Big Society already exists - it’s called social media
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If you’re a regular follower of our columnist Mark Ritson, you’ll be used to him using a blend of well balanced arguments and frank no-nonsense views to convince you that he is right.
Read Mark Ritson’s counter argument here
And in case he can’t persuade you the first time around, he’s more than happy to weigh in and continue an argument with anyone willing to take him on through the comments sections of his columns on www.marketingweek.co.uk.
So, with full knowledge that he’s going to spend the rest of the week hauling me over the coals with 10 different types of watertight evidence that my arguments suck, I hereby state that I disagree with his column this week on the uselessness of social media to brands.
There are two main arguments that Ritson and others from the industry seem to level at social media. The first is that communicating in the social space requires one to be a human being as opposed to a brand to be of any value and the second is that there is no easily applicable measure of ROI.
Let’s take those points in reverse order. On ROI: I agree, there is no easy measure. I recently asked a room full of top marketers from a range of travel industry brands for a show of hands; who had worked out what a successful metric of return on investment in their social media activity looked like. Not a single hand went up. I then asked how many of them planned to invest a greater percentage of their spend in social media by the end of the year. All of their hands went up.
Is that worrying? Maybe. If you want to worry about it then go ahead. The marketers in the room however, weren’t overly concerned. Each of them had identified one or more serious, valuable uses for their social media.
O2’s giffgaff campaign
Market research, reputation management and PR, customer service; your business carefully allocates spend to all of these and yet none come with an easily identifiable metric. You may have read in last week’s cover story on the potency of open or closed branded online communities how O2’s giffgaff brand crowdsources its customer service. “The majority of questions customers ask are answered within the community by members within five minutes,” says giffgaff’s Robbie Hearn. “And if the answer they give isn’t correct it will get corrected by someone else in the community, or people will come back and say whether a tip they got worked or not.”
What this effectively means is that ’Big Society’ - the big idea that acted as a platform for the new Government’s strategy - already exists online. It has done for a long time. Disregard the hype and go and look for yourself. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube are full of meaningful conversations regarding things you really care about, professionally and personally. And when you find them you will also find swathes of people addressing any number of other people’s requests for information, enquiries for help, pleas for tips. Why? Because they can.
There is very little advantage or return for these people in helping or engaging with others that they will never meet in person. And yet they do. They gather, they share, they talk, they fight and they learn. This is what social human beings do. Unless you’ve worked out a way to sponsor conversations at parties, looking for a return on social media will get you nowhere.
Sir Martin Sorrell
The other argument about whether people want to hear from brands or just human beings? Well, brands don’t have much of a choice. The way we communicate with one another about pretty much everything is changing fast. This isn’t a fad for young people, it’s the start of a long term shift. WPP chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell knows it. In our round up of last week’s statements by the big marketing services groups and the global trends they reveal, we quote Sorrell describing digital media and consumer insight as the “Premier League” next to television which he says is the “championship” comparatively speaking. And what is social media if it isn’t digital media with some consumer insight thrown in?
Mark Ritson distinguishes social media from other disciplines of marketing and he names PR, advertising and interactive (by which he informs me he means digital and email). Anyone who still separates social media out from any of those is, I’m sorry to say, utterly mistaken. To me it just means you are letting the world move around you and hoping you can get by on what you’ve always known.
Surely Twitter and Facebook are nothing if not interactive. Apps are interactive - they join people up with brands and many of them join people up with each other. And the nature of the relationships many of us have with our phones means that that interaction is never far away. ’Dead time’, the time we spend travelling on trains or waiting for a Doctor’s appointment, is no longer dead.
PR too is now clearly heavily linked with the social media arena. Many of your businesses are spending more and more on PR and the skills your HR departments are looking for include how to engage with an audience through the likes of blogs, Facebook and Twitter. And as for advertising, I saw the new cinema ad for Spanish beer Estrella Damm at the weekend. I loved all three and a half minutes of it and later searched for it on YouTube to see it again. My search provided other executions which I also watched and later commented on in a conversation with various lager drinkers from across the world. I’ve never bought or tasted Estrella Damm but it might well be the next new bottled beer I try in the pub.
We have written countless examples of social media being of great use to marketers across a number of sectors and disciplines, from cosmetics brand Barry M to financial services brand LV= to charities such as Save The Children. Even when we are trying to write about things other than social media, the ’T’ and ’F’ words crop up because marketers tend to link their most successful customer engagement with the likes of Twitter and Facebook.
I do appreciate that the hype of social media outweighs the benefits right now and I think Mark Ritson’s view is going to ring true for a lot of marketers. That is because we’re not very good at it. Yet. Because I repeat again, this isn’t a fad. Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare are just a few early prototypes - some examples of the many new ways that we humans are going to keep up and communicate with one another.
The Annual, Marketing Week’s new conference on 29 September 2010 www.theannual.co.uk
It’s part of my job to monitor the long term shifts in marketing and customer engagement. And because customers are there, you need to be there. The power of television, print and outdoor advertising to build brand will never be bettered. It is far more limited in its scope however for the functions that social media can excel in when used cleverly; CRM, PR, customer insight, targeted interactive communications and so on.
If you as a brand aren’t there following the conversations, contributing something meaningful and when you’re asked to, guiding a user or fan to transact with you, you’re failing.
Of course if you’re interested in seeing Mark and me slug it out over this and other issues in person, or if you simply want to listen to him talk about the best and worst brand strategy case studies he has seen, book now for your place on The Annual conference now at www.theannual.co.uk
For more information or to book your place at the Annual go to www.theannual.co.uk
Readers' comments (8)
Anonymous | Thu, 2 Sep 2010 2:23 pm
You've conveniently missed out the biggest argument Mark put forward - 'the numbers dont add up'.
If it becomes more effective for you to 'phone each of your customers' then you have to question the impact of your approach to social media.
The reason media doesn't work for many brands is that they have nothing of value to give to the audience with any degree of regularity: what can Nike or Apple or top Shop tell you that warrants the use of Twitter rather than an email alert?
Nothing... and that's why social media, and Twitter inparticular won't engage customers
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Mark Choueke | Thu, 2 Sep 2010 5:57 pm
Maybe I didn't express it clearly enough, I was writing this piece at the end of a very busy press day.
Mark's biggest argument concerns ROI. I didn't miss this point out. It just isn't relevant. Social media isn't about trying to drive profit. It isn't about returns. It can't even be measured easily at this stage. I appreciate that isn't the way old marketing works but marketing and communications are merging and the way consumers interact with brands is shifting and this is something that we need to deal with.
Does that undermine my arguments for us pushing hard for a greater and wider reputation for marketing within business? No. We should absolutely be ROI-focused. We should be thinking about how our entire marketing mix drives top and bottom line.
But we should also be bold and brave enough to talk openly about ourselves as the customer expert. The data expert. For god's sake you can't ignore social media because it is where your customers are interacting and talking, and asking and telling, and complaining and complimenting and telling you what it is they are interested in. And if that isn't the case because your customer is an older demographic then it soon will be the case, give it just a generation or two.
You think social media is all about Twitter? You need to experiment more, you need to read more and you need to listen to what other brands (possibly your rivals) are doing.
You don't think Nike has anything to say on Twitter? Or on YouTube? Or through its app? A new era of integrated marketing in a digital world demands that you join this stuff up with your email shots, your loyalty scheme, your direct mailings and your TV ad.
"that's why social media, and Twitter in particular won't engage customers". Too late mate, it already is.
Stand still and let it pass you by if you want.
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Richard Kent | Thu, 2 Sep 2010 6:56 pm
I'm writing this as a Brit who's been working in the US for the last two years and I'm still recovering from Anonymous' quote above, "social media, and Twitter in particular won't engage customers." Oh boy, you are so wrong!
Clearly there are still some Flat Earthers still out there!
Just quickly on the numbers issue - Mark Ritson assumes one 'friend' or 'follower' is worth the same as another. By talking about phoning "each of your customers", he's really missing the point here. Why would you phone ALL of your customers when the technology exists to engage your biggest influencers on the social web?
Maybe the growing number of listening tools available are not being used, understood or even known about?
At the Engaging Times Summit in Chicago last month, Stan Rapp spoke of his conversion to social media. "Stop advertising, start dialoguing" were his words, precisely because of what the power of the numbers demonstrated to him.
But it's here that my American experience leads me to disagree with Mark Choueke, about not being able to calculate ROI for social media activity - Return on Involvement. He writes "looking for a return on social media will get you nowhere". Wrong. Companies here are measuring the ROI of their social activities and are rolling out the successful ones, just as you would back in the day! The nature of social means that large numbers of mini bets can be placed, with results becoming apparent almost immediately.
Not attempting to measure results means creating another ROI - Return on Ignorance.
In fact Don Peppers, proposed a new formula to measure true LTV at Chicago, to accommodate the value of a customer's engagement with a brand.
Believe me, there is a social tsunami heading for the UK very soon. Your business is at risk if you are not willing to accept this and prepare for it.
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Phil Harvey | Fri, 3 Sep 2010 3:17 pm
With the possible exception of Anonymous above, the impact of social media has been, and will continue to be, significant for marketers. Lies, damned lies and statistics reign here as well as in many other fields of marketing - ROI is not the be all and end all - yet. One of the key issues with any form of measurement is the ability to isolate an affect and compare this to other media - for this you need scale. Social Media, in the UK, rarely commands the investment and commitment to generate true scale currently. Another complication in the measurement argument is setting comparable objectives. Clearly, in some cases building relationships with consumers or generating engagement with them can be compared to CRM and loyalty activities using more conventional methods - but how do you compare the value of complaint or crisis management or insight generation and NPD? We need to evaluate the potential of dealing people to people via social media 'in the round' not just as an alternative way to deliver marketing soundbites to consumers. The reality is, whether brands or their agencies work out the value of social media is not the question, the fact is that consumers have started to work out the value of it and it is impacting on business all over the world. I agree with Richard and Mark, above, ignore it at your peril.
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Anonymous | Fri, 3 Sep 2010 11:56 pm
The only reason marketers don't think SM works or adds value to a brand is because they don't understand it, or aren't experienced enough with it. It's relatively new yet has huge reach, it is still in its infancy. Marketers if you aren't in it now you had better hurry up, otherwise you may never catch up!
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Journojulz | Tue, 7 Sep 2010 2:57 pm
Social media isn't just facebook and twitter.
Just as journalism isn't just magazines and newspapers.
Social media is interaction; opine and respond.
O2's bid to "crowdsources its customer service" is a common way to let customers help themselves. Apple's chief line in tech support has long been the discussion groups it hosts on its own pages.
People loyal to your brand are your best sales team because - of all the methods of communication - word of mouth is still the most trusted.
What social media does is give your fans the chance to go to work in a place where they can easily be found.
When selling art - I realised the longer I kept a customer in front of the work and the more I could get them to say what they thought of it - the more likely they were to purchase. In the end they just needed the time to sell it to themselves.
Social media is just like this process, a chance for the customer to explain why they are smarter for buying into your brand/product and feel more loyal at the end of it.
And if you REALLY are doing it well - people set up independent social media outlets. Macrumors on Friday posted a story about Jobs defending the new iTunes logo. This 'weekend discussion' topic is now 35 pages.
Yes - that's right - That is nearly 900 opinions expressed about dropping the cd graphic from a shortcut icon. This gave people the chance to reiterate the reason - iTunes will outsell CDs next year. A massive achievement trumpeted not by an ad campaign - but by discussions on message boards.
People want an excuse to share their opinions on why their choices are better than yours. They will do this for fun.
A: Coming to bed darling?
B: No, not yet.
A: why not?
B: Someone on the internet is WRONG!
If you can get people spending this level of commitment on your brand - you have an evangelising army that doesn't need feeding.
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A concrete example of how social media has value in PR terms happened to me last year.
A national sunday newspaper called asking about the Sport Unlimited scheme, getting semi-sporty kids into activity using more off-beat schemes. The reporter asked about the use of the Wii amongst other ideas.
When I opened the paper - an indignant MP was ranting about kids being paid to play computer games instead of sport - naming us. Our quotes had of course been taken out of context.
Within half an hour I had left a reply on the news story comment section - including the full quotation about how the Wii is only a stepping stone to real sport by boosting confidence.
Some comments agreed that the scheme was a waste of money - but others noted what a clever idea it was and how well it had worked.
By also posting links on our twitter and facebook sites we got to promote the scheme to our network by showing what a poor job the devils advocate had done and actually got the full quote on the online edition.
All in all, we turned a negative into a positive and spread the word before the roast poatoes were in.
Social media earned its stripes that day.
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Katharine T | Wed, 8 Sep 2010 9:44 am
Mark Ritson has completely missed the point, social media is more than numbers, it's how it's used to engage people and develop 'conversations'.
Brands such as Vodafone have been using Twitter in a great way. For example, I accidentally dropped my phone in a bowl of water this year and had a message from Vodafone on Twitter asking if it was ok, a soggy phone was not good etc etc (nothing from my network provider). The brand engaged me and made me question the level of service from my network and whether maybe it would be worth changing as soon as my contract runs out, which I will. And of course, what have I done? Told everyone how impressed I was with their service and use of social media, catching those comments where they can build some discussion.
Just as Journojulz says above, social media is all about the interaction.
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Mark Ritson | Thu, 9 Sep 2010 11:04 pm
Katherine T says "Social media is more than numbers, it's how it's used to engage people and develop conversations".
Best of luck with the career in marketing. I don't think it's me that's missing the point.
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