I then looked at engagement with brands.  Of the 30, only three confessed that they used Facebook to have any sort of contact with brands and of these three, two only did this in response to some form of incentive – getting freebies, entering competitions etc.  And only one person said that they used Facebook to follow brands in any proactive way – albeit time spent doing this was very small, compared to time spent keeping in contact with friends.

I also suspect I am being generous here.  The group I was talking to (early twenties graduates) comprised people who are probably the most engaged with social media generally.  If we were talking an audience more typical for most consumer products we would more likely find that one in 30 (i.e. three per cent) coming in at somewhere closer to one per cent.  This is, of course, just one sample – but I expect that the numbers I was generating hear are not wildly out of line with a more general case.  In fact, I am tempted to do a bit of work to try and bear this out.

These are not especially surprising results – I suspect they would resonate with almost everyone’s personal usage of Facebook (possibly with social media in general).  However, another way of looking at these results is to say that while 100 per cent of your consumers may be on Facebook, you could only ever use Facebook to reach 3 per cent of them.  Or to put it another way, a Facebook page is a way of not reaching 97 per cent of your audience.  Just imagine creating a new campaign and your media agency then coming to you with a plan which didn’t reach 97 per cent of your audience.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with reaching less that three per cent of your audience – provided what you do with this three per cent generates significantly more value per contact, that the type of value we are accustomed to generating when we are seeking to reach 100 per cent of our audience.  In fact all effective social media strategies are defined by the fact that they are focused, at any one time, on individuals or very small groups and fractions of a total audience.

This is all obvious stuff – but it is not apparently obvious.  Most organisations are still approaching Facebook, and social media generally, with approaches that are designed for audiences, rather than individuals.  They still believe, for example, that the name of the game is content – forgetting that content is a concept that only works with an audience.   They still believe that it is a good idea to run competitions in Facebook, because this activity is proven to create the most Facebook engagement, forgetting that there is no point in running a competition that more than 97 per cent of your audience will never see.  But perhaps if brands are so keen to export traditional marketing approaches into social media, if we also export traditional media planning approaches into this space (i.e. advocating the design of campaigns that reach basically no-one) – this is a way of highlighting the errors of this thinking in a way which people can understand.

P.S. I first published this, in error as a page – which I will keep (but remove from navigation) in order to preserve its link, which several people RT’d

The above is what I think. This is what I do

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It is currently fashionable to ask why it is that Britain, unlike Germany, no longer has a flourishing manufacturing sector, especially since right-of-centre politics in Germany, best expressed by the current Chancellor Angela Merkel, mirrors much of Thatcherite values. The reason is that socially conservative Germany, unlike socially conservative Britain, did not make Thatcher’s mistake. German leaders, such as Helmut Kohl realised that while it was a mistake for the State to control large swathes of industry, this did not mean that the State should surrender its role in entirety to a deregulated free market. Successive German governments have recognised that, even within a free market economy, government, capital and labour are three legs of the same stool. British governments, on the other hand, have seen their role as taking one side or the other in a battle between capital and labour – and no-one joined this battle more furiously than Margaret Thatcher.

We now know that you cannot simply roll-back The State, remove ‘rusting industries’ and deregulate labour and financial markets in the belief that you are thus creating a pristine space in which the virtuous qualities of individualism will flourish, drifting in on the beneficial winds of the free market. As any gardener or farmer will tell you, you can prepare a seedbed, but unless you sow it with something and then tend to it, all you will end up with is weeds.

The last 30 years have shown that if you pursue a Thatcherite approach, as admirable as its values might seem at the time, all you end up creating is a society which allows the most aggressive and self-interested to reach the top of both politics and business. A society which has a denuded sense of collective interest or responsibility, a society where everyone is compelled to be in it for themselves, a society where wealth is associated with virtue and poverty is a sin. And also a society which doesn’t have a car industry.

P.S. I know this isn’t really about social media, or social media training – but I felt compelled to throw my stone on the pile (and what is the point of having a blog if you can’t do that?)

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There is a problem though.  Unlike conventional media, social media does not have scale built into it and we can often forget this relatively obvious fact.

The reason we forget about scale is that within traditional marketing, we are accustomed to the idea that media is a channel that we can use to reach our audiences (i.e. it delivers scale to our messages).  We therefore take its’ role for granted and focus instead on the creativity of the messages we want to put into the channel.  In social media, this is why there is so much talk about increasing engagement and creating ‘engaging content’ because we assume that the media side of social media will work to spread this engagement across our target audience.  For example, in “The Power of Like 2” survey from last year, ComScore reported  that consumers who were exposed to Starbucks’ branded earned media from a friend were 38 per cent more likely to make an in-store purchase than the study’s control group.  A 38 per cent increase in propensity to purchase – what an amazing demonstration of the power of social marketing, who wouldn’t want that?  However, we forget that for this to lead to an actual 38 per cent increase in propensity to purchase this effect has to work across all of your consumers.  I.e. we have to give this effect scale.

Now when the business of creating scale was as simple as buying media channels, this wasn’t an issue, but how easy is it to generate scale in social media?  Answer: it is not very easy and is frequently impossible.

Social media was never designed as a way of spreading messages to large numbers of people.  Facebook, for example, is not really a form of media, it is more like an infrastructure, such as a phone network.   It may have 1 billion people subscribed to it, but this doesn’t mean that it is a channel you can use to reach all these people.  Just as having a phone may give you the ability to reach everyone else who also has a phone, it doesn’t give you the ability to reach all of them at the same time.   In fact, the more engaging social media becomes, the less scale it delivers.  Think about it.  We all know that social media is essentially conversational and personalised.  But conversations only work with a small group of people: the more people you add to a conversation (the more scale you add to it), the less effective it becomes.

Likewise, there is the effect which I call the Great Digital Paradox.  The main promise that digital offers to marketing is targeting.  But the problem is, the more targeted you become, the less effective traditional marketing is.  This is because traditional marketing was designed for audiences, but if you take targeting to a certain point, you stop having an audience and simply have a group of individuals.

As I am always saying in my training courses; social media is the world of the individual, whereas traditional media is the world of the audience.  And the kind of relationship you have with an audience is very different from the relationship you have with individual members of an audience.

Social media only really works on the basis of speaking to small groups of people or individuals.  It hardly ever gives you the scale or reach we assume is associated with the term media.  At one level, marketing and media people are starting to realise this and their solution to this problem is to therefore try and maximise the reach and scale of their social media properties.  This is why we see the obsession with maximising Facebook likes or even creating advertising campaigns which are designed to drive people to Facebook.  It is also why we are seeing Facebook activity linked to incentives and promotions.  The three most ‘engaging’ Facebook posts in the UK in November, as measured by Socialbakers, were all ‘click Like and get a chance to win’ posts.  But as I have said before, just because competitions make the most effective Facebook posts doesn’t mean that the most effective use of Facebook is competitions.

This has some important implications: if we can’t rely on social media to give us scale, we have to totally re-think what sort of engagement we use it to create.  It has to be a form of engagement that creates hugely greater that the engagement we are accustomed to thinking about in traditional marketing.  It has to be social engagement.

Here is an example of the difference between social engagement and marketing engagement.  Let us look at loyalty. Within the marketing world loyalty is all about incentivised repeat purchase, whereas within the social world loyalty is all about friends who will stick by you through good times and bad possible at expense to themselves.  It is the same concept but at totally different ends of an engagement spectrum.  If a brand is going to operate in the social world it has to be able to play at the social end of the engagement spectrum.

How does a brand two this?  The answer lies in looking at how individuals are actually using social media and then aligning the brands behaviour or response against this.  There are really only three forms of dominant social media behaviour.

• First, people are using it to talk to their friends – and this is an area that is virtually impenetrable to brands because people don’t want these conversations interrupted or over-looked.
• Second, they are using it to find information or answer questions.
• Third, they are using it to complain about something, or to try and change something (this could be to complain about and change a government, or complain about and change a product or service).

Brands need to map their strategy against these behaviours.  This means that brands have to forget about the idea of being friends with their consumers because this isn’t a realistic behaviour.  A consumer is never going to be a friend with a brand in the same way that they are friends with real people.  You can also forget about creating lots of engaging content because people don’t actually find this sufficiently engaging – what they really want is answers to questions; they want information, not content and they want this in real time.

The principle responsibility for any brand in the social space is to listen to their consumers and answer their questions.  These can be the questions directly addressed to a brand, or they can be the questions people are asking about the category the brand plays within.  IBM, for example, has a programme called ‘Listening for Leads’.  This involves having people listen to conversations where people are asking questions for which IBM provides an answer and then joining these conversations.  IBM has generated millions of dollars in sales from doing this.

Brands also need to recognise that that there is huge value in creating relationships with those consumers who have a particular interest in their brand and this interest may even stem from the fact that they don’t like what a brand is doing.  This will only ever be a very small group – less than 0.1 per cent of a total consumer audience and their value does not stem from them being a brand ambassador of influencer, their role is help the brand improve its product, service or even marketing.  The digital peripherals company, Logitech, has created a customer service community within which consumers can answer technical questions about the companies’ products.  Logitech has worked out that some of these individuals can save Logitech of tens of thousands of dollars each in call deflection costs.  You don’t have to involve many such individuals before you start to create real value and, of course, you don’t have to pay them anything.

This is the type of engagement that brands need to concentrate on within social media.  Brands need to realise that traditional media and marketing is a high-reach, low-engagement activity, whereas social media is a low-reach, high engagement activity.  Traditional marketing activities can be made more engaging but they will rarely be engaging enough to operate effectively within the low-reach environment of social media.  Within social media, you have to create experiences or contacts that generate hugely greater value, in order to justify the fact that you will only ever be able to create such contacts with very small groups of people at any one time.  Social media may be the word we all use, but we should realise that social infrastructure is what it really is.

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This certainly chimes with my own experience.  Some while back I compared the Twitter versus tabloid media view, in relation to the Ryan Giggs / super injunction fiasco in the UK in 2011.  The conclusion I reached here was that the Twitter view was, again, much more nuanced and far less sensationalist than the view the tabloid press traditionally put out in these sort of cases.  Most people were really not that interested in Ryan Giggs love life, certainly not to the extent which might justify front page spreads.  Which is probably why many tabloid journalists are so scornful of ‘the people on Twitter’, because Twitter deflates the tabloids’ ability to titilate.

There is a further, more recent example.  Last year the BBC and its Newsnight programme got into a huge amount of hot water over the ‘naming’ of a former Tory politician, Lord McAlpine, as a paedophile at the centre of a child abuse ring.  Lord McAlpine is not a paedophile and while the BBC did not actually name him, it was inferred that his name was the one that was heading a list names that were ‘circulating on the internet’ – primarily Twitter.  McAlpine himself then went on to instigate legal proceeding against some of those people on Twitter deemed responsible.  This just goes to show how fundamentally untrustworthy and downright evil this whole Twitter-website-internet thing is – one might have thought.

Except – as this story was brewing I went and had a look ‘at Twitter’ to see exactly what was going on.  Now whilst Lord McAlpine’s name certainly came up, along with a whole list of other, frequently ludicrous, suggestions – there was another name which was much more firmly linked to much more specific allegations.  If one had looked at Twitter in the whole, you would not have reached the conclusion that Lord McAlpine was the prime suspect in this case.  I was thus astonished to see the BBC allowing McAlpine’s name to enter the frame on the basis that this was already out there on Twitter, because while some individual tweets may have been suggesting this, a consideration of the collective view of Twitter would have led one to a very different conclusion.  (I shall not name who Twitter saw as the prime suspect for obvious reasons).

Thus – the BBC effectively inferred that Lord McAlpine was the suspect – and got it wrong.  And the evil untrustworthy Twitter may not have got it right (we shall never know the truth because the powers that be have dropped this subject like a hot potato), but it didn’t get it as wrong as the BBC did.

The main point, from all of this, is that news in the social digital space, cannot be defined in an institutional way any more.  News is becoming a raw material, not a finished product and the distillation of what is truth is shifting from institutions into processes.  You can’t understand Twitter as an institution, you can only understand it as a process.  Twitter (unlike Newsnight) was not purporting to tell me that something was true or not true – it simply provided me with a process that allowed me to make my own conclusions.   And key to this process working effectively is transparency and the ability to put information in context.  It is what I call the ability to see the whole probability curve of news and where upon it, any individual bit of information sits.

And going back to Alan Patrick’s article, Twitter is much better placed to deliver against this than Google – certainly when it comes to news – because it doesn’t attempt to attach a score to a particular piece of information in order to rank it (or define its truthfulness).  Instead it allows you to see the spread of opinion and apply a probability approach.   Google’s strength is in other areas, where seeing the curve is less important.  Thus Google is good at answering question such as ‘when to prune raspberries?’ whereas Twitter is better at answering questions such as ‘is this news story really true?’

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You may also want to check out http://richardstacy.com/advanced-social-media-training/

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This has a couple of implications.  One, which is being much discussed, is the impact such a move has in confidence in Google’s products as a whole.  If things that work well and are popular get killed-off, how will this affect enthusiasm to get behind behind both existing and new products?

The other is that this sends a clear message as to where Google is headed – which is towards the cloud and data harvesting.  The problem, from Google’s perspective, is that Reader was a tool that helped people manage information: it yielded very little information about the people who were using it.

This is all part of what I think is a worrying trend.  The tools that help people create and manage their social media world are being sacrificed on the alter of creating cloud based mega-worlds within which people are managed (Chrome is Google’s brand name for its version of this world).  This is driven by the need, or expectation, that social media tools or platforms have to deliver a level of revenue per user that way outstrips the cost per user of providing the tool or platform.  Ultimately this view of the social media business model is unsustainable (just go back to David Ricardo’s theory of marginal costs and revenues to work this out) – but people are out to make as much money as possible before this reality kicks in.

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Because I always wanted to be a sole practioner, rather than create an agency, I previously described myself as a social media consultant.  Consultant is a label which sounds professional and strategic and in many ways it wasn’t a bad label because what I ended up doing largely revolved around producing strategies.

I remember one such project, which was quite a large assignment, culminating in a 3 hour session with the executive team of the organisation.  Two things really stick in my mind from this.  The first was the comment from the CEO at the end of the session.  He said, “that was fantastic.  I really enjoyed the session, except the bit where you told me my business model was going to have to change.”  The other was a comment from the marketing director, during a follow-up implementation session where she said, “the trouble with a social media strategy is that I don’t know where it stops, because I don’t know how to implement”.

I drew two conclusions from this. First, the production of a social media strategy has to be turned into a process so that an organisation can work both strategy and implementation  out for itself, rather than having something delivered.  This conclusion was strengthened when I finally realised that social media is actually much better understood as a business process, rather than a set of communications outputs.  The second conclusion was that there was no point in trying to draw a picture of how the world was going to change as a result of social media and the empowerment of consumers or customers, because embracing this is too difficult for most organisations – they have to see the flames and smell the smoke of burning business models in order to create the necessary sense of urgency.  Also, most organisations, especially the large ones, are not going to turn their businesses upside down because some upstart tells them trouble is on the way.  If McKinsey tells them trouble is on the way, that is another matter.  But even then, McKinsey would probably have to say it many times and extract many millions in consulting fees before the point strikes home.

As a result, while I still work on strategic projects, usually in cooperation with marketing or digital agencies, I dropped the idea that I provide social media strategies and shifted instead to the idea that I help design and implement a process – i.e. training.  The only problem with this is that training comes in smaller chunks, especially as I have refined my core offer down into a one-day session and it therefore requires greater volume of projects.  This is why my New Years resolution was to become more focused on promoting my training offer.  Hence a distillation of what I do in an Infographic (download and distribute widely!) some tweaks to the website (I now use WordPress.org so I can avail myself of the fabulous Yoast to optimise my posts) and a campaign where I will have to practise what I preach and get out there in the digital space within which people are asking the question, for which my training is the answer.

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TweetDeck says that it is shifting to a browser based environment.  Fair enough, but why would you retreat from the application environment in favour of a desktop environment – given the the mobile / tablet / app space is where all the action is happening?  I suspect that the answer lies in the planning for a Twitter IPO.  Twitter needs to convince potential investors that it has significant revenue potential in order to sell at a valuation that sits close to the expectations of its current owners and investors.  It has realised that the web (cloud) based environment is much easier to commercialise than the app environment.  Stuff that happens in the cloud can be captured and the data sold far more easily than capturing and selling what happens in applications.  Likewise, users can be accessed far more easily – putting ads in apps is difficult.  The lack of digital real estate has always been Twitter’s problem.  You sign up to Twitter on the web and then you never go back, because you then download your Twitter app which you use to manage your Twitter activity.  Twitter bought TweetDeck as a sort of stop (g)ap solution to ensure they were not cut completely out of the Twitter usage game, but this didn’t solve the bigger problem of how to commercialise usage.

I think the closure of TweetDeck is a shame, but it symptom of a wider issue – which is the understandable need to generate money from social media properties.  The problem here though is that the amount of money being sought is based on the need to support a desired (or actual) valuation – and these valuations are hugely over-inflated, because the Wall Street boys haven’t yet worked out the model.  They are are desperate to see platforms such as Facebook and Twitter as forms of media – because any such platform which has multi-million numbers of users must, therefore, be worth a huge amount.  They don’t realise that these platforms are actually infrastructures – or rather they don’t want to see them as infrastructures  – because the business / revenue model when looked at from this perspective, doesn’t look anywhere nearly as attractive.

This pressure is causing properties such as Facebook, Google and now Twitter, to move their focus away from servicing their users, devising products instead which are designed to harvest data and thus boost revenue (or perceived revenue potential).  This is the reason, in my opinion, why almost all of Google’s recent forays into the social space have failed – the products are not fundamentally based on solving problems for users, they are designed to encourage users to surrender data.  Likewise Facebook’s Timeline.  This wasn’t a feature anyone wanted, it was an excuse to encourage users to “put their life story” (i.e. put more data) into Facebook.  It also explains the desire of the big boys to buy-up or otherwise squeeze out, those services which have become annoyingly successful because, like TweetDeck, they provide something useful that the big boys are not doing.

This demand for social media properties to achieve sky-high valuations is, unfortunately, killing-off innovation in the free-to-use social media tool space.  The bar is set so high, that investors are only interested in funding things that will be the next Facebook and developers likewise dream of being Mark Zuckerberg.  What we need is a funding market that recognises that there may be opportunities out there that are much smaller scale in absolute terms, but may offer better and more sustainable relative returns in the long run.

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I use a couple of examples: one is an instance of lack of response to some rather poor food I was once served (see this post) and the other is in relation to a horrible delay I experienced nearly a year ago.  The issue, in both cases, is that fact that Eurostar are not doing the number one thing any organisation needs to do first in social media: listening to their customers and responding in real time.

Eurostar, in common with many organisations, clearly focuses much of its social media initiatives around Facebook.  It has also, unlike many organisations, become quite good at responding to questions people are asking it in Facebook.  And while I suspect it still uses uses an agency to do this for it (classic mistake in my opinion), that agency seems well briefed and able to deal with most of the questions in open forum without pushing people off to a customer care line or closing them down off-line.  I think the agency in question will be We Are Social – so if this is the case, well done chaps.  However, Eurostar hasn’t opened up its listening and response beyond Facebook and thus can’t reach easily people at what is often the most important time – when they are actually travelling.  Its social customer care is imprisoned within Facebook.  The logic behind this probably goes as follows:

1. Facebook is the number one social media place, we therefore need to work-out how to make our Facebook presence as engaging as possible.
2. An unfortunate consequence of doing this is the fact that as well as (rather than) looking at the lovely posts about our latest offers, people also use our page to ask questions and often complain.
3. We therefore need to deal with this rather awkward side-effect of Facebook usage, in order to prevent it spoiling our otherwise lovely Facebook page, full of its “engaging content”.
4. Agency, please sort all this out for us.
5. Agency finds management of Facebook presence is highly lucrative, therefore does have incentive to push alternative approaches.

(Note: so many organisations I deal with put two social media issues on the table, often framed as objectives: how do we make our facebook page more engaging / popular, and how do we deal with people writing negative things on our Facebook page.  To which I always say, position your Facebook page as a listening place, not a content place and actively encourage people to ask questions or complain).

What Eurostar have not done is start from a base-line objective of working out how best to use social media to listen and respond to their customers and thus work out what sort of infrastructure and, critically, process they need to put in place.  This is witnessed by my experience with the delay last year.  As I was sat there on a train that was going no-where, I tweeted @Eurostar for some information.  No response.  The train was so delayed it only reached London in the early hours, long after my last train out to Suffolk had left.  I therefore tweeted Eurostar to alert them to this and ask for advice.  No response.  What I draw attention to in my training is how much more positive my experience with Eurostar could have been if they had answered my tweets and included in the response a link to a real time social information hub, where the latest information could be posted, alongside using a tag such as #eurostarnews.

Putting this in place is so simple and efficient.  Eurostar would not even have to answer most of the questions / tweets directed because if it could direct people to the places or spaces where the answers existed people could find the answers for themselves.

I cannot believe that an organisation that has been “in” the social space as long as Eurostar and deals with the sort of real-time issues involved in travel, does not yet have this real-time information capability in place.  It just has a service update section on its website that relates to generic issues, such as planned engineering work or industrial action.  It is a classic example of organisational focus on Content rather than Information and it means that Eurostar is passing-up on a huge reputational benefit: what I call creating the expectation of listening.

Anyway – to end on a positive.  As I said, Eurostar’s traditional customer service is actually very good.  As a result of the delay, because there were not available hotel rooms in London to put me up, they provided a black cab to take me the 100 plus miles home.  They were also giving people cabs as far-afield as Liverpool and York.  They also gave me a compensation booking – equivalent to a free return trip, valid for a year.  What’s more, I have just called them to redeem this booking – and it was relatively easy to find the number to ring and I wasn’t kept waiting on the line for ages and a very helpful person fixed me a new ticket right away – a process actually easier and quicker than the normal on-line system.  So Eurostar know how to do it in the conventional way – but they don’t yet know how to do it in the social way – probably because social media is still seen primarily as a function of marketing and as a new channel to reach customers, rather than as a channel customers can use to reach Eurostar.

Anyway – I will keep my eye on Eurostar and as soon as they put an effective real-time listening and response capability in place I will be sure to promote this and shift Eurostar from the negative to the positive-case study section of my workshops and presentations.

Update: I tweeted this post and Eurostar picked it up and responded almost immediately.  Good listening, but I am not sure they have worked out a response yet! I would guess that they are monitoring their @twitter space but haven’t actually read the post and this tweet is therefore a standard placeholder.  Let’s see if the substance of the post get dealt with.

Update 2: They have responded more specifically, albeit with a little encouragement.

Update 3: I now have a call scheduled next Tuesday with Eurostar’s online community service leader! (And, by the way, We Are Social no longer work with Eurostar, social media has been brought in-house, which may account for the higher quality of response on the Facebook page).

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