frankly speaking
Why Not Having a Social Strategy is a Mistake
My friend Jake wrote a really interesting blog the other day entitled “Why Your Best Social Strategy Might Be Not Having One”. In the article Jake goes on to outline a few very valid points why companies may want to consider not being in the social space.
Jake’s an incredibly smart guy, a good friend and a wise mentor, but (with all due respect) I think he misses the boat here. Let’s face it, the #1 job of any marketer is to be where your customers are. Facebook has over 500 million users now and the odds are pretty good that a majority of your customers has a facebook profile. The question then becomes how do you leverage facebook to your advantage? Fortunately, there are a number of ways to do so.
I’d like to go through Jake’s points one by one and help him where he may be a bit misguided:
- ROI is Hard to Quantify
This used to be the case, but quite frankly, is a little bit out of date. There is tons of data available to you as a marketer about how much value a facebook fan, a twitter party or a blog post can bring to your company. For example, at a recent company of mine, we KNEW for absolute certainty that every time we shared a link on Facebook, it would drive $XX in sales. Measure this against the promotional cost, and you have a basic ROI measurement.
Taking this to the next level, by leveraging Facebook Connect and allowing your consumers to login, shop and purchase under with their Facebook Credentials allows you as a marketer to determine how much value Facebook Fans are.
-Your brand is out of your control
Jake makes a good point here in the fact that with social media it’s much more difficult to manage your brand, after all, what company wants their brand showing up next to a bunch of frat boys doing keg stands (collegehumor.com notwithstanding). This is where having a good community manager comes into play. The job of a community manager is to live and breathe your brand online. Part of his or her job is to find out the public perception of your brand and help manage it.
To Jake’s point, when you’re advertising on Facebook, it’s difficult to understand where your ads will be shown. This means you as a marketer need to take charge and understand who it is that you’re targeting. If your target market is the 18-30 crowd, the probability is high that your ads will show up in some places with questionable content. The question then becomes are you and your brand ok with that? If not, you may need to reconsider who you’re marketing to.
-You’re handing over your hard-earned customer data and relationships
In this section Jake implies that you’re forcing your consumer to make a choice between you and the social network they’re on. This isn’t necessarily the case. The consumer is a consumer of yours AND the social network. That is, Facebook probably has as much data on your consumer as you do.
Yes, it’s more difficult to identify a customer’s click stream when they’re on a social network, but there’s enough tracking information available at the URL level and the cookie level to identify where users are coming from and what will keep them loyal.
- You can’t protect your users’ privacy
Let’s face it, the web is becoming a more open environment. Every day people are sharing stuff about themselves that 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago they were loathe to share with their next door neighbor. As an advertiser, user privacy should be one of your utmost concerns, you should only share that data with their social network if the user explicitly grants you permission. There have been momentous strides by retailers to find a happy medium between what remains private versus what they allow users to share on social networks and it will only get better as time progresses.
UPDATE - I don’t disagree that Facebook has been in the news lately because of a lot of privacy breaches, but don’t forget, there are plenty of retailers and credit card companies that suffer privacy breaches all the time. In fact, I would argue that the breaches suffered by retailers and banks are more dangerous, because the often include the theft of Social Security information or credit card numbers.
At the end of the day you have to make a decision as to whether or not social media is a sandbox for you to play in. If done correctly, it can be very effective at driving high quality traffic both online and offline.
Good deck from Tariq Ahmad about how the NBA has leveraged social media. Check it out!
Acquiring New Customers from Facebook
Five years ago Facebook started out as a place where college students could anonymously scope out fellow students in their classes at college. Today it has developed into one of the top 10 most trafficked site on the web.
Recently, the company announced that it had over 500 million registered users. The interesting thing is this is more than just 18 year old college kids planning their next party or trying to figure out who’s going to be in their next Economics class. Everybody’s on Facebook . Walk down the street and I’d be willing to bet 7 out of 10 people you walk by have a Facebook account.
Facebook is more than just a place for people to hang out online, it’s a place to share ideas, empower likeminded people and ultimately, if your advertiser, sell products. From the very start Facebook knew that if it wanted to compete with the big boys of the internet it had to figure out a way monetize the massive amount of traffic it had on its site (it is after all a business) and it has since developed one of the premier display ad serving platforms on the web.
So if you’re an advertiser, how do you utilize Facebook to enter the conversation, gain awareness and ultimately boost sales for your product? Fortunately, Facebook has built a relatively simple self-service platform that helps even the most uninformed advertiser set up an ad on Facebook. I would even go as far to say that Facebook’s ad platform is much simpler than Google’s AdWords platform.
So why isn’t everybody jumping on the Facebook Advertising bandwagon? A couple reasons come to mind. The first problem with advertising on Facebook is the click through rate is extremely low. I’ve experienced click-through rates of close to .01%. If you’re a direct response advertiser, this is not great news. Lower click through rates mean high acquisition costs. The second problem with Facebook Advertising is trust. Because the barriers to advertise on Facebook are low, everybody who is anybody has a product they want to promote. The problem is for premium advertiser’s is to stand-out from the mud.
How do we resolve these two issues? Low click through rates is a common problem throughout online advertising. In order to overcome this, some advertisers have tried taking short cuts and frequently use images of cleavage, attractive women and the like under the guise of “chicks get clicks” in order to get people to click on their ad. While this does increase the click through rate, it frequently has zero effect on the ultimate conversion of that new customer (i.e., a person may easily click on that cleavage photo, but that doesn’t mean they will convert when they see that the advertiser is selling books).
The best way to solve the click through rate problem is the same way you would resolve it with any other form of online advertising – test, test and test some more. Change the copy of your ad frequently, change the photo of your ad, change the landing page of your ad. Use images of attractive women, but make sure it relates to your product in some way. What’s more, test whom your ad is targeted to. Facebook advertising makes targeting a group of people very simple. Want to target Females age 35-50 who are college educated, live in New York City and are in a relationship? Facebook advertising makes it easy to do this – make sure the ad you show them resonates with this targeting.
The second problem, how do advertisers gain the trust of Facebook users is a little more difficult to solve. When I’m on Facebook, I hardly ever click on an ad. Why? Because I know those advertisers are probably trying to sell me something I don’t want and I don’t need. So how to turn a Facebook user into a customer? Go for the soft sell.
Instead of driving the user to a landing page on your website, make it simple and just have them become a fan of your brand or product’s page on Facebook. Most people are more likely to buy from advertisers they’re already fans of on Facebook. By getting them to become your fan, you build their trust. When people trust you, they will buy from you.
How do you know how much to invest in Facebook advertising? To me, it’s pretty simple. Do a quick analysis of how much your Facebook fans typically spend on your brand or product. For simplicity, let’s say that the average Facebook fan spends $100 on your product or brand. This means (depending on your return on ad spend requirements) you can spend up to $100 to acquire a new fan on Facebook.
Winning at Social Media
“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”
- Vince Lombardi
There’s been a lot confusion recently about how to properly define winning at social media. Some people like to use platitudes like engaging users, social influencers, quality versus quantity posts and pointing at engagement as an indirect way to grow revenue. Forrester even went so far as do an entire blog post about how companies should look at more than just the dollar ROI to measure the real return on a social media campaign.
This is all great, and important, but to me, misses the point. Let’s be clear - the focus for ANY marketing channel is to drive revenue. In order for the channel to be successful, the revenue generated from this channel must be more than the cost of generating the revenue.
Think about it, if you went to an investor and told him “Well, our company gets a lot of traffic, and people sure do like us, and they blog about us alot and we talk with them about products on facebook and twitter, but unfortunately, they don’t seem to be buying a lot and we missed our revenue target for the quarter.” Do you really think the investor is going to give a damn about how many users you engaged on Twitter or Facebook, or the fact that you were able to get Kevin Rose to retweet your blog post? The short answer is no, he’s really not going to care. He will care, very much so, that resources weren’t allocated better to channels that were driving revenue.
I’m not saying that engaging customers and potential customers, reaching out to social influencers, blogging, participating in forums and using video isn’t important, because it is, it’s very important. But, at the end of the day, all of those things don’t pay the bills, nor do they increase shareholder value.
So, what does it take to win at social media? Like any marketing channel it takes testing, analyzing the data and making the appropriate changes to see what delivers the maximum amount of value for the least amount of cost. Engaging users, working with influencers, blogging, creating a viral app or video all help with taking your social media and marketing programs to the next level.
Eating crow about foursquare. Now they just need to make this happen all the time.
via digital-diva
This is a good deck on assessing the ROI of social media. The thing that I think is missing is on slide 26 as it implies that in order for one to get a full understanding of ROI on a company’s social media activities, you need to take into account interaction and influence. I couldn’t disagree more.
While interaction and influence are important at the end of the day, they probably did not close the sale (though, you can rightfully argue that they helped lead to the sale, which leads to the age old problem of value attribution in the digital space).
Return on Investment for any channel in the digital space is easily measured by knowing the dollar value of sales generated for every dollar invested in advertising. It’s that simple. While I think social media is valuable and at some point in the future may be even more valuable than search (in terms of ROI/ROAS), right now it’s still under-performing for a lot for a lot of companies in terms of driving actual sales.
New Twitter Business Model - Yeah, I called It…
Twitter announced their new business model last week. Basically, it’s a sponsored tweet model where advertisers can sponsor tweets that will be inserted when someone does a search on twitter. Eventually, sponsored tweets will be integrated into users normal feeds that they look at on a daily basis.
Interestingly, I guessed that this would be their model almost a year and a half ago. Want proof? Well, let’s take a look.
Initially, John Battelle posed the following question via twitter:
I, in turn (and probably many others) answered with the following response:
Wow, sometimes I amaze myself. Wondering if twitter now owes me a rev share…
10 Essential Rules for Brands in Social Media 
Taddy Hall (former chief strategy officer for the Advertising Research Foundation) posted an article in AdAge - 10 Essential Rules for Brands in Social Media.
I liked his 10 rules, so I thought I’d shorten and re-blog:
1. The 1% Rule
A small fraction of site visitors are responsible for a…
via digital-diva
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Welcome to my blog. My name is Ben Wilkinson. I work in online marketing and advertising. I'm also a rabid Red Sox fan. This blog is dedicated to everything from sports and politics to business and pop-culture. Sit back, relax and enjoy!
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