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Spring Digital Edition 2013

c-suite advisory

| SOCIAL MEDIA|

I’ve Seen the Revolution and It’s Not Working

Companies continue to struggle to translate the dialog of social media into meaningful conversations

Three years ago, most agency pundits would have told you that the future was in personalized news and ever more sophisticated Web searches.
Fast forward to 2012 and those same pundits sheepishly admit they underestimated the human instinct to be part of the herd and to follow the crowd. Searching Google is a very individual pursuit. Simply put, its algorithms try to take into account how many people look at each slide and who links to each page, but the decision on what you click and what you believe is yours alone. That is not, however, the way most people previously did things. We relied on what our neighbors thought, what the minister said, what Walter Cronkite judged important, or what the local newspaper thought to print. That was then. This is now. People in the 21st century don’t really know their neighbors, only the older ones tune in every night to watch Diane Sawyer or read the local paper…if there is still one. Most modern people follow the pack through Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Twitter, or Pinterest, to name but a few.

Social Animals Online
It all started in 2002 with music fans and college students who wanted to find ways of staying in touch with an extended network of friends and
sharing content with one another. Ten years later, Facebook has moved from a few hundred Harvard students to having a daily average of 552 million active users – 70 percent outside the United States. MySpace, in its heyday, had 76 million users, and the original social networking site, Friendster (remember that one?), had over 90 million members – about 80 million in Asia. For the big sites, the fastest growing demographic is 35+, and over 18 billion minutes a day are spent on Facebook alone. The median age of Twitter is 31 and climbing rapidly. Those users are attracted by its simplicity. If they post compelling tweets, they attract followers who opt to receive messages. Most tweets are stunningly banal. Some are news breaking. Companies have taken to Twitter in an attempt to chat in real time with their prospects. Twitter itself has claimed to aspire to replace a large chunk of the market research industry. Meanwhile, Facebook is a little more complicated and the never ending changes that the company throws at both its end users and app developers have made it a challenge to keep up.

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Giving Without Expectation

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Motivational Minute

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Regional Economy

Events

Offers

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Business Directory
Rates
Strategic Socializing
At the end of the day it all begins with the buyer! Advertisers and marketers must realize that social media sites, while phenomenal for brand advertising, must be considered only the first tool in a larger holistic demand generation strategy. Doug Simpson, Facebook’s manager of global marketing solutions, said companies need to approach Facebook as a branding investment and shouldn’t expect an immediate boost in sales. Engaging loyal customers leads to word-of-mouth awareness and recommendations that other forms of advertising simply cannot buy. “Facebook is also a useful source of data,” Simpson said. A new analytics platform on Facebook will give advertising partners access to the behavior and “likes” of those who follow their brand. “That will allow marketers to produce more targeted content and contacts in the future,” Simpson added. And that is where their true value lies…in the data! On one hand, these sites know a vast amount about their users and can target ads with extraordinary precision. On the other hand, few advertisers and marketers are nimble enough to take advantage of this. Social networking users rarely click to corporate sites, and if they do, they don’t stay for long. Because they are not searching (and because Facebook charges differently), the Google click-through model doesn’t work.

Social media is nearly all user-generated content, and companies that try to make real money out of it using old-fashioned digital methods will fail. Companies need to understand what their buyer is saying and create real-time responses. These then feed into trigger-based campaigns that create a digital conversation aimed at pushing buyers down the sales pipeline. In other words, companies need a strategic plan that incorporates social media as one tool at the top of the lead generation funnel (i.e., part of the bigger picture) that will result in sales. Only when companies learn how to do this will they ultimately be able to translate social conversations into conversions.