frankly speaking
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.
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 social-media-diva
Diff’rent Strokes for Differ’nt Folks
Facebook, Twitter. Twitter, Facebook. That’s all people seem to be talking about these days. When it comes to telling people where you are, who(m) you’re with, what you’re doing or what you’re reading, it seems like the best way to publicize it is to break out your phone and thumb away a quick message to let the world know.
Most people go to the extreme and post the exact same content on both sites and do so in the name of efficiency. Hell, even I’m guilty of doing so, occassionally. While I agree it’s efficient, I think it’s lame, especially if I follow you on both Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc (which is common in today’s social media world). I couldn’t care less to read the exact same message from the same folks across all three mediums.
Why do it? Think about it. You’re Rupert Murdoch - you own the Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and Fox News - does it make sense to publish the EXACT SAME content in all three mediums? Of course it doesn’t. Your audience is different for all three mediums. For me, Facebook = Friends/Family, so my messages there range from political, to sports, to family. Twitter = business/friends, my messages there are focused on business, personal, and few political/sports ramblings. LinkedIn = all business all the time. I’ve never posted anything personal on there except where I’m traveling on my next business trip.
I get that people have the need to constantly let people know what they’re doing and who they’re with, but make sure you’re targetting the right audience.
Social Media Excellence - A Case Study
A couple weeks ago I wrote about a situation of social media failure. Today, I’m happy to write about a situation of social media excellence! A few days ago, I checked into Specialty’s via foursquare:
Three days later (coincidentally, I happened to be standing in line to order food at Specialtys) I received an @ reply via twitter from Specialtys entitling me to a free cookie:
Let’s be honest, I could care less about the cookie. What I find interesting is the fact that Specialty’s has the common sense enough to recognize that social media is a powerful marketing tool and in this case, is using it appropriately to try their products.
Not only do they have a customer, but now they will have someone who goes patronizes their business at least twice a week.
Social Media Failure - A Case Study
In early December, when I found out I would be heading to Salt Lake City for the Holidays, I decided to try a little social media experiment. I wanted to see how engaged the people running the twitter accounts of major airlines, luxury hotels and luxury automobiles were. The deal was simple: sponsor all or part of my trip and I’ll tweet about your company every day for the next 30 days. The result: these companies are not very engaged. In fact, no one from Delta Airlines, United Airlines, JetBlue Airlines, The Waldorf Astoria or LandRover cared to respond to ANY of my tweets or Facebook messages to them.
Granted, there are a couple reasons why they didn’t respond a) because these companies have outsourced their social media management to an agency (ok, not really a good excuse but just go with me on this) or b) these companies are so inundated with requests that they just didn’t have time to get back to me (I have a hard time believing this was the cause because it’s not like the 25 year old who manages these accounts is obsessively updating the executive staff of his/her company on the current happenings of their grand social media strategies) or c) they simply didn’t think I mattered enough to respond.
I tend to think why I received zero response from anyone running social media from Delta, United, JetBlue, Waldorf and LandRover was the fact that they perceived I wasn’t influential enough (on the web) to matter. How they made this assumption is unclear. I tweet fairly regularly - 3 to 4 times a day. I have a decent sized follower base. My tweets tend to be pretty content rich (i.e. I don’t tweet stuff like ‘Standing in line at Whole Foods’). On Facebook, I try to update my status once a day. I have a few friends.
The point to me was crystal clear - these companies still do NOT understand the value of social media in relation to mainting good reltationships with customers or potential customers. For all of the above companies that I mentioned, LandRover had the most to lose - the lease on my car is up on 12 months and I was hoping that by allowing me to test drive one of their vehicles over my vacation I might have been convinced to purchase/lease from them in the future. I suppose they just lost a customer.
About
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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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