Tagged: social media

A quick post about Yahoo, Tumblr and content marketing

Here is a good post about this deal by Robert Andrews in the Guardian.  He may be right and this deal is all about content marketing (although I think a large part of it may also be about the acquisition of a behavioural data pipeline).  Problem is – in the social space, people don’t want content as I have previously written, they want information.

The term native advertising is also a misnomer – a wolf in relatively transparent sheep’s clothing would be a better description.

Also – $1.1 billion for a business with $13 annual revenues?  Only a drowning man will pay that much for a straw.

The three per cent rule: why social media is no good for reaching 97 per cent of your audience

3 per centAt the end of last year I was teaching a session on social media in a masters of communication course at the London campus of the European Communication School.  In total I was lecturing to 30 students in two groups.  Most of the students were French or Belgian and in their early twenties.  At the start of the course I conducted an exercise designed to define how  people actually use Facebook, based on the students’ own experiences.   What this exercise revealed was that everyone used Facebook to keep in contact with their friends and that this activity constituted the vast majority of the time spent on Facebook.  No real surprise there.

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

http://richardstacy.com/advanced-social-media-training

The three per cent rule

3 per cent(This is a page, but it was meant to be a post.  Here is the proper post.  I have kept this page alive because people have RT’d the link, but I have hidden it from navigation)

At the end of last year I was teaching a session on social media in a masters of communication course at the London campus of the European Communication School.  In total I was lecturing to 30 students in two groups.  Most of the students were French or Belgian and in their early twenties.  At the start of the course I conducted an exercise designed to define how  people actually use Facebook, based on the students’ own experiences.   What this exercise revealed was that everyone used Facebook to keep in contact with their friends and that this activity constituted the vast majority of the time spent on Facebook.  No real surprise there.

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.  Continue reading →

Why social media is a dangerous concept

There is a hidden danger in the term social media.  It is dangerous because its name implies it can deliver all the benefits of media, but now with the added engagement opportunities that come with being social.  Media gives us scale, social gives us engagement – put the two together and we can now do engagement at scale.  Fantastic!

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. Continue reading →

Truth in Twitterland

Here is a very interesting article by Alan Patrick.  It compares the Google and the Twitter windows on a current news story and proposes that the view through the Twitter window is actually more nuanced and investigative than the rather one-dimensional, or populist, view provided by Google.

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?’

 

First TweetDeck now Google Reader

FireShot Screen Capture #158 - 'Official Google Reader Blog_ Powering Down Google Reader' - googlereader_blogspot_co_uk_2013_03_powering-down-google-reader_htmlGoogle is ditching Google Reader.  This is a new move for Google, because while it has a history of ‘sunseting’ various initiatives, these have generally been suns that have failed to rise very high in the sky – Wave, Buzz, Sidewiki etc. (Sidewiki? I hear you say – exactly).  Google Reader, on the other hand, was a pretty well established part of the social media firmament.

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.

Eurostar: good traditional customer service, poor social customer service

FailureI use Eurostar in many of my social media training sessions and presentations as an example of an organisation that (still) hasn’t really got social media.  The reason for this is that while their traditional customer care may be quite good, it hasn’t yet worked out how to do real-time customer care, using social media.

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. Continue reading →

The blessed trinity of social media behaviours

Blessed Trinity of Social MediaI have written before about the blessed trinity of media (the Bought, the Earned and the Wholly Earned) and why this definition may not be sensible or useful.  I also think there is a blessed trinity which relates to the three activities that correspond to the principle behaviours of people in the social digital space.  These behaviours are:

  • Talking to friends
  • Looking for information / asking questions
  • Complaining / protesting

If you think about it these behaviours account for probably 90+ per cent of what is actually going on in social media (think about how you use social media yourself).  The interesting thing, from a marketing perspective, is that responding to these behaviours does not correspond to 90 per cent of what most brand’s social media activity is about.

Talking to friends is a space that is virtually impenetrable to brands and you can’t enter it by trying to turn yourself into ‘a friend’ of your consumers.  A person will never have the same relationship with a brand as they will with a friend.  This leaves the other two spaces and it is astonishing how few brands are really aligned against responding to these behaviours in a way which is likely to generate any significant, sustained and measurable value – despite the relative ease of doing this.

Isn’t it time brands mapped their use of social media against the way it is being used by the people they wish to ‘engage’ with?

Just answer the ****** question!

Just listen and answer theHere is a short thought for a Friday.

The first and absolutely most important thing you should do in social media is listen to your consumers / customers and answer their questions.

I say this many times in the training I deliver and posts I produce – but I thought it was a good idea to Just Say It on its own.

You should work out how to do this before you figure out how to drive ‘likes’ on Facebook, what content to produce or how to measure engagement.  Because if you do this, consumers will ‘like’ the brand, rather than just the Facebook page.  And also, if you do this, you will find that you magically have the answers to what content you need to produce and what you should be measuring.

Furthermore, if you simply listen to you customers or consumers and answer their questions, you will have a social media strategy that is far more effective than almost all of the strategies employed by most of the brands in the world at the moment.  Social media is a listening and response tool.  It is not a publication tool.

Is Ryanair right to eschew social media?

FireShot Screen Capture #127 - 'Ryanair's new comms chief to eschew social media I PR & public relations news I PRWeek' - www_prweek_com_uk_bulletin_prweekukdaily_article_1168936_ryanairs-new-comms-chief-eschew-sociaPR Week in the UK is running this story about the decision of Robin Kiely,  Ryanair’s new head of comms to to dismiss the value of social media engagement.  Is he right to do this?  Absolutely, in my opinion.  Ryanair is an organisation that has been hugely successful despite a studious disregard for customer service.  I am fond of contrasting the corporate stories of Ryanair and easyJet.  The story of the later is “you only pay for what you want” and the story of the former is “you only get what you pay for”.  In this respect, Ryanair is being absolutely true to it corporate story.

Kiely is quoted in the article thus:

‘A Facebook account would not be helpful to us, as we would have so many people looking for a response.’

He called the social network a ‘two-way tool’ and said maintaining a dedicated account would probably mean ‘hiring two more people just to sit on Facebook all day’.

‘If customers want to get in touch, the methods are there,’ he added, referring to the brand’s customer care line.

Spot on.  A dedicated Facebook account would mean hiring two people just to sit on Facebook all day.  For most organisations this would be a productive use of two people’s time because: a) it would demonstrate that the organisation takes its customers seriously and, b) it would provide the organsiation with valuable intelligence about what its customers want.  But Ryanair is not ‘most organisations’.  It is the exception which proves the rule when it comes to customer service.

In many ways this approach to social media is less insulting, and less ineffective, than the approach of many organisations who simply outsource the management of their Facebook presence to an agency,  At least Kiely recognises that you need to put dedicated people onto managing Facebook, and better to promote the customer care line upfront, rather than respond to Facebook enquiries with a standard “Thanks for you question, please call our customer care line on this number” response.

Co-incidentally, Rynair was discussed in the SMTLive webinar on ‘Marketing and Customer Service’ organised by Social Media Today on Tuesday – i.e. before Kiely’s statement. You can download the audio here.   It was a good session (as have been all the recent SMT webinars in recent weeks – I recommend you sign-up).  I think it was  either Frank Eliason (he of former @ComcastCares fame)  or Carol Borghesi who made the point that effective customer service is all about being “true to who you are.”  And that, or course, is exactly is what Ryanair is doing.

(But I would still always prefer to fly easyJet – provided, of course, that they can get me where I want to go, when I want to go there, from an airport I want to fly from, at a competitive price.  And therein lies the rub.)