Social Is Dead
There, I did it. I succumbed to the very thing I have railed against in the past. However, I cannot help but think we are starting to reach an inflection point in social networking. Facebook is showing cracks in its armor as brands question the promotional value of the platform and overall user activity stalls. Smaller networks are sprouting everywhere creating greater fragmentation. Twitter is still plagued by spambots and angry API developers. LinkedIn barely registers when it comes to active users. Even the wildly popular social games are fading quickly from consciousness.
This is not to sound all doom and gloom, but social is a bit of a hot, wet mess. In a sense, we are seeing growing pains of the rapid grow and the questions are bound to arise. We blasted ahead full steam without considering what this means for relationships, privacy, security, culture and commerce. While we are still sorting out many of these complicated issues, the area that is ironically the least developed is commerce.
Businesses have had a pretty spotty record when it comes to social media. Given the speed of which opinions fly on the Internet, spectacularly obvious marketing failures get overwhelming attention. Most businesses have some ornery combination of Facebook page, Twitter account, Tumblr blog, Pinterest board, Foursquare location, Instagram photolog, ad infinitum. Unfortunately, very few actually have any idea if it is helping (or hurting) their businesses. It is like when companies started putting up websites. You would ask them why and they said because everyone else had one.
Success is not found when the motivation is based on the actions of someone else. Likewise, businesses put up these electronic storefronts across the Internet, but have no idea of the what, how or why behind them as it relates to their objectives. They buy expensive tools to monitor social traffic, collect all the data, create wonderfully bouncy analytics, and then make decisions that defy all logic or commonsense.
Why then do we bother with social? Because it took this amorphous idea called engagement and finally made it real down to the individual level. Marketers could see exactly who likes or has interest in the stuff they are marketing. It was no longer guess work, because people logged where they ate, stuff they bought, events they attended, books they read, movies they watched, and all sorts of detailed information that is a nirvana of marketing gold. It closed the loop between marketer, product and customer and put a quantitative number on that relationship.
Social was the next level of engagement. Web analytics and tracking cookies and click tracking were a useful first step, but social brought it all together and connected the dots. The problem is that most companies are just not very good at managing all of the components and fragmented processes to gain much value from the opportunity that social and the Internet has dropping into their laps. The whole thing is completely disconnected with tools, data players, technology vendors, and networks all providing a mere sliver of the engagement pie which involved ad networks, creative agencies, social account and web property management, SEO and SEM strategies, PR, referral tracking, monitoring and interaction tools, analytics suites, email marketing services, and the list could go on. Then there are the trade offs in using each of these components where costs, reach, effectiveness, and positioning must be balanced.
In my days doing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) stuff, we had a concept called multi-channel management. The idea was that all lines of communication between customers and a business should provide a consistent and satisfactory experience, whether over the phone, on the web, via email, or in person. Later on, we got a bit smarter and realized that we should segment across those channels and provide a different experience based on some objectives such as loyalty or acquisition or otherwise. The channel itself was not itself of importance; it was merely the pipe to deliver that positive experience which would lead to increased sales.
Social is just another pipe. It is the delivery channel to exchange value. Like the web when it first got attention, businesses separated it out and treated it differently. Because it stood apart, the experience was disjointed and customers became disillusioned. We think social is something uniquely different, but it is only unique in that we get a deeper insight into the customer than what could be ascertained from the web or even over the phone. But companies have once again made the mistake of setting social media apart with its own teams and strategies and objectives.
On the other hand, social presents huge opportunities in that it helps break companies of decades of stagnation in how one thinks about marketing. It is not that social is dead, but rather that traditional ideas and execution strategies around marketing are dying. Marketers simply took existing ideas around marketing and dumped them into tweets and Facebook pages without considering the context. It all too closely resembled direct mail marketing campaigns or impersonal cold calling tactics. The better approach is to start with the customer and pull them inwards as opposed to pushing outwards, inundating audiences with messages that are of little relevance. Businesses need to start thinking about engagement across channels, and social provides the best channel so far to foster real customer engagement. It is time to give social new life and to rethink the what, how, and why of marketing in this channel.
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great post. reminds me of chris dixon’s SEO is dead post. one thing that doesn’t get called out here explicitly but...
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