11.06.06
Check out this infographic – the first thing I’ve seen really trying to put a number on the true cost and return of social media activities.
Is it perfect? No. Is it an interesting kick-off point for a discussion? Certainly.
What do you think of it?
Source: Focus. (Good to see Danny Brown referenced in here, too)
11.05.16
Forrester recently published a report entitled “The Purchase Path of Online Buyers.” Normally I’m a fan of Forrester’s reports, but this one left me scratching my head.
The report looks at transaction data from 15 clients of a marketing agency (let’s ignore that built-in bias, and convenient product placement in the recommendations, for the sake of this post) to draw conclusions about buyer behaviour including:
“Hope for the best, but expect the worst with social.”
(Not surprising that it caught my eye, huh?)
The more I thought about, it the more I was left confused at Forrester’s characterization of the data, especially given the earlier warning about last-click measurement.
Where to begin?
The report doesn’t actually give any detail as to the form the data that was used took. How did they track referrers, especially those two levels deep? Could they identify traffic that came from mobile social apps or from popular desktop apps such as TweetDeck, etc? From the methodology it sounds like they used the agency’s own models to estimate the data, but really we have no idea.
At no point in the report does it say that (a) the companies were engaged in any sort of social media activities, (b) the form that those activities took (c) the scale and reach that those activities had, or (d) the quality of those activities.
How are we supposed to just agree with the conclusion that social media drove minimal sales if we don’t know what form that social media took, if any? It’s like saying “media relations drove minimal sales” without saying whether the organization actually did any media relations.
Hell, the numbers could actually be a good thing - if I wasn’t engaged in any form of social media but it still drove 2% of my sales, that might actually be a sign that I should begin to invest in it.
In my opinion, brands make a mistake when they consider social media as purely conversion-driven tools. Social media provides numerous potential benefits besides end-of-funnel conversion, including:
Related to the last point, companies should consider the average person’s mindset when they’re using social media.
When you’re using Facebook or Twitter, for example, are you often looking for a link to take me to the best place to purchase something? Probably not. If you’re in a purchase-focused mindset, you’re more likely to be looking for reviews or recommendations from other people.
Once you receive them, maybe you’ll dig around for product information on the recommendation, then look for somewhere to buy it.
For example, today I asked Twitter whether I should buy a LiveScribe pen so I could capture my notes in Evernote:
Sure enough, I got a bunch of points of view in return:
Note: None of those responses offer a way to click through to purchase. Still, even though these results affected my likelihood to purchase, if I were to purchase the pen (which I may), a search engine would likely get the credit — even though search has done nothing to influence my actions up to this point — as I would use Google to find the company’s website.
Forrester seems to be ignoring its own warning that tactics other than email and search may be under-attributed, and passing judgement without fully considering the context.
This Forrester report focused on online buying behaviour, so it might seem harsh to criticize it for its single-minded focus. That’s the problem, though — when you’re dealing with a complex, multi-functional set of tools like social media, considering a single dimension in isolation from the others risks writing-off broad benefits across the organization.
This only reinforces the need for a broader focus than an eight-page report can produce – one looking at the effects of integrated, multi-disciplinary approaches to social media. Analyzing an inherently integrated, multi-dimensional set of tools in any other way leads to an incomplete picture.
(Image: talltomz)
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?
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.
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.
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.
11.04.14
As time goes on we’re seeing a rising trend toward social customer support, largely driven by three forces:
The challenge companies are facing is how to scale that support in the face of massive demand from a customer base that comes to expect quick, direct engagement.
Jeremiah Owyang recently posted the slides from his presentation on scalable social business programs. Some of his key points:
Point #2 is a key one – help your customers and advocates (point #4) to handle a lot of the low-level support for you. That doesn’t mean leaving them unattended; it means providing them with the means to do so – a place to do it and the resources to do so.
These points on scale nicely complement Steve Rubel’s recent thoughts – that, operating in a world limited by time and space, when you can’t expand time you need to focus on expanding your organization’s surface area to scale your activities.
What do you think of all of this?
11.04.13
We’ve discussed, many times, the importance of the ongoing trend towards the integration of various communications forms in social media – the fact that you can’t just put “social” in a bubble and expect it to perform without support from other media. Awareness of this is slowly growing as social media activities mature within organizations
In the same vein, this maturity will soon manifest in increased integration between business functions. Chief among them will be a growing realization that customer support is a key communications function online.
Marketing and public relations departments have taken the spotlight for many people (setting aside the Dells, Comcasts and Zapposes (fine, whatever, you try pluralizing Zappos) of the world).
Over the next couple of years, as we continue to see companies invest more and more into social media activities, we’re going to see three forces driving the adoption of social customer support – case studies; customer demand and crises.
The Dells and Comcasts have set the bar high, but we’re seeing a proliferation of companies supporting customers effectively through social media.
Rogers (a client of mine in my last job) engaged over 20,000 times with customers through a variety of social channels last year, and is able to measure the results of this engagement. Freshbooks has built an army of advocates through its personable and responsive support team.
There are many other examples, and companies will increasingly look to replicate that success.
While public relations drove an initial wave of social media adoption, and while ad agencies are getting into the game too, their activities will continue to inadvertently shine a spotlight on the need for online support.
Why?
Because they’re using two-way channels. And when you’re using two-way channels, people talk back… not just about what you want to talk about, but about what they want to talk about.
Nestle found this out the hard way, as did Etsy late last year (BTW, Etsy, removing posts “for negativity” is not a good issues management strategy).
So, the more companies engage in two-way channels (even if they want them to be one-way), the more people will demand responsiveness and interaction from those companies.
The Etsy case is just one example of an issue that blew up online and escalated into traditional media. I continue to see more and more, which leads to the third force driving social support – the desire to avoid becoming a crisis communications case study.
By listening and responding to issues online, companies can nip those issues in the bud. It’s important to remember, though, that if you want your online support to help you avoid issues then (a) you can’t pick and choose which issues you respond to (although there are a variety of ways to avoid having to respond to each and every person 1:1 – more on this tomorrow) and (b) if you don’t fix issues that people identify then listening isn’t enough.
So, there you have it – three forces that are driving the adoption of social customer support. Do you agree? Do you see other forces also at play? Let me know what you think in the comments.
11.04.12
Ever have one of those frustrating conversations with your colleagues during an emerging issue, where you’re trying to figure out whether acknowledging an issue online will defuse it or spread it?
You know, the one that goes something like:
A: “Have you seen all the chatter about this issue online? We should get out there and let people know what’s going on.”
B: “No – it’s only a few people – if we post about it more people will know there’s a problem.”
People have a natural reluctance to admit something is wrong. That’s all the more so online, where people can talk back and potentially ask uncomfortable questions. So, unless there’s someone with enough authority to stick-handle a response through the objections, this is often where a stalemate is reached.
Even if you do manage to convince people of the need to communicate, the time it takes to do the convincing often means that you miss the boat on getting your response out there in time for people to see it.
That’s why I was really interested to see a note from Shashi Bellamkonda of Network Solutions on the Social CRM Pioneers group, pointing to some interesting research by Microsoft and Psychster on the effect of companies acknowledging issues via Twitter on the actions and perceptions of customers.
The white paper, entitled “Using Twitter to Reassure Users During a Site Outage,” looks into the effects of a company informing people – or not – of an outage via Twitter, and the varying effectiveness of different approaches to doing so.
The conclusions provide some useful ammunition for those who advocate for a more proactive approach to managing issues via Twitter:
It’s particularly interesting that the study identified that the acknowledgements do more than just change perceptions; they also decrease the likelihood of people calling your call centre.
During a panel on online support at SxSW this year, Frank Eliason explained that he was able to calculate the tangible benefit from his team at Comcast by looking at the cost of their team, the number of people they helped and comparing that to the cost of those people calling their call centre.
Even the most math-averse person can tell that if you reduce the number of people calling you for information, and do it in a cost-effective way, it should be an easy sell.
What’s more, this is a two-pronged benefit – communicating via Twitter can lower your support costs while simultaneously improving peoples’ perception of your company. So, you’re not only lowering costs, you’re also potentially generating revenue in the long-term.
Win-win.
11.03.22
A few weeks ago Facebook introduced its new Comment Box plugin, allowing companies and individuals to connect comments on their owned properties to their Facebook presences.
At the time, while reviewing the business implications of the new Facebook plugin, I wrote:
“There’s lots of potential for confusion, and controversy, when people realize their comments don’t just reside within the protective, search-resistant walls of Facebook. It’s just a matter of time before people start complaining as their comments start unexpectedly showing up on third party websites, or attracting responses from company advocates over on a Facebook Page…
Companies using the plugin on their owned properties would be well advised to make it very clear to users that their comments may be shared over on Facebook”
My colleague Suzanne Marlatt flagged the way the National Post is addressing the issue on its site. Here’s the notice they include on every story (screen cap below):
“Learn more about the new Facebook comments here or tell us what you think: website@nationalpost.com.
If you are commenting using a Facebook account your profile information (job/employer/location) may be displayed with your comment depending on your privacy settings. By leaving the ‘Post to Facebook’ box selected, your comment will be published to your Facebook profile in addition to Financialpost.com.”
The first line links to a full page of information on the commenting system.
I think this is a great way of communicating the implications of using the plugin. What other examples have you seen?
11.03.17
I just arrived home from South by Southwest Interactive after six days down in Austin, Texas. Given that my voice has pretty much deserted me after numerous days trying to have conversations in overly noisy places, I thought I’d get some of my thoughts on the conference down on “paper” for you.
Networking MeccaSXSW really is one of the key networking opportunities for people in the social space, and as attendee numbers continue to rise (more on that shortly, the opportunities are ever-increasing.
Yes, there are lots of parties at SXSW, but the people who get the most out of the event are those who use those events as a springboard for smaller, more focused conversations with other people.
While SXSW feels like a giant reunion to me, I tried to push myself out of my comfort zone and meet new people.This resulted in me meeting and begin to get to know people I’ve wanted to hang out with for a long time like Lionel Menchaca, Susan Beebe, Chuck Hemann, Lisa Grimm (way too much laughing ensued there), Aaron Stroud, Eric Schwartzman and Chris Baccus.
However, by forcing myself to meet new people, I was also able to enjoy serendipitous meetings with folks like Kendall Aliment, Roger Dooley (neuro-marketing – fascinating), Patrick O’Keefe, Eric Kim (check out Twylah – it’s very interesting), Avesta Rasouli (founder of Coloft), Christel van der Book (Flipboard) and Andrew D’Souza (Top Prospect, a social recruiting site).
Tips:
Size isn’t everything
I heard from a few sources that SXSW this year was about 30 per cent bigger than in recent years. This year it felt too big, with sessions spread throughout the city which provided a disincentive to attend. I think event organizers should consider whether bigger is always better, or whether they should cap the event size to prevent degradation of the event.
While SXSW, to me, is primarily about the people, the panels do still provide the main reason that people attend most conferences. Sadly, thanks to the panel picker system – which I think is a broken process that leads to catchy titles and popular people winning the day over interesting sessions – the quality is hit-or-miss at SXSW.
I went to some interesting sessions (Gary Vaynerchuk was again a SXSW highlight, while Angela LoSasso (disclosure: client), Adam Lavelle and Siobhan Quinn did a great panel on real-time marketing) but avoided many others. I’m glad I did, as I heard from many people that they fell more into the “miss” category, chiefly at the hands of moderators failing to keep topics on-track.
The session situation needs to be addressed. Too many people seem to submit panels just so they can get free conference passes, then fail to prepare anything of value to audiences. It must be near-impossible to coordinate so many sessions, but when the sessions at a conference become a laughing stock, there’s an issue that needs addressing.
Tips:
Twitter got its big break-through at SXSW in 2007. Foursquare arguably did so a couple of years later. At this point, though, the noise from companies vying for attention is so overwhelming that it’s very hard to break through and get significant attention without either extreme creativity or extreme spending.
This year I didn’t see any big winners, but I would agree with Jeremiah that “intimacy” was prevalent as a trend, with group SMS companies like Beluga and GroupMe getting attention from the early adopters.
While I have serious concerns about the ever-expanding size and hit-or-miss quality of the sessions, for me the pros of SXSW still outweigh the cons. The blogger lounge alone provided significant value for me through the opportunity to meet and learn from new people. Meanwhile, the smaller meetings and get-togethers provided the opportunity for me to get to know key people in the space and get in-depth on topics that are most relevant to me.
While it’s easy to get swept away in the hype, if you resist the crowds and clear your own path, SXSW is still a must-attend event in the social space.
11.03.08
Facebook recently introduced a new version of its Facebook Comment Box Plugin, allowing website owners to integrate their commenting functionality with their Facebook presence.
We’ve already looked at the pros and cons of the Facebook commenting plugin for businesses considering implementing the plugin on their sites. Today, let’s take a look at what the implications are for companies running engagement programs.
The new plugin poses a conundrum to those working in engagement programs – specifically, around how they engage in the comment streams on sites using the plugin:
Here’s my take on five clear options for people running social media response programs. What’s yours? Let us all know what you think in the comments below.
Have company employees log in and comment using their own Facebook profiles.
Option 2: Comment as company-owned Facebook page
Company employees log in to their own accounts, but use the new person-like features of Facebook Pages to leave comments as the company’s Facebook page.
Company employees engage in the comment streams under their own names, but via profiles created purely for company use.
Company employees comment on posts themselves, but do so through a new integration in the plugin – a Yahoo! login.
Avoid the pros and cons of all of the other options by refraining from engagement on sites using the new Facebook commenting plugin.
Facebook has thrown a bit of a wrench in the works for companies engaging in social media response programs. None of these options is ideal from a company perspective – each comes with draw-backs in terms of risk, transparency and credibility.
Many companies may want to use Facebook’s new ‘company as a page’ functionality (option #2) to benefit from the ability to aggregate conversations on their own Facebook pages, and to do so credibly while providing interesting conversations for fans of their pages to participate in – and a way to leverage the advocates on your page to weigh-in on relevant topics.
However, for those carefully tailoring the volume and type of content posted on their pages, this makes life difficult. Dan Zarrella, for example, has shown that if you post too often to your page, you may lose fans. By throwing comment replies into the mix, companies may run the risk of saturating their page with content, to the detriment of people on the page. What’s more, your comments are unlikely to always be positive, so you may end up aggregating negative conversations on your page.
Meanwhile, logging-in via a Yahoo ID (option #4) offers a good balance of maintaining work/life separation for empoyees, influence over Facebook Page content, and risk mitigation from avoiding additional page admins and reducing the risk of accidental comments “by the company”. The downside of this, though, is the lost opportunity to bring these conversations to your fans, and the lack of identity verification that Yahoo IDs provide.
Ultimately, this is likely to come down to company culture. Is your culture more risk averse? Then you may want to go with Yahoo IDs. Are you more accepting of slightly higher risk? Then commenting as your company’s Facebook page may provide the greatest benefits without usurping employees’ personal accounts.
What do you think? Would you come to the same conclusion? What would you add to the mix?
11.03.02
Facebook has announced a new version of its Comments Box plugin – its social plugin that enables Facebook-connected commenting on a website. In this post we’ll take a look at some of the apparent benefits and risks of this new feature for businesses.
Among the features Facebook has revealed:
So, what might this mean for businesses? There are a number of potential pros and cons at play here:
1. Ability to comment as a Page
Core to the pros (and the cons) of the new plugin from a brand perspective is the combination of this new feature with the recent change to allow people to use Facebook “as a Page” – commenting throughout the site under the banner of a Page rather than a person. This carries over to the new plugin, meaning that a company’s Facebook Page can engage in conversations on third-party sites.
2. Broader reach of business and user comments
Commenting on third-party sites is a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, companies can significantly affect the tone and course of a discussion by participating in it and giving their side of things. On the other hand, it’s hard to know just how many people actively read comments on sites – especially when comment threads get long.
The new comment plugin lets brands increase the audience for their comments, by commenting as a Page and posting the back to their Facebook Page. In doing so, the brand exposes their Facebook Page’s fans to their comments – potentially far more people than might be reading the other site.
3. Bring brand advocates onto third-party sites
As an additional benefit of the previous point, when a brand comments on an external site and syndicates the comment back to their Facebook Page, people who reply to that comment via Facebook will become integrated with the comment stream on the website. Given that (hopefully) many of those people will be brand fans and advocates, this greatly increases the potential of higher, positive, engagement on other sites.
4. Reduced spam
Popular blogs and news sites are notorious for the prevalence of spammers and trolls – people with absolutely nothing constructive to add, who just looking to cause trouble. Those people often comment anonymously, as it’s much easier to cause trouble under an assumed name.
Facebook’s new comment plugin offers the potential to reduce spam comments by forcing users to connect to their Facebook account when leaving a comment. The additional transparency offers the potential of reducing spam comments and comment trolls.
5. Potential for higher engagement on owned properties
The ability to increase the reach of comments beyond a site itself, and to increase the relevance of comments to users, offers the potential of increasing engagement across the board.
1. Potential for confusion
The new plugin allows people to share their comments over on Facebook. However, once the comments are over there it’s not entirely clear for users that their comments will be aggregated back over on the original site.
There’s lots of potential for confusion, and controversy, when people realize their comments don’t just reside within the protective, search-resistant walls of Facebook. It’s just a matter of time before people start complaining as their comments start unexpectedly showing up on third party websites, or attracting responses from company advocates over on a Facebook Page.
Meanwhile, community managers themselves need to take extra care when posting comment replies, in the knowledge they may be synchronized on another site.
The potential for confusion has a couple of implications:
2. Comments tied to one platform
While other commenting systems such as Disqus (which I use here) allow you to sync comments with your website’s database, Facebook’s comment plugin has no such feature. That means that if Facebook changes things around, or if you change comment plugins, you will lose the comments people have previously left on your site.
3. No non-Facebook login
While Facebook is looking to roll out other means of logging in to the Comment Box plugin, right now it’s limited to a Facebook-only login. That means that if people don’t have a Facebook login (even 600m users is only 10 per cent of the world’s population) or if they don’t want to share their credentials via a third party site, they’re going to be excluded from participating.
4. Facebook myopia
Just as news sites filtering news according to the views of your friends runs the risk of offering alternative perspectives to current events, so the prioritization of comments by the social graph runs the risk of not providing dissenting opinions when it comments to debates on content.
Remember – just because someone isn’t connected to you on Facebook, it doesn’t mean their perspective isn’t valid or valuable.
What’s your take on this new Facebook feature? Any other pros or cons come to mind? Do you think this is a net good or bad thing for companies? Would you incorporate it into your sites?
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