would be like saying that the NRA should sponsor a Michael Moore movie. Sure, they’d be all over the footage, but you can be damn sure no-one would see them in a good light at the end of it.

Spurlock again displays that mis-perception towards the end of his talk, where he talks about the reach of coverage about his movie apparently 900 million impressions at the time. He suggests that that reach shows that agencies were wrong to avoid jumping on-board.

Here’s the thing: how many of those impressions would have benefited the (transparent) sponsors? How many of them would have delivered a benefit to those companies – how many talked about them or showed their products in any kind of way that would encourage purchase?

The “reach” of un-qualified coverage is useless. It’s like saying “guys, every newspaper in the world mentioned us. They all hated everything we do and recommended no-one ever buy our product, but who cares? They talked about us, so let’s pat ourselves on the back.”

Actually, my guess is that it was even less valuable than that. My guess (yes, just a guess) is that most company mentions in that coverage would be in passing, with no substance towards the companies other than to mention that they were involved within the broader context of the film (I’m sure there were exceptions, but suspect they were few).

It’s Paid Media, not Earned

I’ve written before about the transition that people need to understand when they ask for money from companies in return for coverage. When you do that, you move from “earned” media to “paid” media.

Brands don’t (and, in most cases, can’t) control earned media. That gives it greater credibility because the author can write whatever they want. Paid media (you know, when companies pay for inclusion)  is different. If you pay to be part of something, you’re going to want control over how you’re portrayed. Do you think Audi paid to be part of the movie Ronin (an old reference, but a goodie) without knowing the storyline or that their car would be portrayed in a good light?

This isn’t about transparency – I bet that if movies needed a disclaimer about who sponsored them, there wouldn’t be too many concerns – it’s about the value of the offer that’s given to them in return for the commitment. You want to take my money and then have the option of making me look ridiculous? Right. Let me get right on that.

</rant>

Ok, I’m done. The ironic part here is that I actually enjoyed the talk. However, the broad misperceptions in the presentation just begged to be corrected. I get that Spurlock’s films are out to provoke a reaction – he’s good at achieving that, and I think he’s good at what he does. Still, I thought it worth adding my two cents to this conversation, setting the record straight on a couple of things and doing it… y’know… transparently.

What do you think?

(Oh, BTW, Mr. Spurlock, you can count this post as about 50,000 “impressions” towards that reach number of yours. Just don’t consider the tone.)

Disclaimer: While my employer is mentioned in the talk (although it’s lumped into the “ad agency” descriptor… again, do your homework, please), I had no input into, or knowledge of, this discussion. This is my perception and not that of the people involved at the time.

Posted in: marketing

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Why Paying Bloggers For Posts Changes The Game

10.12.02

There’s been a lot of debate back and forth around bloggers (generally mommy bloggers, although they’re certainly not the only ones) receiving direct payment for posts over the last little while. The latest post to catch my eye was a controversial piece over at Mom Blog Magazine entitled Why PR People Get Paid And You Don’t.

I’ve shied away from this topic in the past, but after some interesting conversations I’ve had over the last few weeks I’m ready to weigh in.

A quick note up-front: I’ve been writing here for six years now. Over that time I’ve built this site up from a static site, that I coded by hand in Notepad, to a blog with 40,000 views each month.

While I’ve never accepted monetary payment for posting, I generally get several requests to incorporate ads each week. I get the attraction – it’s a lot of work to maintain a blog – and I don’t begrudge anyone from monetizing their site.

With that out of the way, on to the crux of the matter…

To put it simply, bloggers accepting (or demanding) payment for posts changes the game for them in several ways:

  • You shift from earned to paid media
  • You shift from content creator to service provider
  • You need to compete for budget

Let me explain further…

You shift from earned to paid media

If we break online communications into different spheres – owned, paid, earned and social media – PR has traditionally played in the “earned media” space. When PR people pitch a journalist on a story, we’re trying to “earn” that coverage.

Earned media brings with it lots of advantages. It’s highly credible, it’s long-term (it lives on) and it increasingly plays a role in product sales. On the flip side, though, earned media is near-impossible to control – in terms of quantity of coverage, of tone of the journalist/blogger’s coverage or of the content of the coverage. However, the benefits have traditionally outweighed the risks (hence PR people have jobs).

To journalists/bloggers, that means that when a PR person approaches them, they have control of how they react to the ask. They can turn it down entirely and write nothing, or they can write a positive, neutral or even negative piece if they so choose. That’s fine, because they’re producing editorial content. PR people accept that risk when they pitch.

When money exchanges hands, the situation changes. Suddenly you’re no longer playing in the “earned media” space. Now you’re in the “paid media” space. That changes the expectations. If brands pay for placement, they have different expectations to when they just pitch for coverage. Not only do they expect the post to appear, but they also have different expectations around control of content.

Update: Paid media also suffers from a draw-back of being less trusted than earned coverage. (thanks to Jen Zingsheim for noting this in the comments)

It’s not a black-and-white situation in reality – mainstream media is now adopting more of a pay-for-play model – however, brands do get control over key messages within those stories.

Simply put: you earn coverage; you pay for ads. You can’t have things both ways. If you accept payment, expect different conditions.

Your role in the situation changes

The earned/paid distinction also plays into the second of the key factors in this debate.

On the earned media side, the PR person is looking for a win-win situation – they’re looking to win through favourable coverage; meanwhile they’re looking to provide value to the blogger through content opportunities that fit their needs (so they’ll publish not just this time but also down the road).

Once we’re dealing in the paid media space, the situation changes. Suddenly, you’re not just the recipient of a pitch, who gets to decide what to do. You’re a person who wants payment to provide a service. That means you need to demonstrate value to the party that’s looking to purchase that service.

This means a shift in roles. The PR person becomes a client, just as someone buying ad space is a client of the publication selling the ads. Meanwhile, you (now as a service provider) have more of an obligation around quality.

This leads into the last key factor here…

You need to compete for budget

When companies allocate marketing budgets to PR, advertising, interactive and social programs, they make a decision on how to allocate those resources to get the best results.

When PR agencies come up with their plans, they consider how to get the best results for the budget they have. Sometimes that will incorporate a blogger outreach program. They make the decision that this is the best use of their budget.

When bloggers require payment in order to write a post, they add another decision point in the budgeting process. That isn’t, by itself, an issue. However, the result is that the blogger then finds themselves competing against other options for budget.

That’s right – you’re competing for budget. That competition means:

  • You need to demonstrate your value, and “well you want my coverage so I’m valuable” isn’t an appropriate response.
  • Your asking price needs to be based in reality – on the value you can provide. How can you demonstrate your influence? Again, on the earned side the PR pro needs to do that research to satisfy the client; once you become paid media the onus is also on you.
  • You’re up against paid media with established CPM and/or CPC figures, with stated audiences and at least a ball-park number of impressions an advertiser can expect.

Again, is this bad? No. The reality, though, is that when you ask for money for your service, that needs to come at the expense of something else. Your value is therefore going to get compared to other investments. This can be a tough dose of reality for some bloggers, especially those with small audiences, who are used to getting the VIP treatment from brands.

Payment changes the situation

The bottom line here is that, when you ask for payment in order to write a post, the situation changes. You’re no longer just a blogger/journalist from whom a company is seeking earned coverage. You’re  a media property from whom they’re buying coverage.

Bloggers who decide to go this route need to understand that this is the situation. There’s nothing wrong with seeking to monetize your site, but if you’re not ready to deal with this reality then you could be in for a cold, harsh wake-up call.

There are plenty of different sides to this, of course. What do you think?

Posted in: blogger relations, communications, marketing, pr, public relations

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Interview: Aaron Goldman – Everything I Know about Marketing I Learned From Google

10.09.09

Aaron Goldman is the author of Everything I Know about Marketing I Learned From Google (affiliate link). Before declaring free agency earlier this week, Aaron was the founder and principal at Connectual, where he put lessons learned from Google to good use in digital marketing consulting and matchmaking.

As part of a blog tour celebrating the book launch, I took the opportunity to put a few questions to Aaron about his views on Google’s approach to marketing, and how its own social media activities have contributed to its success. You can find more information about the book at GoogleyLessons.com. I’m working my way through a review copy of the book right now; look for a review on here in the next couple of weeks.

With all of the companies taking innovative approaches to marketing nowadays, why did you choose to write about Google?

5 main reasons:

1. It’s a company I know intimately. I worked closely with Google during my 5-ish years at Resolution Media, helping brands manage paid and organic search as well as serving on Google’s agency advisory council.

2. Google’s ubiquitous. Everyone knows Google. Everyone uses Google. So it’s a company that people are familiar with.

3. Google is incredibly successful. Innovation and success don’t always go hand in hand. In Google’s case, they do. That makes it a company that many businesses look up to and aspire to be.

4. Google has a mystique and intrigue about it. People want to peek under the hood and see what makes the Googleplex tick.

5. People don’t usually think about Google as a company that does much marketing. Most folks think Google just had a great product and benefited from word of mouth. But, just because you don’t see Google ads all over your TV, doesn’t mean it’s not marketing. A lot of Google’s marketing doesn’t have media dollars attached to it.

All that said, many of the “Googley Lessons” in my book aren’t necessarily about Google’s marketing. They’re basic tenants that Google does well in other facets of its business that marketers can learn from — things like, “Relevancy Rules.”

If there’s one key insight marketers should take from your book, what would it be?

Marketing is more than just advertising.

I know I’m preaching to the choir here as this is a battle you PR pros often have to fight all the time when brands dump time and money into paid media when they could be getting better results with a little more focus on earned media.

Your book mentions the importance of data. PR has long suffered as a discipline that struggles with data and measurement. What can we as PR practitioners learn from Google’s approach to using data?

The lessons in chapters 8, 9, and 10 of my book are Test Everything, Track Everything, and Let the Data Decide.

Google is always testing. At one point, it tested 41 different shades of blue for its toolbar.

Of course, without tracking, testing is useless. Google has a bunch of great tools that marketers can use to track their efforts.

And Google doesn’t rely on intuition or gut feels. It lets the data decide the winner in each of these tests.

PR pros would be wise to take Google’s approach to continual tweaking and optimization. What worked yesterday will not work tomorrow.

And, while tracking is certainly not as easy in PR as in advertising and media, there are plenty of ways to measure impact. The key of course, is to measure actual impact — not impressions.

Now, every brand will define “impact” differently based on corporate goals but I can guarantee you no company has a goal to get 1 million Facebook likes or 1,000 retweets.

What impact did these social media indicators have on brand awareness, preference, and sales?

You feature insights from numerous marketing luminaries in your book, among them Avinash Kaushik, Google’s analytics evangelist. How do you see web analytics fitting into the modern marketing system?

Web analytics is one of the ways to do the tracking and measurement I just preached about.

And Avinash will be the first to tell you how important it is to focus on the right metrics.

When I interviewed him, Avinash told me that marketers put far too much emphasis on “input” or “acquisition” metrics like page rank or clicks. As he put it, “true glory” comes from “output” or “behavioral” metrics like bounce rate and average order value.

Going forward, the role of analytics will only increase as marketers create data-driven cultures.

How do you think Google’s social media communications activities – its numerous blogs and its Twitter presence, for example – have fed into its success?

I think Google’s social media strategy has made the company more approachable.

3 of Google’s core values are openness, transparency, and authenticity.

By having a blog and Twitter account for just about every business unit and product, Google is able to engage people in a “non-corporate” way.

Google doesn’t just use these channels to beat its chest and blast out promotional messages. It shares works-in-progress, product bugs and fixes, behind-the-scenes stories, etc.

This gives people a warm and fuzzy about Google that they just don’t get from, say, Apple. Can you imagine Apple blogging about products still in development or tweeting about product bugs?

Of course, this speaks to the difference in cultures between Google and Apple. Google is all about launch, test, fail, improve. Apple would never launch without full testing and QA.

Social media as a channel is ripe for the Google approach. If you wait to polish every single message and interaction, you’ll have missed the window of opportunity to engage a customer or potential customer — not to mention come off as unauthentic and insincere.

Posted in: books, communications, marketing, pr, public relations

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The Challenge – And Risk – Of Ad Agencies’ Growing Interest In Social Media

10.07.20

Too much has already been written about the recent Old Spice foray into social media. However, one aspect of the campaign has escaped most commentary – the firm – Wieden + Kennedy – is an ad agency. Not a PR agency, or a social media agency. An ad agency.

On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal ran an interesting story on the growing interest of ad agencies in the social media space. As they put it,

“As more and more advertising dollars flow into social media, some Madison Avenue firms are seeking to grab a piece of the action.”

The story cites several examples of ad agencies who are making a move to grow this side of their business. As they do so, they are moving into direct competition with the PR firms and social media agencies who, until recently, they have partnered with on client projects.

Many public relations folks have harped on the idea that PR agencies are best placed to serve clients’ social media needs because of their focus on relationships and conversations as part of their core business. If nothing else, Isaiah Mustafah’s wonderful social media tour de force last week proved that ad agencies can get it right online, with a combination of creativity, comedy and captivating two-way interaction. Meanwhile, however, the pragmatists among us have been observing the blurring of the lines for quite some time. I’ve argued, for example, that PR agencies can learn a lot from ad agencies including:

  1. How to better scale programs;
  2. How to plan and execute more creatively;
  3. That measurement is critical;
  4. How to effectively target their key audiences;
  5. How to better target messages.

Four challenges to PR firms from ad agencies

Public relations agencies – even those who have been working in the space for several years now – can’t ignore this evolution. The increasing attention of ad agencies raises several critical challenges from a PR and broader communications standpoint:

  1. Advertising agencies typically command bigger budgets for programs. That’s nothing new and PR people have long gnashed their teeth about that fact. However, when social media is brought into the mix, the larger budgets mean that ad agencies have more visibility, more flexibility and the potential for more creativity than PR agencies may enjoy thanks, not to their credentials or ability (though I’m not slighting them), but due to the source of their funding.
  2. Ad agencies have access to the marketing function, which often controls communications in general within organizations. That means that they will often have a shorter route to the top and, linked to the above point, may have greater influence with clients.
  3. Ad agencies are built around strong creative teams. They have the creative chops that can rival those of any PR agency.
  4. Control of the marketing side of communications means that advertising agencies have access to other assets that PR agencies may not have – graphics, logos, actors (once again, see Old Spice)

Risks if PR and ad agencies don’t work together

So, the stage is set for quite the tug of war. Trouble is, I suspect that no-one will win if a tug of war is what happens. In fact, a battle like this may hurt both sides as agencies wrestle over the grey area in client relationships. The risks of not learning from each other, and from not learning to place nicely together, are several:

  1. Fragmented social media efforts: A lack of cooperation between advertising and PR agencies, or between marketing and corporate communications functions, can lead to each doing their own thing in social media. That leads to fragmented, siloed failures as organizations roll out poorly coordinated, ineffective campaigns. As Forrester Research analyst Sean Corcoran outlined in December 2009, the different forms of media each have their own pros and cons. I suggested earlier this year that organizations need to effectively coordinate the various media channels and their complementary characteristics to  make them work together and to obtain optimal results.
  2. Sub-optimal results reduce future budgets: Siloed campaigns lead to sub-optimal results, as the weaknesses of each channel remain present without being offset by other channels. That leads to a reluctance from companies to invest in unproven technologies and techniques, leading to lower budgets for these programs in the future. Traditional approaches, which are losing efficacy over time, will continue to deliver similarly sub-optimal results in the long-term. Companies run a risk of a downward spiral with no end winner.
  3. Short-term spikes less effective: Ad agencies excel at generating attention around ideas, but can sometimes struggle more with long-term efforts – this is where the PR agencies’ focus on long-term relationships comes in, as they can plug the gaps in the timelines with sustaining tactics. Old Spice’s re-branding effort, which even has my girlfriend suggesting I try the product, will fail if it simply stops now. If that happens no-one beyond award judges will remember it in a few months. To really entrench their efforts, the agencies involved need to support the initial spike in attention with tactics that will maintain that velocity over the long term.

Conclusion

Agencies need to agree to work together to integrate their communications approaches. It can be tough – the bottom line is that their business objectives often conflict with each other. However, neither is usually “the bad guy” and it can work. If that doesn’t happen, clients need to establish a framework that ensures agencies work with each other, rather than against each other, with cooperation established as a key criteria when evaluating agency performance. For that to happen, companies need to resolve their own internal conflicts between marketing and public relations. Good agencies can help clients make that happen.

What do you think? Have you experienced this blurring of the traditional lines between agencies? How well do you think agencies can hope to work together, given their conflicting objectives?

Posted in: communications, marketing, public relations, social media

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Four Reasons Your Social Media Marketing Campaign Sucks

10.05.25

Listen; engage; develop.

That’s the three-step approach we recommend companies take when it comes to approaching social media marketing activities for their organization. While you’ll hear nuances in terminology and small differences in approach, you’ll see thought leaders in our industry take a similar approach. Brian Solis, for example, talks about “listening, observing and learning” as the bedrock steps in organizational use of social media in his book “Engage” (which I’m currently reading).

You know what you don’t see anyone recommending? Build, promote, abandon.

However, we’re still seeing social media marketing campaigns built with this implicit process. A few tell-tale signs when we encounter them:

  • A short-term focus, often manifested in a desire for “disposable properties” and a reluctance to sustain any kind of presence after the end of the campaign.
  • The desire for campaign-based tactics with no existing presence of any kind.
  • A one-way broadcasting focus, aiming to blast messages out to the target audience.

Granted, a campaign-based approach can work with specific influencer outreach, but it’s far more effective if the team doing it is able to reach out to those people consistently over a long period of time and hence is able to build a relationship with those people. In general though, the problems with this approach, and the reasons that you don’t hear anyone advocating for it, are four-fold:

1. It takes time or money to attract an audience

Social media tools don’t just let you flip a switch and reach thousands or millions of people. TV, radio and print advertising lets you do that; Facebook, Twitter and blogs don’t.

Social media lets you identify, create and tap into communities of like-minded people. However, this doesn’t happen organically overnight. So, any campaign that starts from scratch and aims for quick results needs to be supported by other forms of media in order to drive people to the social properties in the hope that people engage. This is often counter to the organizational goal of a campaign: driving to a single conversion point, requires resources to be diverted from the primary goal and in doing so reduces the ROI of the campaign.

2. You build an audience, only to throw it away at the end

As I just mentioned, it takes either time or money to build an audience through social media tools. By scrapping the properties you’ve developed at the end of the campaign, you’re throwing all of that investment down the drain. That’s like building an email list then deleting it as soon as you’re done building it.

A much better approach would be to drive people to a long-term property which you can adapt and tailor for short-term purposes, for example a long-term Facebook page or a corporate blog. That way you can foster and continue to engage your community over the long-term, with the benefit of increased loyalty, further conversions and improved perceptions of your brand. What’s more, next time you have an announcement or campaign, you’ll have a pre-established group of people there who have opted-in to receive your updates.

3. Social media is earned media, not paid media

Much of the problem stems from the mindset of the people who often drive the social media bus in corporations. If you think back to our social media marketing ecosystem and Forrester’s breakdown of media types, marketers are often most used to paid media – immediately scaleable and controllable.

Social media isn’t primarily paid media – it’s owned and earned media. Often these lines may blur – you may do interesting things with your owned properties (which are long-term relationship builders) while earning attention in other forms of media with your approach there.

Trying to fit a paid media approach to earned and owned media is akin to trying to saw a plank of wood with a hammer. You’re doing it wrong.

4. It’s one-way, not two-way

These campaign-based approaches still take the old one-way approach to engaging online – do something funny or interesting in the hope that it will “go viral” and reach thousands of people. There’s some value in doing that, but there’s so much more potential to social media that companies really only scratch the surface if they take a purely campaign-based approach to social media.

For example, where’s the potential for business process redesign, product enhancements or customer service improvements in a siloed promotional campaign? There’s very little – which means you’re missing the bigger picture. You can use these tools as one-shot promotional tactics, but you’re missing the forest for the trees if you do so.

Do you agree?

Simply put, campaign-based social media without the basic foundation of an ongoing presence to support it is, more often than not, doomed to fail.

What do you think?

Posted in: marketing, social media, strategy

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Evolving the Social Media Marketing Ecosystem

10.03.08

In January this year I put forward my thoughts on the social media marketing ecosystem in which we operate in 2010. It looked like this:

While this relatively complex model is great to help shape the thinking of organizations wrestling with a plethora of products, it’s also a little complex for organizations without those massive resources. These organizations, which comprise the majority of the market, just don’t have the staff, resources or time to deal with such a complex set of properties.

So, I went back to the drawing board – not to re-think the model, but to boil it down to one simple enough for the majority of people to digest. The result: a simplified model of the social media marketing ecosystem:

All of the complex dynamics within the original system are still accounted for within this simplified diagram, but the framework as a whole is much easier to digest.

In addition to earned, paid and owned media (summarized as “company website” and properties on other sites), this model has an additional sphere on top of Sean Corcoran’s framework, on top of which the original ecosystem model was developed – social networks. This raises the question – should Corcoran’s model have an additional row? What might it look like? (thanks to Joe Thornley for prompting this line of thinking)

It’s a tough call. For one thing, the “social media” row might look a lot like the other rows in many ways; borrowing aspects from owned and earned media in particular. For another, any definition of the role of social media is surely going to be controversial.

I’m a glutton for punishment though, so I put together a starting point – Corcoran’s model, revised with a new row for social media.:

Does social media deserve its own row here, or does its rapid evolution over the past few years simply mean it is intertwined among the other media types in today’s communications environment?

What do you think?

Posted in: communications, marketing, pr, public relations, social media, social networks, strategy

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eBook on 2010 Content Marketing Trends and Predictions

10.01.21

Want to get some insights into what some of the smartest people in marketing are thinking 2010 holds in store?

Along with nearly 40 other smart folks including Radian6′s David Alston and Tipping Point Labs’ Andrew Davis I contributed my thoughts to this eBook of content marketing trends and predictions published by Marketo and ClickDocuments.

Check it out and let me know what you think! (my thoughts are on slide 36)

ClickPredictions 2010

Posted in: marketing

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