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Social media is changing the world. If you aren’t on the bus, you’ll be run over by it. But does this apply if you are selling grout? How can brands without aspirational appeal take advantage of the social media wave?
There’s a quick dose of reality to consider. If people aren’t talking about your product, they aren’t going to suddenly start sharing it on Facebook. Even so, there are other options and things to consider if your product isn’t a natural social fit.
Popular Opinion Matters
Consider the plight of McDonalds. It recently had a social media flop when it asked people to share stories. Generally speaking the stories were pretty negative. They are left spending a consider amount of money, and potentially harming the brand as well.
What doesn’t make sense is why they didn’t expect this? Movies like Super Size Me helped paint them as a source of junk food that nearly killed the movie’s maker. The general opinion isn’t great, and 140 characters in isolation isn’t going to change anyone’s mind.
Mcdonalds has plenty of products and promotions that do have popular appeal. People love things like the McRib, the Monopoly game and their support of the Olympics. Heck, I used to beg for Shamrock Shakes when they were available. All of these are limited time promotions well suited to the ephemeral nature of social media.
Every business has products like these. Food trucks have managed to move from “roach coach” to mobile gourmet by exploiting the time sensitive nature of their product.
Highlight interesting uses
Sure, no one talks about grout. However, they do talk about bathroom remodeling. Even if a product is a small part of a larger effort, there’s opportunity to actually engage in conversation.
Could a bandage manufacturer talk about how it’s might be used to stitch up hockey injuries? Certianly
Even the least sexy products in the world are often used in far more interesting places than people would expect. Anyone that thinks how their product is used is actually caring about their users. That’s social.
Just be fun
Budweiser nailed social media years before MySpace was even invented. They took an undifferentiated product and got people to talk about it, just by making entertaining ads and playing them to the largest possible audience. They didn’t need the internet to make that happen, just the SuperBowl and the water cooler at the office the next day.
Any brand can be fun. KSwiss and the Kenny Powers, MFCEO tried to take an unremarkable shoe company and just talk about it differently. Will it Blend took an industrial grade blender and made it a viral sensation. While it might be easier for a little brand to do this, anyone really can be edgier about what they do. Arguably, GEICO ads are getting people to talk about Auto Insurance, one of the least interesting products imaginable.
Every brand has a chance to be social.
Even so it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be easy. For every win, there are probably five failures that never garner attention. I’d be the first one to say that I’ve been trying to get people to talk about financial responsibility with a short term lender for months with limited success.
Even so there’s one thing to keep in mind. Social media is fleeting. If people don’t see something they can’t view it badly. Why not try? Most failure won’t get noticed, but the success could turn a sleepy blender company into a household name.
Related articles
- McDonald’s Has Mc’Egg on Its Face Again (jpwilliam.wordpress.com)
- McDonald’s learns a social media marketing lesson the hard way (newmediaandmarketing.com)
Tags: social media
I’m always impressed when people take a challenging concept and make it more user friendly. Search Engine Optimization is in many ways about getting all of the details right. ScribeSEO is a pretty nice tool to check your work. It’s not free, but it is worth the price. Check out Scribe Plans and Prices here.
Tags: FAQs Help and Tutorials, Google, search engine optimization, Website
The quickest way to lose trust from someone is to say “just trust me“ The need to explicitly state this creates all kinds of questions to people that hear it.
Social media needs to stop saying just trust me
It’s been said by too many social media experts. Don’t worry about ROI. Social media isn’t about making money. Twitter is about relationships. You could play mad lib with these variants.
Everytime someone says ignore ROI in social media, a panda gets kicked in the nuts.
These are the messages that we want to hear. It’s great to have the freedom to connect and build relationships without worrying about results. Social media advocates want to believe that they are beyond normal business metrics. Struggling advocates want to think that the reward will come if they continue to plug away.
All of this causes social media to lose credibility with executives. Investments don’t continue when people don’t have credibility.
I know this intimately because I used to run a social media site that wasn’t concerned with ROI. We shut down, despite nearly a million users. It’s hard to pay the bills with a user base.
Measurement flaws aren’t an excuse
It’s hard to measure social media return on investment. Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s not a valid effort. Measuring the effect of traditional advertising is tough too. Complex multivariate analysis methods have been developed to provide some estimates of the return. It’s not perfect, but it’s enough to offer confidence in the billions spent in advertising each year. CEOs have been asking for these justifications and CMOs that can’t provide them aren’t in jobs any more.
If this new medium is going to be taken seriously, it needs to start thinking about return. Even if the numbers aren’t perfect, something is better than nothing.
Return on Investment starts with strategy
When the effort has a purpose it’s easier to make the tie to return. When comcast launched customer service via twitter, there was a clear business tie. When dell pushes out a limited inventory of refurbished computers there’s a clear business tie. The same can be said of food trucks that share their location and experts that share their knowledge. In all cases there’s a link that can be created.
This is not about constantly bombarding people with brand messages. A narcissistic company is even more annoying than a narcissistic person.
Our social media strategy is simply about retention of customers. We’re providing them with valuable money saving information so that when they need our services we are top of mind. We rarely mention our products. Yet I’m very confident that I can demonstrate a return on our effort. My numbers aren’t perfect, but they inspire confidence to continue the effort in a company that watches every dollar spent.
Accept that ROI is important and we all win
Ignoring and belittling the question about ROI won’t make it go away. Experts need to step up and realize that traditional marketers fought this for a while too, and it was a fight with business that couldn’t be won.
When we as social media marketers accept our accountability, we can get the respect and funding that we deserve.
Related articles
- ROI of Social Media (thestartupangel.com)
- What Every Social Media Marketer Should Know About Argyle Social (socialtimes.com)
Tags: Business, Chief executive officer, social media, social media strategy, twitter
According to twitaholic, there are about 20 users on twitter with more than 5 million followers, and well in excess of 400 users with more than a million. The question in my mind is: are these numbers impressive or dangerous?
For a moment consider the expectations of a twitter user. Twitter is currently central to two key propositions. First, it is a real time feed from the people that you follow. Second, it is a conversational medium where users expect responses to their postings about people. I think it is accurate to say that a Twitter user would expect that if they tweeted about a restaurant during a meal, a waiter should respond while they are waiting.
This combination of righteousness and immediacy is one of the biggest challenges of social media for those that have massive followings. It only takes a small percentage of a massive number of followers to generate thousands of brand and “@” mentions every day. Users mentioned something because they do care. They expect a response.
A critic might say that users don’t really expect a response from a celebrity. To me, there’s a difference between an expectation and execution. Certainly most users aren’t receiving a response, but this may be the part of the reason for a high churn rate with the medium. If twitter isn’t delivering a conversation, particularly with the people with the highest value, what’s the point in participating?
Related articles
- Young people ‘bored’ with social media (telegraph.co.uk)
- Gartner: Quarter of Generation Y ‘burning out’ on Facebook (zdnet.com)
- Staying Interesting in Social Media (stevenhammer.com)
Tags: facebook, Gartner, Google, Internet marketing, Online Communities, social media, Social Networking, twitter
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Google plus burst on to the social networking scene just a few short weeks ago. Many reports have claimed it has signed on as many as 25 million users within the first month of creation. It’s a truly startling pace. To be honest I’m jealous compared to my experience in running Stir, which had under a million after about 9 months of operation.
From my perspective, many of the early conversations on G+ centered around a few things. G+ itself seemed to dominate conversation. A second common sharing was the sort of animated gifs that dominated myspace during it’s heyday. The final conversation was that of photographers sharing their work, as a natural extension of an integration with Picassa.
None of these are the sort of conversations that normal people care about. They want to share the mundane and normal. Baby pictures and dinner commentary is more important than the social media revolution to most people. TV shows and celebrities are more valuable than the internet famous.
Above all, people love social games. Millions of people are devoted to games from the likes of playfish and zynga. Google plus is now making a play by allowing to you play.
It’s a clear strategy to “cross the chasm” between the early adopter and the masses. However, there are some interesting differences between this and early Facebook and they might make a difference in success and failure.
Early Facebook was a fairly open platform. There was a limit to what could be shared between apps and user data, but beyond that there were plenty of options for innovation. Not only was Zynga able to launch with viral mechanics, but other platforms like the dating app zoosk and even living social were created with Facebook’s open platform.
Ironically, Google Plus games are a very closed environment with a limited set of partners. This might change later with a public release of an API, but for now it would seem that there is tight control over what’s allowed on the network. This is closer to the approach that Hi5 and MyYearbook used. Both have had decent adoption, but nowhere near the runaway growth of Facebook.
It’s a sharp contrast to many of the other philosophies of Google. They’ve opened up the mobile operating system of Android far more than Apple. Maps and Earth have used a very open API that’s created a ton of mashups and pushed aside competitors like MapQuest. Generally they’ve used open architecture where they can to supplant existing competitors. Here they haven’t apparently done the same.
It’s my opinion that this is a misstep for the network. If they are going to win the race they need to embrace the open architecture that many of their competitors in the space have used.
Related articles
- Google adds games from Zynga, PopCap and others to Google+ (venturebeat.com)
- Google+ Gets Games, Including Zynga (GOOG) (businessinsider.com)
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It wasn’t that long ago that NYT began a series of hit jobs investigative articles about Google and shady search engine optimization practices. Fox News has now decided that they need to jump on the Google-bashing bandwagon now with an article that is even less deep and accurate than those in the New York Times. They brazenly called it “3 reasons google is killing internet search,” in a perhaps not ironically link bait style headline.
Personaly I have a number of problems with all three points the article makes. One by one:
- Google algorithms are not faulty
The Fox author takes umbrage with Google because they deliver localized results when he didn’t want them.
Consultants are often told a story when they start to work. A client might come and request a rock. When you bring something back they often say, “That isn’t a rock, that’s a pebble. Bring me a rock.” or “Why did you bring that boulder? I wanted a rock.” The message of the story is simple. A request often takes refinement to understand. It’s important to understand more than the surface of the request.
The same is true of Google. A simple request for “penguins” could mean an arctic bird or a hockey team. Effective searching doesn’t expect perfection without context. More often than not, issues with results come from too little context. It’s too high a bar to expect any search engine to be a mind reader. We have to do our jobs too.
- Google is not a easy mark for scammers and cyber criminals
The Fox article references both the NYT study on plumber lead generation and mass blocks of websites as evidince that’s it’s an easy place to scam.
First, the fact that Google has blocked that many websites is evidence to the contrary. That’s actually telling that it’s fairly effective at eliminating cyber criminals. They’ve even recently launched an extension that can show if a computer is infected with malware after a user completes a search.
Second, scammers target email, direct mail, dating sites, phone, and any other place that a mark could be found. Criminals will find any place they can to steal. Having a monitoring intermediary helps protect us a bit, much like a spam filter in email helps block out the mess. Of course, common sense doesn’t hurt either.
- SEO is not corrosive to search
The author clams that “so-called” SEOs go against Google’s intent of independently analysing the content of websites.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Google’s exact mission statement is “to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” There’s nothing about independence implied or stated. Good search engine optimization seeks to assist Google with this mission. I spend a good portion of my day trying to make sure that our data is interpretable by a machine. New efforts with structured data formats like schema.org, HTML5 markup and microformats exist to make Google’s job easier; not to manipulate.
Let’s go back to the business results that are expected of SEO. The point of optimization is to assure that a user’s search and your product are aligned. There’s no business value to tricking a user onto a site where the product or information will be of little value.
I’d be the last one to say that Google is perfect. It’s clear that people try and manipulate search results through unsavory methods. However, pointing out the exceptions and presenting them as the rule is both misleading and unfair. As one of the good SEOs I can’t help but take this attack on my career very personally.
Tags: Fox News, Google, search engine optimization, Searching, Web search engine
No commercial I’ve seen recently resonates as much as “The most interesting man in the world” series from Dos Equis. It’s not a new campaign and it didn’t start out as an sort of social media campaign, but it offers so many lessons in to better social media campaigns.
Have a Point of View
There are short versions of the campaign that feature simple responses to living an interesting life. Nuggets such as “the afterparty is the one you want” are simple, but offer sound advice. There is a key to offer a perspective that the listener may not have yet thought. People might disagree. Keep in mind that disagreement is part of conversation, and social media is meant to be conversational.
Do things differently
A big part of the most interesting man is that he seems to defy convention. As one ad puts it, he bowls overhand.
There’s no point in listening to you if you are saying exactly the same thing as every one else. You don’t have to ride the back of a condor to work, you just have to recognize when you are doing something unusual. If many followers aren’t present, then it might be interesting to share.
Remember your audience and brand
The subjects of the most interesting man’s factoids are exactly they type of things people talk about over a beer. Sports, parties, women and adventure. Even though the sell of the commercials is soft, the subject is spot on.
Social media practitioners should remember that they need to be consistent in their messaging as well. A follower became engaged for a specific reason. The duty is to keep them engaged by delivering on that reason. An account devoted to money management tips shouldn’t devolve into a conversation about mountain bikes.
Consistency doesn’t mean droll or inaccessible. Being interesting is exactly the opposite.
Stay thirsty my friends
The catch phrase of the ad has a powerful nugget too. What ever subject is of interest, it’s important to keep questing for more knowledge and information. Stated in a social media way – stay thirsty for your friends.
Related:
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- 7 Ways to Give Your Social Media Presence a Boost (martingysler.com)
Tags: facebook, Internet marketing, social media, twitter, YouTube
Last month, the Dallas Museum of Art hosted a celebration for Dr. Seuss and his birthday. This event was obviously kid-friendly so the entire family joined. The DMA has a wonderful wing with lots of family activities and most of the celebrations were held there.
The kids wing
The Dr. Seuss activities included a scavenger hunt, a juggler and a hat give away. Even our little daughter was given a checklist and pencil for the hunt. In the kids wing, there are tons of fun things for kids. There’s a section where the kids can trace art, and places for them to explore textures in a house. They can run, play and touch. In many ways it’s the opposite of the rest of the museum.
We let the kids play until it was time to eat. However, before we left, I wanted to see some of the real art in the rest of the museum.
The main hallway
A quick diversion down the main hallway was our only stop before leaving. Our daughter, still wound up from the kids area, got a quick instruction to be quiet in this area. She was clearly going to be bored with this new direction. A simple question was proposed.
Which one is your favorite?
At this point our daughter shot off like a rocket toward the painting that she liked the best. About one second later we noticed that she was holding the pencil that she had been given and pointing it at her favorite. Running toward a priceless painting with a sharpened stick in front of her. Fortunately she stopped just short of the art, but not before I’m sure that everyone in the museum heard us.
The management lesson
This near disaster comes from more than just my own questionable parenting ability. There was a systemic problem that lots of businesses might have themselves. The rules of the museum weren’t consistent. In one area running was allowed, yet in another it wasn’t.
A second lesson is to think about the action that will result from your direction. We asked our daughter what her favorite was. It was a very broad, open ended request. A better way to ask would have been “Let’s look at all of these and then you can tell us which one you like the best.” It’s far more specific, and useful. Yet it doesn’t restrict her thoughts. It only keeps her from running.
We’ve all seen parrots at conferences. I’m not talking about the birds, I’m talking about so called experts that repeat the wisdom of true experts over and over again. There’s no data to back up assertions, but the truth has been spouted so often no one would dare question. For that matter these parrots are often better presenters than the real experts. However, I’ll be the first to say that if you listen to them, you’ll be no better off than the newspaper at the bottom of a real parrot cage. Quite often the convention is very wrong.
Social Media Parrots
One piece of wisdom that I hear from parrots quite often is to “join in the conversation.” The logic goes that if an influential person responds, you can pick up some followers of your own. As you continue to expand this your follower count will have it’s own base.
Real Data on Conversations
It simply doesn’t work anymore. After picking up a retweet yesterday from one of my twitter accounts from a very influental person with tens of thousands of followers, we gained exactly one follower. One. This was an “old style” retweet that would appear in everyone of their follower’s timelines. It’s very different than what I would have reported a year ago.
It’s worse if it’s simply a response to a tweet. Direct responses don’t appear for most people unless you follow both parties. So even getting Charlie Sheen to respond won’t get your handle exposed to many people at all.
Conversations aren’t the key to growing a social media presence, adding real value is the key.
WGAF
It’s a simple acronym, but it’s the key to social media these days. Who Gives a Flip. (insert expletive if you so desire). If no one has a reason to care, it’s not going to help at all. If you can’t answer the WGAF honestly, it’s not worth posting.
Credit where credit is due
To be frank, I’m being a bit of a parrot about one thing – the term parrot. I have to credit that to Joe Laratro of Tandem Interactive who used it in a DFWSEM presentation.
Innovation requires questioning wisdom
It’s impossible to innovate by repeating other’s work. It takes genuine experimentation that questions convention. Big ideas don’t come from listening to the experts, they come from questioning them and expanding on their work.
Tags: innovation, social media, twitter
