Hill+Knowlton Strategies

I spoke a few months back to a specialist service provider group about how to better use social media to support them in marketing themselves.

It was an extremely enjoyable group, really keen to investigate how they might best bend the new channels to their goals, build fan followings and start sharing content in pretty much anyway possible. Things started out much as they usually do, explanations and discussion about the risk of getting involved, how long the management of this should really be taking.

After a couple hours interacting with these guys two things occurred to me.

Firstly, they were all capable marketers. They had understood a consumer audience, engaged them with storytelling that allayed their fears and lowered barriers to purchase and/or engagement with their brands, and had been able to describe a (sometimes solid) return on investment for their activities.

Secondly, they were all building a fence around social media through the way the planned and executed activity. Campaigns were planned as facebook audience specific, with incentives that had nothing to do with their business and whose call to action didn’t make it off the platform. It manifested as a common problem with using social media as part of the marketing mix, how do you deliver a result to the business and not just the platform.

This is a big problem.

I’m going to get a little Mr Miyagi on the answer though. “Make social media perform as part of the marketing mix by making social media a part of the marketing mix.”

I’ve come up with a few questions/points.

1) What is value to you as a page owner?

I’m guessing you didn’t get into social media to develop a large fan base, to push for an incremental increase in likes each week, or to chase a higher level of engagement that would be seen favourably by the Facebook Edgerank algorithm.

Increasingly, I do a lot of work in the digital space, and I have learned to love the data. It teaches you what is working, where your traffic comes from and where they go when you leave. Digital is utterly fantastic in its ability to measure the actions of your audience but that mountain of data delivers a risk too.

As a business owner, you need to go into any marketing activity with an idea of how this will provide some value to your business and define some measures that will show that this is happening. You might want to foster a discussion around the experience people have when they do business with you. Very few businesses are ultimately guided by an ability to to build and engage a social media audience as an end, unless of course, your name is Mark Zuckerberg.

Engagement can be a fine indicator that the efforts you are making are having a connection with your audience, but it is not the overall end goal. As an industry, we should stop trying to convince clients that it is, spending some time and understanding their business would deliver stronger ideas and better campaigns.

Thinking about how your social channels form a part of your marketing mix and what role they play in moving someone through the consumer journey that ultimately makes you money is an important part of being successful in this space. It might also increase the perception of value we can articulate if we could show how many likes equal a profitable action.

2) Here’s another social media guy talking about the conversation.

Possibly the most overused few words in social media today. Everyone, from the bright eyed newbies hammering out content plans, through the the “only digital I do these days is in powerpoint” director types can agree that social media is about a conversation.

It seems interesting to me, then, that so many companies are ignoring this. It seems like many online see conversation as two or more people saying what they want to say, in the same place. That to me, sounds like a lengthy trip to the third ring of hell. Conversation at its best represents speaking, listening, learning, understanding and acting on the contents of what’s being said. I’m not really sure I can believe that asking an open question form and burying your head in the sand constitutes the same thing.

The widely hashtagged fails from Qantas, Woolies and Coles are not notable because of the LOLs they give industry observers and the echobox of the twitterverse, but that they demonstrate such poor conversations. The results highlight the fence that these brands have put around their social media efforts.

If Social was an integrated part of their businesses some of the feedback would provide actionable improvements to their products, offers and images in the market.

3) What utility are you delivering to your fans or connections?

As a page owner, decide at the start what the page will deliver for the audience and what the page will deliver for you. Use this as a lens for everything you do.

It’s probably also important to note that many people of facebook see the channel as ‘theirs’ so it’s probably wise to balance the content value equation squarely in their favour. Delivering utility is the route to building an audience that stays with you over time.

Well, maybe not completely, at least not yet. A study just released by Roiworld, an online gaming site, says that one in 5 teens are losing interest in the platform.

Teens Study June 2010

Probably not time to write the whole thing off just yet, as the survey only polled 600 teens and Roiworld doesn’t make use of the platform to connect users and spread their games. The result are interesting all the same, and I especially liked the 16% of people who have left because their parents have turned up on the site.

Old school marketers seem to exhibit a desire to find the next aggregation network. They had it when everyone watched TV and got lazy, force feeding ads down peoples throats. As TVC’s seem to be moving back to a position of ‘part of the mix’ instead of ‘king of the castle,’ the search is on to find the place where everyone will be, the place to concentrate investment and wipe out the competition through the tried and tested use of frequency and repetition.

It seems to me that with the rise of new platforms and their ability to reach a couple hundred million people increasing at a geometric rate (TV took 13 years to reach 50 million, facebook took 9 months), we should rationally expect that the lifespan of the channel is not going to be as long. High levels of investment in the platforms return lower ROI as the lifespan of the platform diminishes.  It seems like every agency in the comms industry is talking about social media, gurus and experts launch themselves on the success of a little SEO, some aggregation of trends and knowledge that most of the market knows there is an opportunity, but that’s the extent of their knowledge.

I believe the conversation we should be having is how to make media social. Planning and developing content for a world where stories move across media networks, both new and old, seems to be the strategy to try and develop. You have to go where the audience is, but also, as a brand you have to develop a meaningful relationship with people and not their online profile. The brands that provide the most seamless experience across the networks are going to win.

I’m excited as hell to be involved.

I ran into this over at http://www.planningfromtheoutside.com/

I think it’s a great way to communicate the sheer weight of involvement and communications the social web has attracted. Sometimes when we’re planning a new campaign, it feels like the game is changing in front of our eyes. Here’s the proof it really is.

Change really is the only constant.