Social media experts spring up like toadstools. But who is REALLY making money?
As I have said countless times, too many marketers are gullible fools who think a magic formula will relieve them of the pain of thought, exploration, experiment, measurement and conclusion.
This morning I got an email from Dawn Brewer, who is pretty active on the South Coast of our fair isle.
She writes for the web. Writing for the web is much the same as any other kind of writing so this is a good way of presenting yourself as a specialist to clients, most of whom think it is some kind of arcane skill.
I don’t think I know her (could be wrong, as I meet many people and am forgetful) but she has a good website, well-written – http://www.dawnb.co.uk.
She talks a lot about social media and marketing, which know-naughts fondly imagine is the answer to a maiden’s prayer – i.e. will make up for their sloth and incompetence.
As I have often remarked, I don’t know any media that aren’t social – from rude notes on lavatory doors to newspapers. And I don’t know any good marketing that doesn’t stem from social realities. But what I do know is that I am drowning in bilge telling me I can get lots more “likes” and so on.
But nobody I know is drowning in business, though the usual crooks say they are. “Likes” are utterly meaningless; all it takes is a click to like me. I want someone to like me so much they will buy from me.
Very few will. Outside Google and the content network I have seen nothing worth shouting about from such as Facebook, let alone Twitter. We have found after exhaustive tests that for us, Facebook, in terms of sales, is about 27 times less effective than Google.
This does not mean social media don’t work. There are campaigns for traditional products that do extremely well. The Old Spice campaign did very well, though unfortunately it took sales away from that companies’ other lines.
Social media must work – just as newspaper advertising works. General Motors have stopped spending on it, but that doesn’t mean much as their advertising is dire wherever they run it.
This good Forbes piece suggests Facebook is a Ponzi scheme: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholiday/2012/05/17/why-i-lost-my-faith-in-facebook-advertising
But that is another subject. What I believe is that too many people are looking in the wrong place for business.
The other day I was talking to Ben Jesson of Conversion Rate Experts about all this. I don’t know anyone much smarter than him and his partner Dr. Karl Blanks. I am trying to get them to come and talk at EADIM again next year. They are hilarious and very informative.
He just said, “All the clever people we know are turning to traditional direct marketing media, like TV and so on.”
Drayton,
I have to agree on some of the complete knackers that is expert advice on social media. We Tweet, that works well for us. Not a great amount of followers, many of them we even know. All of our trade customers came from Twitter. Our local MP is on Twitter and I get to abuse him and sometimes he comes back for round 2. It works, not because it’s Twitter, but because we only use a medium we understand. We also make sure that if we do Like, Follow or send emails, the list is homegrown.
My 13 year old daughter is on Twitter and Facebook and probably quite a few sites that I really don’t understand. She has mountains of people in her lists, they just mutually follow each other. I am pretty sure that most of her audience don’t know her and some of them will be very undesirable. Her view is that she is popular because she has more Twitter followers than me.
Amen, Drayton. The way I see it, the powerful pull to ‘social media’ is driven by a certain domographic. And the same people also populate marketing departments. They know all about social media, are heavily involved in using them, and so naturally lean towards what they know in business. Also – to be associated and involved in ‘social media’ sounds far better than to be involved in ‘direct marketing’ although they both lie in the same field. (It all reminds me of the old battle between the ‘glamour’ of awareness advertising and the penny-wise world of direct marketing. The direct marketing press were responsible for perpetrating the myth by constantly refering to it.) Part of the reason for the pull towards social media is the guys running the companies – especially Google – are heroes to young marketers. But Advertising revenues from AdWords generate almost all of the company’s profits and it was Eric Schmidt that forced Larry Page and Sergey Brin to run those classified ads in Google. Otherwise it would be just another search engine like Yahoo.
What a long post this is! I am not drunk, by the way. I am writing this in the morning!
Drayton, we’re still singing from the same page of the same hymnbook. Must be the benefit of age and hindsight — and the tighter default settings on our BS detectors that kick in with advancing years and experience.
Always a pleasure to share your thoughts and ideas — especially when we’re in such close agreement! 😀
John
PS: Watch for an invitation in coming weeks from http://cunningoldfarts.com, a new strategic marketing alliance I’m planning for “senior” direct marketers and advertising practitioners from the Twilight Zone (the era B.I. — before the Internet).
Two days ago I decided I’m going to refer to myself in these conversations as a social-media old-timer. Not an expert or a guru or anything like that – gah! But at the same time, having been on Twitter and LinkedIn for close to six years and with a set of Facebook brand pages that haven’t yet fired me as their admins, I do have a sense of what good they are – and aren’t.
Aside from Facebook Pages, these are NOT sales channels. They are service and research channels – a way for company reps to hear what we once called The Voice of the Customer: to get feedback and gauge reactions.
I think they have tremendous value as retention tools and even as fodder for new-product ideas – and some value in very small consultancies as relationship builders. I also get my news from Twitter.
But the idea of social media as an efficient lead generator is just crazy. Yes, there is some opportunity for one-to-many messaging; we should all be tweeting every blog post. But using the promotional megaphone for more than 10% of your total feed crosses the line from social into spam – letting it slip to your community that you’re there to take, not to contribute. And then you might as well not be there.
Mary
PS – There is one guy whose take on social media and how to get started is the real deal, and he is not a marketer. His name is Robert Scoble, and he was Microsoft’s first blogger. His blog is http://scobleizer.com – read the stuff from the early days, back in 2007 – 2009, especially. These days he doesn’t post there nearly as much as on Google+, but that’s okay. His beat is different these days, and when you get to know his work, you can decide if the new stuff would mean much to you or not. MB
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