Social Media Marketing is Broken

“I am going to Germany for seven months,” announced my friend on Facebook, and her confused, concerned and excited friends erupted with a dozen urgent questions. An hour later came the explanation: “It was a cancer awareness meme. Sorry to have put bad info out there.” Well, I feel so much more aware about cancer now, don’t you?

This is just the latest example of how social media marketing has become (or always was) broken–a chase for memes for memes’ sake. Social media marketing is an insular and largely meaningless game where the perceived winner is not the brand that gains awareness, consideration or purchase intent but the one with the most retweets and likes.

The problem rests not with social media but with marketers. I blame marketers for focusing on quick fixes and easy metrics rather than appreciating that–as always–brands gain customers’ trust, usage and loyalty through hard work and not button clicks.

The problem isn’t only in social media, of course. Too many marketers have been lazy, focusing more on saying different things about the brand in paid media rather than helping the brand to be different in meaningful ways. These marketers continue to invest in lookalike ads, hoping the right headline or creative imagery will catapult the brand forward, ignoring the preponderance of evidence that validates people are drawn to brands for deeper reasons.

For example, the 30 companies featured in the book “Firms of Endearment,” selected because they are driven by purpose rather than quarterly earnings, grew their stock by 21.06% annually compared to 3.3% for the S&P. These “firms of endearment” advertise, but not like everyone else. Take Patagonia–while other retailers were using Cyber Monday ads and emails to pump discounts, Patagonia used the same channels to tell its customers “Don’t Buy This Jacket.” Patagonia won not by telling customers “Pick me! Pick me! I’ve got the best discounts!” but by encouraging customers to “buy less and to reflect before you spend a dime on this jacket or anything else.”

IKEA, another “firm of endearment,” is again demonstrating why it belongs on the list. IKEA could’ve had a sweepstakes for a Fado lamp or given away a virtual Klobo loveseat for Farmville farmers; instead, the company listened to the people who launched their own fan page entitled, “I wanna have a sleepover in IKEA.” Voilà, a perfect combination of PR, social media and fan-building loyalty program with a 100-person sleepover in an IKEA store.

In social media, marketers suffer from the classic problem of failing to understand cause and effect: “Starbucks is a social media success with 26 million fans on Facebook, so all I need to do is gain fans by giving things away in Cityville and I’ll be a success, too!” I am not suggesting Starbucks hasn’t done some savvy marketing in social media (more on this later), but Starbucks does not succeed because they have Facebook fans, they have Facebook fans because they succeed at providing a product and experience with which people connect.

Seek social media marketing case studies and you will find a typical assortment of tired marketing promotion tricks ported into the social media era–brands that gained new “fans” by giving away a freebie or offering a sweepstakes. These tactics have been around for decades, so why is it we see them featured in so many social media case studies but so few brand marketing case studies? Because experienced marketers know these tactics do not (for the most part) work.

Freebies and sweepstakes accomplish very specific things–they help launch a new product, promote a new product feature, penetrate a new market or secure display space on retailers’ shelves. They may raise trial and awareness, but they do not deliver repeat usage, loyalty and advocacy, the very building blocks of social media success.

If most freebies and sweepstakes are a mismatch for social media, why do social media marketers use them so much? The argument seems to be that providing an incentive to Facebook users to try your fan page is a first step toward building Facebook relationships, but that sort of thinking ignores how Facebook works. Thanks to Facebook’s Edgerank, adding a bunch of disinterested “fans” who hide or ignore your posts does not help but rather hurts your brand’s chances for success on Facebook. Running a real-world sweepstakes so that 3% of the participants become customers may or may not be a smart marketing investment, but running a Facebook sweepstakes so that 3% of the participants become engaged members of your fan page is a brand-killing play every time.

Is it possible to succeed with a freebie or sweepstakes in social media? Yes, if you focus on two things–the thing you offer has to encourage people to engage with the brand in a meaningful way and the audience on which you focus must be not the largest but the right audience. For most brands, offering an in-game freebie to Cityville’s 43 million users makes as much sense as offering a new chess piece that devastates opponents’ pieces in an entire rank of the board. Chess players of the world will take it; they will use it to enhance their chess game; but does it make them consider or buy your insurance or peanut butter brand? No, because it fails to provide meaningful brand engagement to the right audience.

I mentioned Starbucks earlier, so let’s explore how this “firm of endearment” succeeds with freebies, ads and sweepstakes. It gives away free Wi-Fi in stores and offers free content for customers–meaningful brand interactions to the right customers. Starbucks used Promoted Tweets to serve ads to people who search for “coffee” and “Starbucks” to let them know about the free drinks available for those who use reusable cups–meaningful brand interactions to the right customers. And Starbucks has given away samples of a new coffee available in the aisles of grocery stores, not just to anyone but only to Twitterers who influence others and who tweet frequently about coffee–meaningful brand interactions to the right customers.

If I see one more headline about a brand that adds 100,000 new fans in a day because of a sweepstakes or freebie, I am going to throw my laptop out a window. I’m just tired of it. Not only is it frustrating to see so much attention lavished on poor social media marketing, it also is time consuming to constantly explain to others why there is no easy (and truly beneficial) way to add hundreds of thousands of fans to our own fan page, despite evidence to the contrary.

It is time social media marketers abandon the easy metrics and focus on the ones that matter. It’s the NFL postseason and I’m a Packer fan, so I cannot resist the analogy: In the 2010 season, six quarterbacks threw for more yards than Aaron Rodgers did. Nine completed more passes than Aaron Rodgers did. Five threw for more touchdowns than Aaron Rodgers did. Seven even won more games. But Aaron Rodgers led his team to a Super Bowl victory.

Stop counting yards and start focusing on how your brand truly wins in social media. If most social media marketers shifted their attention to metrics and strategies that matter more, social media marketing would matter more.

Who Matters Most in Social Media? Not You!

Please don’t take this personally, but you are not the most important person in the world. (Nor am I.) If professionals and brands keep just one thing in mind as they develop strategies and engage in Social Media, it is this: “It’s not about me.”

In Social Media, you can and should have goals. Having goals helps to define how you establish profiles, who you follow, what you share, and how you measure success. Even for those who use Social Media purely for personal reasons, having goals and gauging qualitative success is vital; we live in a stressful world with many demands on our time, so we ought to be able to judge that our hours with Twitter and Facebook are worthwhile. But no matter your goal, it’s vital to focus more on your listeners than on what you care to say.

Right now, Social Media seems like a bright, shiny new toy because it is new to a lot of people. Twitter’s been around since March 2006, but as of the end of 2008, 70% of Twitter users had joined in just the past year. Facebook took almost all of 2004 to reach its first million users; thus far in 2009, the site has grown from 150 million to 250 million users.

As with any change in communication technology, Twitter is causing an upheaval in the norms and rules in communication and in this time of uncertainty, people and organizations are inserting their own rules of engagement. Businesses that would never dream of sending a spam email are encouraging their followers to blast valueless brand messages to their Twitter networks. Folks who would never send an email to their entire contact list in order to invite one friend to lunch are announcing their plans to every follower they have on Twitter.

How is one to know what is right and wrong when best practices in a new medium are still forming? That question sounds rhetorical, but it’s not. The answer is easy–just think “It’s not about me!”

This maxim isn’t based on cutting-edge Social Media theory but on two truisms as old as mankind: “Technology changes; people don’t” and “Communications is about the understanding, not the speaking.”

Technology changes; people don’t

Every time technology changes the way humans communicate, someone predicts it will alter the very nature of human behavior, and these predictions always prove wrong. In the 1930s, Philo T. Farnsworth thought his invention, the television, would be “a marvelous teaching tool,” ending illiteracy and permitting people from different lands to settle differences “around conference tables, without going to war.” Close, but no cigar.

The late 90s were full of financial speculation based on the idea the Internet had changed everything. High banner ad click rates convinced many that content would be free; Ecommerce was going to put stale old bricks-and-mortar enterprises out of business; and profits were derided as some sort of quaint concept like the buggy whip or waiting until marriage. Today, digital news is as much at risk as its printed counterpart because online ad revenues cannot cover costs; the list of top online retailers consists mainly of large offline retailers and manufacturers; and the financial markets made clear the importance of profits when the dot-com crash evaporated trillions of dollars of value, 500 dot-com companies, and half a million high-tech jobs.

Social Media will change much–the size of human networks, our ability to maintain soft relationships, the reach of the individual, and the transparency of organizations–but it won’t change humans. We cannot argue that the things people are not interested in today–interruption advertising, spam, others’ private conversations, narcissistic self interest, irrelevant babble–will suddenly become in vogue simply because Twitter exists. These types of “me”-focused messages create just as much noise in Social Media as in the real world.

Communications is about the understanding, not the speaking

George Bernard Shaw said “The problem with communication … is the illusion that it has been accomplished.” Twitter is filled with illusion–the illusion every tweet is read; the illusion others are interested in my every thought; the illusion that being followed means being heard; and the illusion that the larger the list, the greater the influence.

None of these statements is completely true, and none is completely false; their truthfulness varies from person to person based on the attention earned from the listeners. Communication doesn’t occur because words are uttered or a status update is tweeted; it occurs when those messages reach another person who cares enough to pay attention and can translate the meaning.

Thoughts of caring and attention on Twitter came to mind as I read the comments to my last blog post, Eight Twitter Habits That May Get You Unfollowed or Semi-Followed. I was honored (and lucky) to be picked up by the SmartBrief on Social Media, which resulted in 30,000 views, 67 comments, and 1200 tweets on Social Media Today. The volume of dialog about this blog post permitted some interesting insights about following and listening.

The most contentious part of my blog post was my suggestion that people will tend to tune out Twitterers who publicly thank others for retweets (RT) and #followfriday recommendations. Many thought that a public expression of gratitude was more valuable than a Direct Message (DM). What I found interesting was that, out of all the comments, just one person approached the issue in terms of whether Twitterers like or value seeing others thank each other (which is “you”-focused). Everyone else commented how much they liked to publicly thank people or how much they wanted to be publicly thanked (which is “me”-focused).

My intent isn’t to debate etiquette but to encourage people to think of what motivates followers to truly follow and not merely semi-follow; having people on your Twitter list is one thing, but having active listeners is another. Assuming you want to earn attention from those following you, then regularly tweeting a message pertinent to a tiny fraction of your followers seems likely to reduce your relevance and diminish the attention you earn.

Think of it another way: How often have you heard people complain of not having time to Twitter or of being overwhelmed by the microblogging service? Keep those people in mind when you consider these questions: How many of your status updates are of the type that others must scroll past to get to the interesting and pertinent tweets? And how many are perceived as valuable and worthwhile by almost all of your followers?

“It’s not about me” doesn’t mean you have to approach Social Media with a sense of altruism. It’s okay to have objectives, but it’s vital to keep in mind the people who earn influence are the ones who focus most on others.

Two comments I received really stood out as shining examples of the “It’s not about me” school of thought. Deb Kolaras shared a rule of thumb that forces one to consider his or her status updates from the perspective of others: “Would I say this to a large room of people?” Think of a room full of people including family, peers, and future employers, and consider that they will only “hear” your tweet and not the entire conversation you’re having. Will it make sense? Will it be relevant? Is it appropriate?

The second comment came from Christopher Sherrod who summarized this topic succinctly: “People love tweets that are useful. Be useful in your niche and people will follow you.”

Who matters most in Social Media? Everyone else! Strive to live by this, and others will perceive your value, listen to you, and connect in a very real way.

“TheLadders.com $100k Experiment” gets A for Content, F for Social Functionality

TheLadders.com has a marketing campaign that is worth notice, but they failed to ask “How can I improve this by making it social?” As a result, their new campaign, The $100k Experiment, will not achieve as much attention and traffic as it might have had they considered ways to leverage Social Media.

TheLadders.com, which specializes in job openings with salaries in excess of $100,000, wanted to make a point to employers about the kind of attention $100,000 can attract. So, they placed that amount of cash into a glass box in the middle of a park and left it there unguarded. Ten hidden cameras captured the reactions of passersby.

The video is great–it’s funny, interesting, and worthy of attention. TheLadders gets an “A” for creating content that people will want to see (and unlike Google’s “5 Friends,” this video keeps it short and engaging.)

But this is 2008, and engaging content–while vital and challenging–is no longer all that is required for a successful marketing campaign. Where are the Social Media hooks in TheLadders.com campaign? Consumers cannot embed the video on their sites (which I’d consider bare minimum functionality for an online video campaign), nor can they comment on The $100k Experiment. As a result, this site is a lonely island when it could have been a bustling network of interaction.

Other than links and comments, what else might they have done to turn this lonely and isolated video into the hub of a hundred thousand conversations?

  • How about a poll to determine the charity to which TheLadders.com should give the $100,000? Think that might generate some attention, links, and dialogs?
  • Or, another charity angle might have been for TheLadders.com to allow people to select a charity, generate a custom video link, and then earn a charitable donation for the chosen charity based on how much traffic that link generates to the microsite.
  • How about the ability for people to ask for their city or neighborhood to be the next spot where the glass box stops? Might it be fun to see friends, coworkers, and neighbors punked by the $100k experiment?

Their agency did place the video on YouTube (where it had 0 views as of this morning–was I really the first to see it?) There is no reference to TheLadders.com in the text and no links to the career site or the microsite–another lost opportunity for links, attention, and traffic.

It’s hard for me to understand how in 2008 marketers could generate a great idea and execute it with care and style, but miss the importance and value of Social Media features. The $100k Experiment will generate plenty of deserved attention, but the career site could have multiplied their success by asking, “How can I improve this by making it social?”

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