As we grope our way forward to embrace, understand and utilize social media as an efficient marketing channel, we have to recognize that hype and wishful thinking are far ahead of the reality. Our emerging social graph is new, morphing regularly, subject to the stampede of public opinion and mostly out of our control. Experimenting with social media is an act of faith; grabbing the tiger by tail and hoping to both hold on and learn something interesting along the way.
And yet we can’t kid ourselves. There are limitations and challenges inherent in harnessing or mobilizing social media to suit brand objectives. Among them are the 7 unspoken truths that most of us have encountered, but few discuss openly. Recognizing the early limitations of the medium can help us better understand how and where social media fits in the marketer’s toolbox.
It’s a Blizzard of Blah-Blah. There is a lot crap in social media. The prescient philosophers, pundits, prophets and prognosticators are outnumbered 100 to 1 by people sharing ordinary, banal and off color thoughts. The rapid embrace of the channel is much more impressive than the production of content. And while user-generated content (UGC) has become venerated by some, its more of an indicator that people want to speak up and participate than it is a rich source of useful information or insight. In fact, social media operates a lot like talk radio. A vocal and aggressive minority can set the agenda and drive the conversation while the overwhelmingly majority sits back and listens voyeuristically.
Pictures Matter Most. Videos, photos and images account for a huge amount of input and usage in social media. It’s as if people are telling us that pictures matter more than words. The time spent uploading and viewing video in the social graph far outpaces any other activity. Maybe our consumers, tired of endless blab, feel that seeing is believing.
Sentiment is Anyone’s Guess. A variety of tools have been created to gauge sentiment in social media. Most use screen scrapers and compare what they find with databases of positive and negative terms. Most use algorithms based on word proximity to decide if comments are for or against you. (E.g. If your brand name is within 5 words of the word “sucks” it’s considered a negative comment.)
This is a primitive form of data mining. I haven’t seen a tool capable of learning effectively or capable of discerning idioms and the nuances of language sufficient to make real judgments. This “machine sentiment is usually expressed as a bell curve. There are a small number of clearly positive or negative things about your brand and the vast majority, the big lump in the middle of the curve, is labeled neutral. The net affect is that basically you have no real or verifiable idea what the majority is thinking or saying about you or your brand unless you dig into the verbatims and create your own protocols to grade, sort and weigh the mass of conversations yourself.
Finding a Voice Isn’t Easy. Brands seeking to leverage social media confront challenges in finding their voice and discerning a point of entry into the conversation. Do you leap into the conversation or ease your way in quietly? Do you wait to be introduced or do you push your way in? Do you act on your own agenda or do you follow the threads you find?
And while many brands have developed a brand personality, its not clear if the first or the third person is the appropriate way to communicate with fans or if the words that define the brand personality can be brought to life consistently in an always-on forum. Brands have a posture and a sensibility that shapes the way they communicate although social media is filled with informality, argot, idioms and protocols that will be unfamiliar, possibly uncomfortable and fraught with corporate legal implications. And while anyone can throw up a Facebook page or open a Twitter account, hitting the right tone, the right frequency and the right content is not a slam dunk.
Social Media is Labor Intensive. Somebody has to monitor the channels, devise the content, coordinate the offers, synch campaigns with IT and operations, measure the traffic, gauge the sentiment, identify the openings, assess the competitive landscape, keep on top of technical developments and align the whole shebang with the communications plans and business objectives of the brand. This takes people and lots of them. And while client marketers are devoting half an FTE or 1 whole person to social marketing activities, agencies, PR firms and consultants are deploying legions of young professionals and interns to keep pace with the volume of activity and the changing dynamics of the channels.
Privacy Matters More Than We Think. Not everyone is comfortable living their lives out loud online. Facebook’s multiple, notable privacy gaffes have surfaced a broad array of concerns that run much deeper than is acknowledged. If we did an audit, we’d find several social networks are lax when it comes to privacy settings, policy and forethought. So while many marketers are excited by the possibilities for segmentation, customer intimacy and the prospect of intense 1-to-1 personal communication with customers and prospects, just as many marketers fear a privacy backlash that could prompt ham-fisted government regulations or wide-reaching consumer class action lawsuits.
Marketing Applications Are Not Clear. If 500+ million people are using social media, it makes sense for marketers to follow. But unlike other media, social media hasn’t yet found its role in the marketing or media arsenal. Social media could become a marketer’s Swiss Army knife -- part reach medium, part frequency extender, part direct marketing tool, part coupon distribution mechanism, part early warning radar, part intelligence gathering tool, part press release distributor and/or part promotion platform.
We know it’s big but we don’t quite know what to do with yet or how to use it for optimum affect. We are eager to engage, though everyone has a different definition of what the term means and why the term matters. And so at the moment we are content to experiment, test-and-learn, share results with each other and convince our bosses to keep playing around with social media till we hit on something that makes a difference either in sales or in customer satisfaction.
The campaigns being run now are the overture to a much longer, richer and more directed social symphony. Anyone who tells you otherwise is kidding himself or herself and you. Seeing the speed bumps clearly will help us grasp the communications and cultural implications of these digitally enabled networks and allow us to fit them into the tool set that powers and grows brands.
Great post, Daniel.
I agree with your fourth point about the difficulty in finding a voice in social media channels. Even if a brand does find it’s voice, it’s often difficult for a message to be heard among all the noise and clutter. In addition to contributing to social media conversations, marketers need to consider creating their own social media channel with a community website. We’re seeing growing interest in community sites as marketers look to open source social pushing systems to become a truly social business. Social publishing platforms make this possible by creating a place where content and community come together. – Lynne Capozzi, Acquia