Hoodwinked by the emperor's new tweets
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Last week, I sat with the senior management team of a big client that I consult for to review the marketing plans of the company’s three major brands.
Mark Ritson is an Associate Professor of Marketing, an award winning columnist, and a consultant to some of the world’s biggest brands.
Each time, the brand manager concluded with a major part of the spend going on social media; each time I winced. I know it’s heresy for a marketer to even question the power and potential of Facebook, Twitter and the rest. But despite the recommendations from ad agencies and the repeated prognostications in the media, I remain unsure about the practical value of social media for most marketers.
Facebook, to be fair, has its attractions. One of the brands last week has more than 2,000 friends on its Facebook page - way more than the average British brand. But it also has more than 2 million consumers, so how feasible is Facebook as a marketing tool compared to traditional media? It certainly offers a free and powerful channel of communication with some viral potential - but with 0.01% reach of current consumers and no direct impact on other target segments it’s hardly going to have a revolutionary impact on my client’s marketing strategy.
Twitter is an even less impressive option. It might be a social phenomenon but how am I actually going to use 140 characters aimed at a tiny proportion of my target market to build brand? Last week the Financial Times proclaimed that the best brand builders were all using social media and quoted Engine’s Debbie Klein who believes Twitter and other social media have “fundamentally transformed marketing from a monologue to a dialogue”.
Maybe Debbie’s idea of a dialogue is sending 140 characters to complete strangers who never reply. That sounds to me like just another massmonologue.
The only cases that the FT used to prove its point were the repercussions for Eurostar after its snowbound passengers tweeted their disgust at being stranded last December and the bad publicity for Southwest Airlines after American director Kevin Smith twittered he had been thrown off one of its planes for being too fat.
Is that the best it can do? Because I could make a strong counter-argument that both incidents would have been just as well publicised and damaging to the respective brands had Twitter never twattered into life in the first place.
I can appreciate why 2 million people follow Google on Twitter and what those consumers get in return. But most brands don’t have the newsworthiness, broad appeal or dynamism to have any chance of making Twitter work for them. Are mundane brands like Rentokil (sample tweet: “The mouse was hiding under the teapot all along”) and Hellmann’s mayonnaise: “Don’t just spread the love, dip and squeeze it too!”) really doing anything for their brand except annoying the handful of consumers that signed up (briefly) for their tweets? And let’s not forget that, despite all the hype, Twitter has been gradually losing visitors to its site for more than a year now. So whatever questionable value it ever held for brands is now in decline anyway.
And then there is YouTube. What a marvellous tool for brand building that turned out to be. Just to prove my point that much of social media is draped in the emperor’s new clothes - name me five British brands that have used YouTube in the past year to build brand equity. Any that spring to mind? Thought not.
Name me five British brands that have used YouTube in the past year to build brand equity. Thought not.
How about branding success stories using LinkedIn? Or ChatRoulette?
My point is not to deride all social media. Clearly some brands will benefit from these new tools. But I do question if the impact of social media and its applicability to most brands are as big or as game changing as many experts would have us believe. Six weeks ago, for example, we were being told that this would be the first election decided by twitter and Facebook.
Rubbish. As usual the vast majority of the British electorate, at least outside of Soho, made their mind up based on TV and newspaper coverage. Marketers are a fickle bunch. We love anything new and shiny because deep down we fear being left out of the clique or appearing ignorant of the latest marketing buzz.
If I posted a picture of my arse on the internet and called it MagicMarketing.com and then got my brand manager mates to tell everyone it was an awesome new social media tool, I bet by Christmas I could get 5,000 marketers to agree with the statement: “I am considering Magic - Marketing.com for my marketing mix in 2011”.
Half would tick the box because they were told it was hot at a dinner party and the other half because they had not heard of it until asked and assumed, in a panic, that they should have.
If a big brand does not tweet or use Facebook, the brand manager in charge is usually blamed for being out of touch with the social media revolution. But perhaps they are actually media savvy. The one thing social media has succeeded in doing is reducing the prices of direct marketing, outdoor, TV and other traditional media. Those of us who cannot see the
Emperor’s new clothes should take pride, take note and take action.
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Readers' comments (31)
Lee Washington | Wed, 5 May 2010 12:37 pm
Interesting points - I would argue that countless brands have used youtube in the past year to gain leverage and promote products. Samsung is a typical example which has created many very successful viral videos this year.
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Anonymous | Wed, 5 May 2010 2:07 pm
Incidentally, www.Magicmarketing.com is available for sale. $60,000 is the price - though after Ritson's column I am sure it will go up.
Anyone fancy a startup? If we pull this off there could be significant bottom line advantages.
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Tess Alps | Wed, 5 May 2010 6:28 pm
*partiality alert* Yes, telly woman wades into debate to make case for TV.
Thinkbox is happy to use Twitter as one of our marketing tools because we need to talk to journalists and other media influencers, and that is Twitter's core user base.
My only problem with the hype around social media is that it's positioned as an alternative to more established brand communications. That is utter bollocks.
However, brands can and do use it to extend the ripple that their other marketing creates, notably their TV ads.
There were some superb examples in 2009: T-Mobile, which had a branded YouTube channel (ie cash)to capitalise on 'Dance' TV camapign and comparethemarket.com of course which used Facebook and Twitter (no cash) to extend the Aleksandr love.
I say no cash but of course there are agency fees and lots of corporate resource involved.
If you are being asked to spend lots on it you muct interrogate exactly why you would do that. I do fear that a lot of social media spend comes under the PR banner and is therefore subject to a great deal less rigorous ROI scrutiny than other marketing investment.
The new John Lewis ad is enjoying lots of social media chat at the moment. But social media didn't create the chat.
We've done some research with Facebook and they were kind enough to tell us that they love TV programmes and ads, because they bring registered users back to the site.
It breaks my heart that wonderful films are being made at not inconsiderable for brands are are only being seen by a few hundred thousand people.
So if you want to know how to get lots of social media action, invest in a fabulous TV campaign. Simples.
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Anonymous | Wed, 5 May 2010 6:55 pm
The main word in New Media is in fact "NEW" and half the people using it don't know what they are doing. But do you completely dismiss TV cause some of those ads are bad too?
You are right that the 140-character thing will never teach me anything significant about a brand, but it is certainly a good way to remind that there is new content on a site, or direct me to an event happening in store. And in that, there is significant value to a brand i.e. sales.
I think the "savvy" brand manager will not completely ignore social media, just understand the very real limitations of it.
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Daniel Baylis | Wed, 5 May 2010 7:29 pm
As a "brand spokesperson" for Tourisme Montréal, my primary tools for communicating with travelers are social media platforms. I use twitter, facebook and youtube to creatively position Montréal as fun getaway.
Media is changing, and to not have a social media strategy is to ignore massive opportunities.
The ones who are winning the social media "dance" are those who provide great content. If I'm following Hellmann’s mayonnaise on twitter and they continually shove their slogans down my throat, I'm going to "unfollow" pretty darn quickly. However, if they share recipes, provide cute videos, offer giveaways, etc, as a "mayo lover" perhaps I'd be more apt to tune in.
It's all about engaging and creative content.
My generation is not going to be flipping through newspaper or sitting in their living rooms consuming television. You need to reach us through our computers, our mobiles and ultimately through the social media platforms that we invest countless hours into.
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Ruben Berenguel | Wed, 5 May 2010 11:01 pm
I recently read a similar post, about the low revenue advertisers got from Facebook ads, if you were not a Facebook app itself. For some brands social media (and not every social media site) can boost sales, or at least, be useful to its public. But for others, it is completely useless. The best marketers of the next 10 years will be the ones telling the correct companies the correct site to advertise.
Ruben
www.mostlymaths.net
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Kim | Thu, 6 May 2010 1:00 am
I think that if you take a traditional marketing approach to social media, you're wasting your time and money. Marketing with social media is not about sending out messages about your brand and hoping that by doing so you're making some sort of impact.
Marketing with social media is about being innovative, being clever and being the first one to discover a new way to make this media work--for your brand. If that is not what your brand is about, and if your marketing team doesn't have the competency to do that, then you're right, it is just a bunch of rubbish.
But for those few smart marketers that get it, and that can crack it, it truly can be a goldfield.
Perhaps Mark, you simply need a younger marketing mind to understand this one :)
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Kerralie Shaw | Thu, 6 May 2010 3:22 am
I agree that to invest '..a major part of the (marketing) spend on social media' sounds questionable... but to at least consider social media as part of a marketing plan is a move in the right direction compared to not so long ago!
We know that many consumers are having conversations and researching brands online... so you raise interesting points about whether brands should be proactive or passive in this space.
Did your client also discuss their consumer insights plan to complement their marketing plans?
If so, did they propose to use online communities to augment all the traditional quant and qual research (...that I'm assuming they do) - or was their gusto for social media reserved exclusively for getting their message out??
I hope these brands are getting the deeper, richer insights they deserve... then perhaps their marketing plans will be based on customer insights... rather than spend being allocated to the new tools just because they're available.
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M | Thu, 6 May 2010 3:39 am
Let's face it, Internet users are turned off by ads and marketing material being plastered all over the websites they visit. As I am typing this, I can't even recall the banners on this very page - it is a fact that most users' eyes and mental focus are actively drawn away from marketing messages rather than to them, especially on websites. I know mine are.
Mark is right. Please, don't simply jump on the bandwagon and be another try-hard. It smacks too much of another "i-Snack 2.0"!
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Kostas Mavroeidis | Thu, 6 May 2010 3:56 am
There is value in social networks.
First of all, the power of social networks is in their ability to spread word of mouth. So it is part of the mechanics of publicity, and a way to test if a new concept catches on.
Following on that, tools like youtube can be a low-cost platform to broadcast a variety of commercial messages and at the same time test which message is more popular, and to whom.
We have to consider all media for imc, but the interactive and viral nature of social media offers a critical utility; it lets us see what works and allow us to design adoptive strategies. I would just not use them to replace television.
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