Social Media and Traditional Marketing, Part 2

I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create. (William Blake, Jerusalem)

As I said in my earlier post, I had a conversation with a marketing educator concerning the role of social media in marketing. I told the educator that I believed social media, as part of an integrated marketing communications strategy, have an important role to play, mostly because they serve to keep marketers honest.

In the educator's reply, he said he agreed with my comment that social media needed to be "part of a total media plan."

The only problem is, that's not what I said.

What's the difference between an "integrated marketing communications strategy" and a "total media plan"?

Night and day. It's frustrating to realize at the end of a conversation that you've been speaking a different language.

"Media planning" is advertising terminology. "Integrated marketing communications" is not. Advertising may be part of a larger marketing communications strategy, but an advertising media plan is only a small part of that strategy.

Whenever there is a paradigm shift in any discipline, a new terminology arises, because, as William Blake said, "I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's." The resulting cognitive dissonance can be both a barrier and a boon.

Social Media and Traditional Marketing, Part 1

I was recently asked, by a marketing educator, "how a marketer reaches and manages the markets involved with the Twitters and Face Books of the world."

Reaching is one thing, managing quite another. The question itself reveals a much larger question: how does traditional marketing adapt to the new reality of social media?

The first thing the traditional marketer needs to do is give up the idea of control. We can't control social media or the use to which they are put. We can manage our social media efforts, but we can't manage the media themselves.

We have to be very careful about overt commercial use of social media (see the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, 4.2).

Social media have changed marketing radically, but the change is primarily to remove the marketer from direct manipulation of the marketing message and the consumer. Social media can be a great commercial benefit, but you need to let your prospects and customers do the talking.

Marketers have to be aware of the power of social media conversations. They need to monitor these conversations and respond to them in their own publications -- their websites and blogs. They can use other social media to link to their websites and blogs, but they should be careful about engaging directly using social networks.

The one constant in Internet and social media marketing is information. People, regardless of culture, use the Internet and social media to find information that is of value to them. The marketer reaches prospects and customer by providing that information -- by making it easily accessible.

The other aspect of social media that is important, and which marketers have to been keenly aware of, is the power of narrative. They do not just contain information: they structure it within a narrative.

The well documented fact is that people usually believe anecdotal evidence over hard, even overwhelming, empirical evidence. It's not enough that marketers present the facts (though they must definitely do that in the age of social media). They must present the facts in a convincing narrative. Information without narrative is merely data, and data convinces no one. Social media participants can pick up a narrative and broadcast it, or they can formulate their own narrative and broadcast it. Which would you prefer they do?

The only way to manage the reputations of companies, products and services (and by extension to increase sales of those products and services, and improve profitable revenue and the value of the company) is to combine authenticity, information and narrative to present a compelling case.

I told the educator that I believed social media, as part of an integrated marketing communications strategy, have an important role to play, mostly because they serve to keep marketers honest.

The Dark Side of Social Media

Hamilton Spectator, March 15, 2010:

Teen dead in triple shooting

Two partygoers complained about music at student house, then pulled handguns; two others wounded
...

The party had been advertised on Facebook and other social media. Eyewitnesses said the suspects were acting strange and combative that night.

Seldom do we see a more stark example of how a tool designed to augment our existence may be used to harm us. It seems the two suspects showed up with intentions to celebrate March break in their own manner. This ambiguity is in the nature of all tools. The tool is ethically neutral, but its uses are not. A hammer can be used to build a house, but it can also be used as a weapon.

What this story illustrates is how little we can do to control or manage the ways in which social media are used. We release information into the wild and it mutates like a virus.

As marketers, we have to understand that a social medium is not just another marketing or advertising medium. We can't control the conversation. We can't manage the medium. And we can't determine the uses to which our information is put.

"All Mouth and No Trousers"

I just ran across this phrase in BNET's coverage of the 2010 Super Bowl ads. It's a British expression that approximates the more common (in North America) "all talk and no action," and BNET used it to describe one of the ads that aired, and the failure of public reaction to live up to the ad's pre-game hype. In other words, the ad was a bust.

How did they figure that out so quickly? Enter Internet technology and social media. Brand Bowl 2010 was created to measure viewer reaction via the "Twittersphere."

Before you get too excited about a new age of accountability in old media advertising, consider this stat from BNET: "while the dollar cost of an ad on the Super Bowl has increased more than 6,900 percent, the effective per-viewer cost has tripled since 1984."

So, in 1984, when 85.5 million people watched the Chicago Bears beat the New England Patriots, a 30-second ad cost $525,000, or roughly 1 cent per set of eyeballs. This year, as approximately 90 million viewers (the "Who Dat" nation) watched the Saints trounce the Colts, a 30-second ad cost about $3 million, or roughly 3 cents per viewer. However, to really make an effective impression, the big brands had to run multiple spots. Doritos, for example, ran at least three different spots.

For the rest of us, who do not have a $9 million advertising budget on any given Sunday, the medium is definitely all mouth and no trousers.

And now for my favorite ad:



The reading glasses hanging from his t-shirt -- great touch.

(Full disclosure: I am a life-long Packers fan, and remain a Brett Favre fan.)

Social Media Breaks Replacing Cigarette Breaks

Two trends that go together like hand and glove: the rise of smartphones, and the rise of social media. So, if you suspect the person in the next cubicle has started smoking again, think again. There is a growing probability that he or she is sneaking off for a social media break.

Over at Harvard Business School, David Armano has published his Six Social Media Trends for 2010, and the social media break is one of them.

Define Social Media

Business.com's 2009 Business Social Media Benchmark Study shows that social media adoption for B2B marketing and PR purposes is growing, but I think the usefulness of the study is marred by its overly expansive (though unstated) definition of social media.

Is a podcast a social medium? When I think of people plugged into their iPods and notebooks on commuter trains, my first impulse is to define podcasts as antisocial media, but this of course begs the question:

What are social media?

The most basic definition is that social media is many-to-many as opposed to one-to-many communications. For me this rules out podcasts, because they are a one-way communication, rather than a conversation.

Another defining aspect of social media is that they are peer-to-peer. For me this rules out webinars, because webinars almost always involve a supposed expert lecturing to an audience wishing to learn from that expert's expertise.

Blogs can be considered social media, but they have to be considered on a case-by-case basis, because their status as social media depends on their operating principles. For example, a blog is not much of a conversation if the comments are turned off or heavily censored by moderation.

As always, I welcome your thoughts.

Social Media Marketing and Your Online Marketing Budget

Bob DeStefano over at SVM E-Business Solutions offers a great checklist that you should go through before deciding to jump into social media marketing. He says you should be able to say yes to all of these statements before you think about using social media to market your products and services:

• My Website is my most powerful marketing tool.
• My Website generates all of the leads I need to support my business.
• My company is on the first page of Google for every popular phrase my customers use.
• Email marketing helps my company nurture new customers and generate repeat business
• I know that I am generating a strong return on investment for every dollar I spend on marketing.

This checklist covers most everything you should be thinking about when it comes to online marketing. Where I differ with Bob is in timing: There is no reason that you should not work on your website and your social media marketing in parallel, provided your strategic objectives are clear and inform both efforts.

One objection to this line of thought might be budgetary: you want to establish ROI on your website effort before committing more of your marketing budget to extend your online effort. Such an objection indicates a reasonable and cautious attitude, but you need to weigh your caution against the exponential potential of integrating your website, email marketing and social media marketing.

Social Media in the Workplace

A recent survey by Robert Half Technology asked CIOs about policies regarding the use of social media in the workplace and found that over half (54%) prohibited the use of social media in the workplace completely.

Now, I can understand the impulse to ban the use of social media. It's easy to assume that Twitter and Facebook will cut into worker productivity.  I can remember the same thing happening in the early days of the Internet, and there's a lesson to be learned there. Today, the Internet is an extremely important productivity tool in most organizations.

A pleasant memory came back to me when I read the survey. A number of years ago, I was touring a well known European brewery. The tour guide told the story of a policy change concerning workers drinking during their shifts. The old policy: each worker was allowed 6 beers per shift. The new policy: each worker could drink as many beers as they wanted per shift. The result: beer consumption at the brewery went down.

So what's the relevance of this story to social media? Well, of course, beer drinking should be a social activity, but that's not it.

The real relevance is in the empowerment of your employees.

When you ban social media in the workplace, you're telling your employees that you don't trust them. But if you want all your employees to be ambassadors for your company, then you have to empower them to communicate your company's message by all available media. If your customers use social media, so should your employees. If you want to begin a conversation with your customers (because a conversation is exactly what marketing should be), then you need to empower everyone within the company to be part of that conversation, to be a marketer.

Sure, there will likely be abuse, as there still is with Internet use in the office, but that's a question of motivation, not technology. Twenty years ago, people played solitaire on their computers more than they worked. It seemed like a total waste of time, but in reality it was a way for users to become proficient with a mouse. Twitter and Facebook may not seem to have much relevance for your employees' productivity, but the social media skills learned there are transferable to business applications, and if your employees are going to make social media mistakes, it's better that those mistakes are at their personal expense, rather than the company's.

If you don't have any nails, you'll never learn to use a hammer properly.