Tagged: social media

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.)

Should you let an agency manage your Facebook page?

Managing Facebook pages is big business for a lot of social media agencies.  In fact, it is fast becoming a staple activity.  Is this something to be encouraged?  In my opinion, absolutely not.  In fact I would go so far as to say that if you are using an agency to manage your Facebook page, this shows you haven’t yet worked out how to use social media effectively.

There are, of course, many reasons why you might want to use an agency to manage your Facebook page.  For a start, Facebook is so darn fidgety – always changing stuff, introducing new things and changing the rules of the game.  Keeping on top of what is going on at Facebook is a full-time job – so it makes perfect sense to hire an agency who is already plugged-in to the Facebook world.  Secondly, maintaining a regular stream of posting is a burden.  Creating all this ‘engaging content’ is not something the average marketing department was set up to do, whereas it is something that writers and other creative folk in the agency world do very well.

Bit here is the rub.  Do you really need to stay on-top of everything Facebook is doing?  And why do you see Facebook as so much ‘dead air’ that has to be filled with content, engaging or otherwise? Presiding over ‘dead air’ was a criminal offence in broadcast media, but Facebook is not a broadcast medium.  The idea of the need for regular posting comes out of the world of blogging, where constant refreshment created Google-juice and visibility in the digital space.  But Facebook is a closed digital world, which Google can’t penetrate.

One of the most insightful things I have ever heard about Facebook was said to me by the marketing director of a large retailer in Turkey.  She said, “I love Facebook because it tells me what people think about my latest ad.”  Unwittingly, or otherwise, she had hit the nail on the head.  You don’t use social media to carry messages to people about your brand, you use it to find out what people think about your brand.  You don’t use it to create brand ambassadors within your consumers, you use it to create consumer ambassadors within your brand.

I think the most important part of any Facebook page is the ‘post by others’ section – i.e. the part where your customers or consumers want to talk to you.  You have to ask yourself the question “why would I want someone else to be standing between me and my consumers?”  You can, of course, drop an agency into this slot, but they will never be able to give the best answers.  In fact a sure-fire sign that an agency is managing the page comes when you see the response “we are so sorry to hear you think (our brand sucks), please call our customer service hotline on this number and they will be able to help you.”  A pretty insulting response if you think about it.  You may as well be saying “you can either sit down and listen to what we have to say to you and press the applause (like) button at the right moments or you can sod-off somewhere else and find someone whose job it is to listen to your petty complaints.”  I exaggerate – but not by much.  This type of deflection response clearly says “you are in the wrong space for this type of behaviour, go away”.  And also, if your customers think that you brand sucks, or is great, or could be improved by making some changes – this information should take route one into your organisation, not be filtered through an agency.

I am frequently asked by clients or people in workshops I am running “how do we create more engagement with our Facebook posts?”  This is often followed by the supplementary “how do we deal with negative comments on our Facebook page?”   To which my answer is always “position your Facebook page as a place where you encourage people to come and complain, so that you can be seen as an organisation which takes its’ customers seriously.  Don’t position your Facebook page as some sort of interactive content platform.”

Personally, I think you can forget about the posting space in a proactive, planned sense, because no matter how engaging you make this type of planned content, it will never be engaging enough to compensate for the fact that Facebook (as with all types of social media) is a low reach form of media.  Reach 100,000 people via an ad – easy.  Reach 100,000 people via a Facebook post – will nigh impossible.  Traditional media has reach built into it, social media does not.  The only things you should post on a Facebook page should relate directly, in real-time, to the questions that people are asking.  Your consumers should define the content, you don’t plan the content in advance.  This type of contact is much higher value, both in terms of the impact with the consumer and also the intelligence for the brand, and therefore justifies a lower reach.  Facebook may well say, as it has, that “all (brand) content should be as engaging as the posts you see from friends and family”, but that is never going to happen is it?  You are never going to have the same relationship with a brand as with friends and family.   The only form of engagement worth generating is that which comes from listening and responding to the questions your customers are asking.  

None-the-less, lots of agencies are making a lot of money managing Facebook pages, which, in my opinion, reflects the fact that very few brands have worked out how to use Facebook (indeed social media as a whole) effectively.  Of course, these brands may have been encouraged to form a view about effective use of Facebook by those self-same agencies and Facebook itself.

Perhaps more charitably, it is form of herd mentality.  In any situation that is new, it is difficult make decisions about what to do – because there are no precedents.   It therefore often makes sense to do one of two things.  The first is the easiest thing and the second is the thing which everyone else is doing.  In the new environment of social, the easiest thing is any option which allows you to continue with conventional low engagement mass marketing albeit it with a few tweaks to make it more social.  It is easy to understand Facebook as some sort of media platform that needs to be fed with content and thus easy and sensible to outsource its management to an agency.  It is difficult to see Facebook as a channel that consumers will use to reach you, partly because it then means you have to deal with this yourself and can’t simply push the problem to an agency.  And very soon, the easy thing becomes the thing everyone else is doing which makes it even more compelling.

That is not to say that there isn’t a role for agencies.  You can use agencies to do analysis and intelligence – spending time out there seeing what people are saying and thinking about your brand, the competition or the sector.  Agencies can listen effectively on your behalf, but they can’t speak effectively on your behalf.

– Richard Stacy: advanced social media training –

Creating ‘engaging content’ is a waste of time in social media

A provocative thought to start 2013.

Here is a statement that is incredibly important to understand if you wish to create an effective social media strategy.  I think it is possibly the most important concept you will ever need to get your head around to understand the future of marketing.  It is also pretty simple – one might even say it is obvious.  Here it is.

Traditional media is low engagement / high reach.  Social media, on the other hand, is low reach / high engagement.

That’s it.  It doesn’t feel like a revolutionary or startling claim – but grasping its full implications is something that very few brands have done.  I don’t see much evidence that P&G has grasped these implications.  I don’t see any evidence that Coca Cola has grasped these implications.  In fact I see plenty of evidence these organisations are either trying to give reach to their social media presence (in order to make low engagement activities and content still work) while failing to produce activities sufficiently engaging to be cost-effective in a low reach (i.e. social) environment.

To understand this we need to examine, in detail, the concepts of engagement (which is largely a function of content, information or activity) and reach (which is largely a concept of scale).

So let’s look at engagement (and content)

Most social media strategies are littered with the word ‘engagement’ and ‘content’ and then the ever-popular hybrid ‘engaging content’ which is frequently held aloft as the the all-consuming objective of social media campaigns (“Our aim is to produce the world’s most engaging content” – Jonathan Mildenhall, Creative Guru of Coca Cola in his famous Content 2020 video).  But here is the thing – to even use the term ‘engaging content’ in a social media context, is to demonstrate that you have failed to grasp the implications of the, supposedly simple and obvious statement at the start of this piece.

Here is why.

Content is a word that comes straight from the world of traditional media – the low engagement, high reach world of traditional media.  You can make your content more engaging, but you can hardly ever make any form of content engaging enough to work in the high engagement low reach world of social media.  Nor, conversely, will you be able to give your social media presence sufficient scale (reach) to make it work like traditional media – i.e. to be an effective channel to put single messages in front of your audience.

Ask yourself this question.  Where is it that your consumers have told you that what they really want from you is more ‘engaging content’?  Is this the overall thrust of the ‘posts by others’ section of your brand’s Facebook page?  If you seriously think this is what your consumers want, you have not been listening to them.  It may well be that you have worked out that if you create more engagement you will start to push the needle on the reach of your Facebook page – but so what?  Taking something that doesn’t actually reach many of your consumers and making it reach even 100%  more of them doesn’t really achieve much.  Twice of very little, is still very little.

As an aside, I have recently been having an interesting conversation with Socialbakers – one of the leading players in providing various forms of social media metrics / measurement. (See previous post.  Jan Rezab, the CEO of Socialbakers replied in an email and also a signed pdf letter (!) which he wanted me to publish.  Jan – consider that thus done, although I think the best way of replying would be to leave a comment on my blog so that everyone can see the whole discussion).  The basic thrust of our conversation is that Jan has been saying brands must create (and thus measure the creation of) more ‘engagement’ and become ‘friends’ with their consumers – and I have been saying that this definition of ‘engagement’ is not a concept worth pursuing or measuring, and that brands can never be friends with consumers – by any credibly social definition of friendship.

Engaging content is what marketing directors want their consumers to want (largely because it is something that marketing directors, and their agencies, believe they can produce).    It is high time we all paid attention to how it is that people are actually using social media (as opposed to how it is we might wish them to use social media).  They are not using it to follow brands or establish ‘relationships’ with brands – some of course are doing this, but they are – and will always remain – a tiny proportion of your consumer base.  What is mostly happening in social media is that people are using it to have conversations with people (real people) that they already know and are probably friends with.  This space is virtually impenetrable to brands – because consumers will never by ‘friends’ with brands (despite whatever label you might want to stick on a click).  Leastways, this ‘friendship’ (clickship) will be miles away in engagement terms, from the type of friendship they have will real friends.

It is all a question of the scale of measurement.  When you enter a social environment you have to use social scales of measurement.   Something that might look very engaging when viewed against traditional content-comparison scales of measurement, probably won’t even register on the dial, when you are using a social measurement scale.  Just because you are using social media, doesn’t mean that you are being social – although it does mean that you are being rated by a consumer (if not a measurement agency) against a social measurement scale – i.e. a scale where loyalty does not mean incentivised repeat purchase, loyalty means sticking by you through thick and thin.  In short – no matter what type of ‘engaging content’ a brand might create in social media, no matter how much more engaging this content or activity might be than an ad,  it is almost always going to be at the low engagement end of the spectrum – when that spectrum is calibrated against a genuinely social scale.

If we actually pay attention to what it is consumers are doing in social media (apart from connecting with friends) we see that they are asking questions and seeking out reliable, peer-endorsed, information.  This is an area where a brand can play, and it is an area where the engagement score of their activity can start to rate within a social measurement scale – as I will outline later.

But I am getting ahead of myself here.  Let us first look at the issue of reach, scale and media.

It is all about scale

The scale effect (i.e. business benefit) with traditional media was generated through its ability to reach large numbers of people – your entire audience – often repeatedly.  This allowed the contact value per person reached to be very small because a very large amount of a small thing still adds up to a large thing.  A great ad or campaign may make people a little bit more likely to buy your product – and if you can scale that effect across the whole audience that can translate into a big shift in overall sales.

Social media doesn’t do scale – it doesn’t have scale built into it in the way that traditional media does.  Facebook wasn’t designed as a platform to put a message in front of lots of people, it was designed to allow small groups of people to connect with each other.  Therefore, the scale effect (business benefit) from social media does not lie in the ability to create a small amount of a positive effect with a large number of people – because you will hardly ever be able to reach enough people to make this a sensible activity.  Instead, the scale effect comes from creating a dramatically greater positive effect per contact, albeit across a much smaller number of people (at any given time – see this post).    As we have seen ‘engaging content’ is never going to rank high enough to qualify as creating a sufficiently positive experience to make its production a worthwhile activity in the high engagement but low reach game of social media.

Note: you can’t solve the scale problem with social media by simply trying to add scale to your social media presence – boosting likes or followers – because it won’t be either cost efficient or possible to add sufficient scale for your social presence to start working for you the same way as traditional media does, i.e. as a channel to put a message in front of lots of people.  Reaching  half a million people using an ad is pretty easy, whereas reaching half a million people using Facebook is well nigh impossible.  This doesn’t, of course, stop people trying – hence our collective obsession with creating ‘viral content’.  Social media does, in fact become like traditional media when something goes viral and it does so a virtually zero cost – but you have to ask yourself the question: just how frequently does something become viral in comparison to the number of attempts to make things become viral.  Answer: hardly ever – and even when something does, the ‘engagement’ created is often of lower value than a conventional ad, because of the need to drag the content away from a proven brand message territory, in order to give it the interest necessary to create the viral effect.

Proponents of the engaging content school of thought, such as Jan from Socialbakers, may be keen to point out that more engagement leads to greater reach.   The big question is – how much reach?  Creating engaging Facebook posts will obviously increase the reach of your Facebook presence – but Facebook will never be an effective way of reaching your entire audience, or even a sufficient segment of it.  It goes back to my earlier post about what works for you in Facebook doesn’t mean that this should shape the way that Facebook works for you (it is a bit like the non-logic in the “all elephants are grey therefore all grey animals are elephants” argument).

In short, if you are going to do something that is fundamentally of low engagement (as measured on a social engagement scale) – you have to be able to do it at higher scale or reach than you are ever likely to achieve using social media.  If you are using a low reach form of media (such as social media) you have to be able to increase the value stakes considerably – way above that which we conventionally associate with ‘engaging Facebook posts’.

So how do you create a business benefit from engagement in social media?

Basically, there are two types of engagement:  the engagement brands want to have with their consumers and the engagement consumers want to have with brands – and both are totally different.  Brands want to try to talk to entire audiences (reach) and put messages or promotions in front of them.  This is what marketing basically does and the success of it is defined by the creativity of the message and the effectiveness of the channel strategy in distributing this message.  Consumers are happy with this (in the world of traditional media) because they understand that the brand is talking to them as part of an audience, not as an individual.  It is a bit like going to a Coldplay concert – this only really works if there is also an audience of which you are a part.  Standing in the arena on your own would be pretty strange.  However, when a consumer is engaging with a brand (in the world of social media) they are doing so as an individual and therefore the response they want back from a brand is totally different.  To return to the Coldplay analogy, if you had an audience with Coldplay, as distinct from being part of a Coldplay audience, you wouldn’t want Chris Martin to prance about and sing, you would want to ask him some questions and have a chat.  Understanding this difference between the world of the audience and the world of the individual, and the fact that consumers can operate seamlessly in both spaces, is the single most important step a brand needs to take if it is to understand how to deal with a consumer in the world of the individual (i.e. the world of social media).

So how does a brand create value by engaging with its consumers in the world of the individual?  It does it two ways.  The first is by listening to and answering consumers’ questions.  This is what consumers actually want a brand to be doing, rather than a brand that produces lots of ‘engaging content’ (Coldplay analogy again, you want Chris to talk to you, you don’t want him to prance around and sing).

Try this for an exercise.  Go to your brand’s Facebook page.  Look at ‘posts by others’.  See what it is your consumers are actually doing.  I can guarantee that 90 per cent of what will be going on here is consumers asking questions or registering complaints that they want attended to.   Then look at the total disconnect between how your brand is using Facebook to ‘reach-out’ to its consumers (lots of ‘engaging content’, probably produced by an agency) and how your consumers want to use Facebook to reach your brand.

In this respect Socialbakers are spot on when they talk about a socially devoted brand, insofar as the definition of a socially devoted brand is one that listens and answers questions (as distinct from one which produces ‘engaging content’).  Measuring your effectiveness in responding to Facebook questions (as Socialbakers do) is great, albeit the value you create for a business is not the speed of response to questions, it lies in the volume of questions you can answer and especially in creating an environment which encourages people to ask questions – what I call creating the expectation of listening.  Social media has created an explosion of opportunity in the customer service space.  This has been driven by the fact that customer service has become liberated from the channels in which it had previously been imprisoned (email and phone) – as I like to say, the social media revolution is simply the separation (or liberation) of information from its means of distribution.  Customer service has gone from being a business hygiene factor to being a front-line marketing tool (albeit most marketing directors haven’t embraced this fact yet).  Of course, there is also no point in then locking customer service back up again by imprisoning it in Facebook – a customer needs to be able to ask a question and receive an answer using whatever platform they want and thus brands need to be listening and responding, in real-time, across all platforms.

Coming back to the issue of scale and benefit – the value you can create from an effective customer service contact and the fact that this experience can now happen in open forums and is thus seen by many, is infinitely greater than that generated via a single impression created in conventional audience-based marketing.  Such a contact is high engagement and thus qualifies to operate in a low reach environment.  Create 1,000 such social contacts per day and you are creating something of real value whereas the creation of 1,000 low engagement, conventional content-based contacts is largely worthless.  This is in addition to the benefits that will also come from getting real-time feedback about what consumers think about your product.

Note: a like, follow or share does not qualify as a valuable social contact in this game because this is still in the low order of engagement – something that may be more valuable than an ad impression, but something that is nowhere near valuable enough to create a sensible benefit unless you can extend it across a large segment of your consumer base – which of course you will not be able to do.  Likes, follows and shares are also not useful indicators of a brands ability to respond to questions – they are indicators of what people think about content.  And content is not the name of the game in social media – content is the name of the game in traditional, high-reach media.   Listening and response is the name of the game in social media.

The second way you create value in the world of the individual is by identifying the tiny proportion of your consumer or customer base who are your super-fans.  These are not brand ambassadors, because they won’t want to represent your brand, nor will they be representative of your consumers.  There is also no point in trying to get them to increase their rate of consumption of your product or service because they are only a tiny group and are probably already at maximum rate of consumption.  However, what they will be prepared to do is become involved in your brand in areas such as new product development or customer service.  Prelini Udayan-Chiechi at Lithium has a fantastic case study from Logitech where they were able to quantify the huge value that super-fans, operating in a customer service community set up by Logitech (using the Lithium platform) were able to create.

But in all of this, it is essential to remember that we are always and only ever dealing with small numbers (low reach): a small number of super-fans or a small number of people – at any one time – who are asking questions.  If you are going to work at the small scale, you can’t create a business benefit simply by nudging those small numbers of people a little bit up the positive engagement scale, as is a realistic objective for ads and other forms high reach, audience-based, marketing.  You have to be doing something that operates at an altogether higher order of magnitude in terms of the value per contact, or else you are wasting your time.

In conclusion (finally)

So – to sum things up.  When you are in the social world, you have to use social scales of measurement and you have to create activities that will rank against this scale.  The activity that is the creation of ‘engaging content’ will never rank high enough (against a social scale of measurement) to make this a worthwhile activity.  You can create whatever scale you like to measure things like  ‘engagement’ and ‘reach’ and get tremendously excited because you have moved the needle by 20, 50 or 100 per cent.  But twice of sod-all, is still sod-all.

The only things worth doing, and thus measuring, are those activities which actually rank against a social measurement scale.  These activities are listening and responding to individual consumers (not trying to be their ‘friend’) and identifying those ‘super-fans’ who are prepared to actually  help you make your business better.

The value of a Facebook page does not lie in (and therefore should not be measured by) the ability to create engaging posts or reach lots of people.  The value of a Facebook page, as with all forms of social media, lies in the ability to listen and respond to those people who wish to engage with you.  It is the way your consumers use Facebook, not the way that a brand wishes to use it, that you should be measuring.  And, as I have said previously, this means that Facebook itself is a form of measurement, rather than something you should be measuring.

Good luck in 2013!

P.S Jan, if you want to respond, please leave a comment on the post rather than send me an email – in that way the conversation can become more visible – especially to those who have read the post.

– Richard Stacy: advanced social media training –

Just because something works doesn’t mean that it is working

FireShot Screen Capture #105 - 'November Facebook Data for United Kingdom - stacynet@googlemail_com - Gmail' - mail_google_com_mail_u_0__shva=1#inbox_13b8e711e6d7883eYesterday I got an email from a chap called Darren Reed at Socialbakers (see above).  I say I got an email from him, but in reality got an email from b2b-mail.net because I ended up on an list on account of having commented on piece on Socialbakers’ blog.  I don’t think Darren actually sent it.  Anyway this ‘slightly spam’ email drew my attention to Socialbakers’ latest Facebook Report for the UK recognising the ‘best performing brands on Facebook’ – whatever that means.

As it turns out, this means the brands which have created the most engaging posts, according to the measurements provided by Socialbakers.  Thus I was able to see that the top three most engaging posts in the UK in November were:

  • Coming in at number three, was Appliances Online with “Click LIKE and you could WIN a £500 Electrolux Oven/Cooker.”
  • In the runner up spot was Asda with “Click “like” if you’d love to win £100 to buy your Christmas turkey and all the trimmings!”
  • And the winner, and best performing Facebook post in the UK in November was (insert drum role here) Appliances Online again with “Click LIKE if you fancy WINNING 3 Samsung smart appliances (Worth £2,500).”

One can see a theme emerging.  Indeed it is a theme that anyone who studies Facebook will be be familiar with – namely that the main reason consumers ‘like’ brands is to get offers, freebies or enter competitions.

I was pleased to receive this information because I was able to insert it into a presentation I was about to give to a bunch of marketing folk at Bilgi University in Istanbul in order to illustrate a point I was making in relation to understanding how to use Facebook.  This point was that “just because something works doesn’t mean that it is working” – as in just because competitions are effective in Facebook does not mean that the most effective way of using Facebook is competitions.  In fact there is almost nothing to be learned from the sort of data that Socialbakers et al may give us about effective postings or content in Facebook that will help us determine how to use Facebook effectively for the very simple reason that Facebook (indeed almost all forms of social media) are extraordinarily ineffective tools to use to put content in front of lots of people.  Social media does not ‘do’ large numbers it ‘does’ small groups.  Social media does not have scale built into it, in the way that traditional media does.  The benefit you get from social media therefore does not lie in the numbers, the ability to ‘engage’ a lot of people, the benefit lies in in the ability to create relationships with very small groups of individuals, at any one moment in time.  Critically, therefore, these contacts have to deliver something of significant value – i.e. hugely greater value than that associated with the sort of metrics that Socialbakers are measuring (likes, shares, comments etc) in order for the effort to be worthwhile.

I was using this point to illustrate the main theme of my presentation – namely that we now have two worlds: the world of the audience and the world of the individual (I thought this was a rather neat theme to use given that we were standing is a city that has been defined by the fact that is sits at the physical and political junction between two worlds – the world of Europe and the world of Asia).  Up until this point there has only ever been a world of the audience and as a result, most brands are simply trying to push approaches designed to be seen by audiences (i.e. lots of people) in front of individuals or groups.  And, of course, this doesn’t work.  As Hugh MacLeod memorably stated “If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they would punch you in the face”.  This doesn’t mean that advertising doesn’t work, it means that advertising needs an audience in order to make it work, or as I, rather more charitably put it, “The great thing about advertising is that no-one take it personally”.

The value of Facebook, and all of social media, lies in the ability for your consumers to tell you what they think of your brand and, potentially, to help you improve what it is your brand does.  Pushing ‘engaging content’ out through Facebook is a total waste of time – consumers don’t want engaging content, they simply want a brand to be listening to them and answering their questions.  Now if you can do this at scale in a platform neutral way (i.e. listening to consumers wherever they want to talk to you – blogs, Twitter, Facebook, forums etc.)  you will be creating something of value – albeit Socialbakers won’t be able to measure it.  In reality, as I have said before, you don’t need to attach metrics to Facebook, Facebook itself is metric – it measures what people think about your brand.

Anyway – I will send this post to Darren.  I am sure he won’t mind given the liberty he feels he has to send stuff to me.  Let’s see how (or if) he responds.

As an interesting footnote, a few weeks ago I was running a session with a group of post-graduate students at the European Communications School in the London College of Communication.  Of the 30 or so members of the group only one used Facebook to have any sort of relationship with brands.  A handful said they occasionally ‘like’ brands, but only to get access to offers and the rest said they only use Facebook to stay in contact with their friends.  Is anyone surprised about this and if you are not, why do we then think Facebook is some sort of magic platform to ‘reach out to’ or ‘engage’  a significant number of consumers?

We also then went on to do some basic brand mapping work in order to identify what sort of relationship people had with ‘the thing’ that is Facebook.  What this showed is that people see Facebook as a utility.  It ranks somewhere slightly above the relationship they have with a mobile phone network and a long way below the engagement they have with services like Google or products such as Apple.  So, remind me again, why is it that Facebook is trading at an earnings multiple about four times greater than that of either Google or Apple?  Maybe it is because marketing directors are being encouraged in the deluded belief that Facebook is some form of media platform that allows them to reach lots of people, rather than a tool that lots of people can use to reach brands often with content and requests that brands are unprepared to respond to (a tool for which, incidentally, consumers will not be prepared to pay – as my research with the students also confirmed).