Social media is for people, not brands
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An MBA student asked me last week what my problem was with social media. She’d just completed my 12-week Brand Management course throughout which I had been openly hostile to the idea of social media as a communications revolution for brands. The way she had asked me suggested that she thought it was a simple case of 40-something fogeyishness driving my antagonism toward Twitter and the rest.
Read Mark Choueke’s counter argument here
To be fair, I have no doubt that social media is changing the way that people communicate with each other. But where I deviate from popular opinion is in the relevance of social media for most brands. Over the weekend I looked again at big brands and their application of social media.
The results, when compared to the industry buzz we keep hearing, simply do not stack up.
I took Brand Finance’s 2010 report on Britain’s biggest brands, covered exclusively in Marketing Week (29 July), as my starting point. I drew the line at the top 20 and reviewed each of these brand’s Twitter activities. The reality versus the myths of social media might surprise you. Did you know, for example, that five brands, including big players like Morrisons and Barclays, don’t use Twitter at all? How do we reconcile that with the apparently essential nature of social media for 2010 marketing strategies?
And many of the brands that do use Twitter are having very little impact. Forget the hype for a second and just look at the numbers. Of the 15 brands in the top 20 that tweet, several of them - including BP, Vodafone and BT - have fewer followers than tweets. Have you ever encountered a successful mass-communications strategy that involves more messages than audience members? In the particular case of BT and Vodafone, it also prompts the question, given the business they are in and the fact that both have more tweets than followers, why they didn’t just pick up the phone and call their customers instead?
To be fair a couple of the brands on the list, like O2 and Sainsbury’s, have got a more decent number of followers on Twitter. But the figures, relative to their actual market sizes, are still infitessably small - in both cases their followers represent less than 0.5% of their customer base. It’s going to require one hell of a viral effect for Twitter to have any meaningful effect on either brand’s market. And what about Tesco? It’s arguably Britain’s biggest and best run brand and yet it has a grand total of 281 followers. Are you starting to see my point?
Peter Andre has more followers on Twitter than the top 20 British brands between them
If there is one killer stat that proves that I am right on social media’s inequity for most brands, it’s a new calculation that I have called “the Peter Andre factor”. The ex-pop star and ex-celebrity husband is hardly one of Britain’s biggest stars. And yet he has more followers on Twitter than the whole of the top 20 British brands. In fact, his 520,000 followers mean he has more than five times the followers that Britain’s 20 biggest brands can muster between them.
What does Peter Andre have that brands lack? The answer is simple. He is human. Forget what the marketing experts tell you about celebrities being brands. That’s rubbish. Celebrities are people and social media works on a person-to-person basis. Hence the huge numbers of followers on Twitter for pop stars and footballers. Where it does not work is when cold, hard, lifeless organisations start trying to spark interactive social media conversations. It’s not welcome. It’s not valuable. And it’s not working.
The reason I am being so stringent and negative about all this is because that’s exactly the way marketers are supposed to be when it comes to spending money on communications. The whole idea is to query the value of everything to make sure that you don’t get suckered into spending your company’s hard-earned cash on something that is not going to give you a return on investment. And right now I question just how many marketers engaged in social media are actually able to justify their investment.
See Mark Ritson appear at The Annual, Marketing Week’s new conference on 29 September 2010 www.theannual.co.uk
The problem with the social media crowd is that they are way too positive and biased towards its potential for every brand, in every situation. Of course they would be positive because it’s not their money they are spending, it’s yours. And it doesn’t do any harm that compared to all the other potential communication tools that they could recommend for your brand social media is very high margin stuff.
So let’s get social media into perspective. It’s a new and relatively insignificant communications tool that has limited potential for a very small proportion of brands. As such it joins the integrated marketing communications mix as an interesting, but probably unjustifiable, alternative to other more established and effective tools like PR, interactive and advertising.
And if anyone tries to tell you any different they are suffering from Insania.
Mark Ritson is an associate professor of marketing, an award-winning columnist and a consultant to some of the world’s biggest brands
For more information or to book your place at the Annual go to www.theannual.co.uk
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Readers' comments (41)
Molly Flatt | Wed, 1 Sep 2010 4:16 pm
Mark, I agree that there's more rhetoric than results in social media, particularly when it comes to the big brands, but there are some big flaws in your piece.
To begin with, looking at the number of Twitter followers is certainly not a good measure of social media success - in fact an over-focus on those sort of meaningless metrics is a pretty good sign of a brand with dodgy priorities. If you started to look at the conversation a brand was generating across a number of different platforms, the emotional impact of it, the level of recommendation and the subsequent sales, then you could be said to have some insight into their social media success.
And seeing social media as an alternative to other marketing channels doesn't work either. It's simply one way of engaging with consumers - like retail, HR, R&D, customer service, PR, advertising and all the other touchpoints. It must be part of an integrated approach focused on the experience it is mediating for the people (solving problems, surprising and delighting), not the tools (how well is a brand 'doing' Facebook?)
Any agency or brand forking out without demonstrating ROI or results is of course nuts. But this kind of simplistic 'social media is all smoke and mirrors' stuff is tired. The interesting practitioners are talking about social as one part of an effective, measurable word of mouth mix - few people are claiming that simple Twitter followers are meaningful any more.
Let's move the conversation beyond forced 'controversial' whistle-blowing and onto what interesting stuff IS happening out there...
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Mark Choueke | Wed, 1 Sep 2010 4:30 pm
Mark has bashed social media with a series of powerful arguments, I disagree with all of them however. Read my defence of social media here:
http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/sectors/media/big-society-already-exists-it’s-called-social-media/3017636.article
Mark Choueke
Editor
Marketing Week
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Jason Reynolds | Wed, 1 Sep 2010 4:33 pm
I'd rather hear a personally relevant story of how you tried and failed with a brand to build out Social Media aspects within a brands integrated marketing strategy. That would be both personal and meaningful.
I agree in principal that Twitter, standing alone on it's own, will get very little traction. But if it is integrated as a part of your overall strategy, it can be one of the best ways to mobilize the early-adopter and most vocal brand participants you have. This is especially true for non-profits and corporations whose leaders personal brand is intertwined with the corporate brand. Some examples:
http://twitter.com/michaelhyatt
http://twitter.com/VirginAmerica
http://twitter.com/livestrong
http://twitter.com/OPRAH
Also, don't overlook the reality that blogging is also "Social Media", and there are some great examples of high-traffic, inside-look type blogs out there for both big business and small:
http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/disciplines/digital/social-media-is-for-people-not-brands/3017669.article
http://boeingblogs.com/randy/
http://www.englishcut.com/
http://www.theequinepractice.com/Blog/
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Iain Haywood | Wed, 1 Sep 2010 4:39 pm
I'm sure Dell would disagree...
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Ciaran Norris | Wed, 1 Sep 2010 6:05 pm
Excellent post. Next week can we expect one on why you should put all your budget into outdoor, because everyone in London sees buses?
What Molly said.
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Rob Hinchcliffe | Wed, 1 Sep 2010 6:22 pm
Well said Molly. Got a twitter account I can follow? :)
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neilperkin | Wed, 1 Sep 2010 7:55 pm
Hmmm. Media is becoming increasingly socialised, the customers of just about every business are spending significant amounts of time in socialised environments, marketing needs to move on from just talking at people, technology now facilitates new, and genuinely exciting ways for businesses to involve their customers in what they do (which in some cases can lead to the kind of business-model-driven innovation and efficiencies that have the potential to transform industries). Concluding that social media is insignificant and of limited potential based on the number of twitter followers accrued by the corporate accounts of a few large brands somewhat misses the point (by a country mile). But then you could always just continue to do what you've always done...
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David Angell | Thu, 2 Sep 2010 11:29 am
I would disagree with this analysis. To take Twitter as the key example is to misunderstand the audience and potential of social media for brands.
Twitter to begin is less relevant than Facebook in terms of immediate potential for brands, but it's also understanding it's position in the marketing cycle that is key. Twitter's users are less the mass-market of Facebook.
Taking just one example, we can see the potential for brands on this platform, without taking into account apps, polls, ads and the then social media-to-blog spread that occurs. On Facebook Peter Andre has 828,093 likes, he is using the same landing page as a brand to advertise tours.
If we even take the example of Lush Cosmetics, their exposure on traditional media is minute by comparison, however they have a healthy and buzzing constituency of 100,361 likes allowing for all of the direct and spin-off (user-to-user) messaging that comes with this.
The point is that it's easy to be skeptical through providing leading examples. A brand interacting on the correct platform can carve a niche, as you say so long as you place your brand in the correct arena.
In addition to this, this article also focuses on just followers on Twitter and not mentions of brands, which once you pass the direct communication, spin off of brand and association of the brand becomes important.
Taking for example the BBC, their core Twitter account has 29,962, no Tweets and network of sub-accounts. Examining the number of mentions - for example using http://www.tweetedbrands.com, the total was 1,039,687 for last month.
The way to add to this buzz, to control damage should it be negative is to be placed within the medium.
Aside from this, as I mention, Twitter is less of a mass market or direct marketing place, people are close to opinion formers there and often the spin-off will be people then mentioning on Facebook, then blogs, then it enters traditional news. This said online it's not always such a direct flow.
Because of this, having a good mix of social media properties that, yes, are suited to your brand is essential.
To argue that because old brand monoliths are not participating, therefore there is a problem with social media tells us nothing. There is a fear to engage with people and a misunderstanding of the medium, for example limiting it to Twitter.
So the social media marketing industry is optimistic, because it realises that we are at the start of it's potential, and those that are succeeding are benefiting from a market not saturated by the traditional players.
My final point is regarding investment and ROI and compliments Molly's. If we think of the quote “Half my advertising spend is wasted . . . but I don't know which half”.
If you are to look at the decision as to whether to spend via traditional marketing or PR and social / digital media and you think that you can measure your campaign with more precision than a campaign based on data, then you really have not researched the online brand and marketing world (i.e. Twitter tracking is simple, Facebook Insights and social media tracking tools allow you to dive incredibly deep in to consumer opinions, and this is all before we go near the power of Google Analytics or further analysis tools).
The actual spend for a social media campaign would be fractional to that of traditional methods, management, apps, ads and launches are your outlay, that's if you want to go that far, just having a social media presence alone is effective, so long as it's managed.
So I think it's worth furthering Molly's comment and looking at the potential, rather than making old media assumptions.
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Nick Buckley | Thu, 2 Sep 2010 2:31 pm
If I set aside the implication that social media and twitter are the same thing, and if I happily accept the argument that social media is not a universal brand panacea, I do find one thing in Mark's analysis to strongly agree with.
Yes - twitter works amongst people much better than for brands, logos and anonymised group voices. The dynamic of twitter is personal interaction - *even* when retweeting a useful link or reference.
My conclusion, though, is not that brands should give up on twitter - it is that they should behave [AUTHENTICALLY!] on twitter much more like a person. This could include finding someone 'real' who is able to personify the brand or [high risk + high reward] synthesise a persona which can function as a proxy for them... without falling into the many waiting traps.
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Mark Palmer | Thu, 2 Sep 2010 2:34 pm
This is an immensely naive and out of date perspective on business, brand strength and indeed what social media is. Brands and businesses build differentiation, understanding, loyalty and then may also entice consumers to try and buy. Social media is a part of the change in how such views and opinions are formed. Apple spent fortunes on the launch of the IPad, but the expectation, understanding, desire and reputation for the IPad started in joined up brand & comms thinking that sees social media as a fundamental aspect of consumers lives and conversations. Recent research in the USA shows social media commentary as probaly the best predictor of box office success for a movie. As Toyota or BP wring their hands about crisis managed badly and writing off huge values in their company - and their brand reputation - the truth is social media was not the answer ...but an appreciation of how views and ideas are taken in, managed and spread would have saved them a fortune. A proactive approach to embracing social media is vital. You may choose not to do much social media as a brand, but do so from a position of understanding and a reason. You may not be there, but the conversations about your market, your business will be. Social media is not a lone discipline or necessarily something that can be valued by how much you spend on it, or how many followers or Facebook fans. However, it is those with perspectives like those expressed by Mark Ritson...which are fine if sport for a debate, but if you are a Chief Exec and you listen them....you are a fool.
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