When content and engagement aren’t enough: a case for having an idea
Nearly half of online consumers write comments to help others, not to engage with brands
This just in: 50 percent of all social media campaigns go unnoticed. They fall on deaf ears. Consumers don’t give a damn. And brands are wasting time and money. In large part because they don’t know how to listen to consumers or deliver content that matters to them.
At least that’s according to the recent TNS Digital Life 2012 Report. The study interviewed 72,000 people from 60 countries and discovered that consumers, particularly those in the US and UK, are pretty cynical. In those two countries 60 and 61 percent of consumers have no interest in engaging with brands via social media.
Are you surprised? I’m not. In fact, we probably don’t need a study from TNS to tell us this. Look how much mediocrity is out there under the guise of “brand journalism,” or “owned content.” Much of it might feel good to its creators, but it’s a yawn inducer for customers and prospects. The fact that anyone with a laptop and Internet access can be a content creator simply means we have “mountains of digital waste” cluttering a landscape populated by friendless Facebook accounts and blogs no one reads.
While some marketers are getting it right, most appear to be missing an opportunity. Consider that almost half of all consumers willingly comment about brands on review sites – not to complain or praise mind you, but to share experiences and help others. So they’re using social media to engage. And they’re talking about brands. They just don’t want to have those conversations with the brand itself.
Ironically, when it comes to making purchase decisions, consumers rely as much or more on a brand’s content than they do on peer recommendations. They just want it on their terms and in a relevant context.
Let’s recap. Consumers want brand information and use it to make decisions. They willingly take the time to engage online, albeit for the benefit of each other. And too many brands, at least according to this study, can’t find a way to engage.
Why? TNS suggests inefficient targeting.
My conclusion would be a lack of creativity — a shortage of truly interesting, entertaining and useful ideas. Daily posts on Facebook – polls, questions, promotional offers (though the latter tends to work) – might cut it with a select group of already engaged fans. But will they hold their attention long term? Or delight them on a regular basis. Or succeed in attracting new customers?
I’m a huge fan of earned attention. And owning content. And being in the publishing business. But the one downside of everyone and anyone — and that includes brands and companies — being a content creator is that just like cable television, the good stuff becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of all that’s out there.
We’ve all seen, and hopefully created, stuff that’s good. It might be an event that lasts a day. Or extends for a month. It could be a price promotion. Or a new product launch. A single app. Or an ongoing story. Even a Facebook page. When social content is great, when there’s actually an idea to capture our imaginations, when there’s an execution to delight us, we want to engage.
Social media may have changed everything. But not the need for new, interesting, useful, relevant, and well-designed ideas. Let’s make more of those.
How Sapient Nitro can turn a social media disaster into an opportunity
It’s easy to bash Sapient Nitro for its social media faux pas yesterday. After all, they basically wrote the playbook on what not to do in digital and social media. Nevertheless I’ll shed a bit of a positive light, go out on a limb (to the very edge in fact) and declare that this is an opportunity for Sapient Nitro to create a really good social media case study and learning guide.
Want to convince clients not to over-react? Who is in a better position to offer such advice than someone who made the mistake and lived to regret it. Want to forcefully counsel clients not to delete those nasty Facebook posts? Guess who now knows about that. Want to get paid by clients to develop a crisis management playbook that can be followed when problems erupt? The team that didn’t have one yesterday today understands how essential it can be. Especially for global brands with multiple content creators. (Note: read Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto and you realize exactly how important it is to have instructions worth following when the situation gets so stressful that it’s hard to think clearly.)
If you want to use this as a social media case study, check out this sequence of events on Storify. It includes links to video, articles and tweets, along with my two cents.
If I were Sapient Nitro I’d take comfort in a few things. One, this too shall pass. It might seem omnipresent yesterday and today, but a week from now no one will really remember. United Guitar, Nestle’s and even Dominos all endured days of misery when they screwed up. But search Dominos social media on Google today and you get a story about re-invention.
Two, this story played out primarily on Twitter, a few blogs and AdWeek. At least so far. It didn’t really make the mainstream press and most clients don’t pay as much attention to the same blogs as ad industry types do.
And three, admitting mistakes and laughing about them, presuming you don’t repeat them, is something everyone can relate to. (We’ve all done something stupid.)
True some clients may prefer their agencies to know enough not to make such mistakes. But with a little bit of “positioning” Sapient Nitro ought to be able to turn this into a useful case study that talks about the eight mistakes not to make in social media.
- Don’t post the wrong kind of content
- Remember the web isn’t local, it’s global
- Engage proactively at the right time
- Don’t try and control the community or delete their comments
- If you do, archive everything
- Have a crisis management plan in place and follow it
- Try not to get defensive
- Accept the blame, apologize, and move on
If you want the beginning of a case study, check out the Storify post.
Google+ Pages would be perfect for Car Talk
And vice versa. While brands and media properties will no doubt rush to try out Google+, in many cases for the wrong reasons – to push out content, to replicate Facebook posts, to do the same thing they’re already doing elsewhere – it strikes me that Google+ Pages could work better for certain kinds of brands and content creators than other social platforms. Like Car Talk.
Wouldn’t you love it if Tom and Ray had hangouts once or twice a week for open questions and clever repartee? Sure Car Talk hangouts might be hard to get into, and fans would get really frustrated if they got shut out, but the brothers could always produce brief videos of the best exchanges and share them on YouTube after the fact. Which by they way would help yield better search results and drive traffic back to their Google+ page.
They could share puzzlers on their Google + page each week, too. Fans and listeners could post answers right there. Instead of simply hearing the right answer on the next show, we could amuse ourselves with the wrong ones, too. Perhaps even engage in some argument and debate.
And while it may not be possible for Car Talk, as a Google+ Page owner to add individuals to its circles (at least until the page is circled by a fan first), once fans do add Car Talk to a circle, Ray and Tom could segment those users based on interests or needs, both automotive and psychological. They could have circles of “mechanics who want to get better,” “prospective new car buyers,” “people in bad marriages due to automotive disagreements,” etc. Click and Clack could offer up advice, information, links and content specific to the circles that could most benefit from them.
There are plenty of reasons for brands and media companies to get onto Google+ Pages.
To stake your claim before someone creates a fake version
Like this one for BofA. (They deserve it, though.) Looks like Google is already on top of establishing verified pages, but it’s always easier to avoid the hassle.
To increase search results
Certainly Google+ pages will come up higher in organic search than will Facebook pages. Plus Google can weigh inbound links to that page, so that if you get the right people to link to you your results are even better.
To take advantage of Direct Connect
As Google+ continues to get more popular searching for +Burberry or +Pepsi or +Google makes it really easy for people to find your page. Presuming that they want to because you’re doing great things there.
To avoid being late to the party
An awful lot of brands were late to Facebook and even later to Twitter. While it’s always possible to catch up, it’s hard to be perceived as an innovator if you don’t get there first and set an example.
To get familiar enough with the platform to actually be inventive with it
And I don’t simply mean putting some video in your profile pictures, though kudos to Burberry, it is aesthetically pleasing. Rather to figure out whether or not you can deliver better service here than elsewhere, take advantage of hangouts, or simply leverage your +1’s in a more meaningful way.
Here are some other posts that you might find helpful.
Why Google+ Will Have a Huge Impact Re: Brands
Brand Pages are Lacking, but You’ll Make One Anyway
Burberry and Angry Birds Launch Pages
Google+ Pages Won’t Save the Social Network
In the meantime, I’m hoping Click and Clack jump on Google+ pages sooner rather than later and set an example of how to use the platform.
Sharing my S.I. Newhouse Talk
The First Amendment, printed in its entirety on the SI Newhouse 3 Building at Syracuse University
The good folks at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication were kind enough to invite me to speak there this week as part of their Global Leaders in Digital and Social Media Speaker Series.
The experience was awesome. I had the chance to visit and present in two classes – Dr. Bill Ward’s Social Media You Need to Know, and Professor Brian Sheehan’s Integrated Advertising Campaigns –and then deliver a keynote in the school’s wonderful Herg Auditorium.
S.I.Newhouse impressed on all fronts. The facility is spectacular, especially Newhouse 3, with its curved facade and the full text of the First Amendment (written in its entirety) incorporated into the exterior glass walls.
The building houses media rooms, production facilities and editing labs that feel almost as cool as an Apple store. There are well-lit open spaces that act as metaphors for transparency and freedom of information. But best of all, I found eager engaged students.
In my keynote, titled The End of Us and Them, I talked a bit about the somewhat conflicting trends in our business today. On one hand, TV spending in the US next year will grow 5.1 percent to well over 70 billion. On the other hand the critics tell us that, “In the future marketing will be like sex. Only the losers will pay for it.”
We have agency models that are still beholden to the golden era of media defined best by Walter Cronkite, Bill Bernbach and Ed Sullivan. Yet the new media forces are people like Zuckerberg and Chen, who’ve liberated us all and therefore relegated the old model – in which agencies and media companies were owners of content and controllers of distribution – to the diminished position it has today.
I shared an exchange I witnessed between Ted Koppel (SI Newhouse alum) and Arianna Huffington to remind students that it didn’t matter who was right –Ted wants to give people news that’s good for them; Arianna wants them to have the news they want – the reader, and consequently Arianna, have already won. (You can see the entire video of that conversation if you want.)
But I also suggested that all would be well. Advertising and its practitioners will prevail and prosper presuming we learn to create not only with words, pictures and stories, but also with technology, APIs and community.
There are a few other suggestions and examples as well. Much of it familiar to regular readers here. But if you want to take it, use it, repurpose it for yourself, here it is.
Thanks to the folks at S.I. Newhouse and especially to @DR4Ward for the warm hospitality and dinner at America’s best rib joint. I suggest the pork ribs and pulled pork combination.
Oh, and if you ever get invited to speak there, do not pass it up. Talking to you Mr. Armano. You’ll get more Twitter love from the students than you’ll ever get anywhere else.
Can mandatory social media service save America?
America has lots of problems: unemployment, poverty, obesity, urban violence. But there’s actually a more pressing problem. It’s the “us versus them” mindset that permeates our country and our politics.
Our communities of concern have become too narrow
Before the Occupy Movement even launched, I heard Robert Reich speak at Google’s Zeitgeist 11 Conference. In a brilliant talk he clarified how our communities of concern are shrinking. We don’t do everything as a country to solve unemployment because those in power don’t really care. Why? Because they are college graduates. And the unemployment rate, while 35 percent for high school dropouts, hovers at a mere five percent for college graduates. High school dropouts are not in the community that matters.
Reich extended his argument to rationalize why the poverty rate for senior citizens in America has been reduced significantly (from 20 percent to five percent) while poverty rates for families with small children has sky rocketed (an appalling 37 percent of US families with small children now live in poverty). The former reside comfortably in the community that congressmen care about (powerful voting block; closer in age) while the latter sits outside it.
Whether his assessment is right or not, two facts emerges as crystal clear. Each of us – blue, red, old, young, urban, rural, black, white, gay, straight – tends to care disproportionately about those with whom we share empathy and interdependency. And as our country becomes more fragmented rather than unified, our communities of concern get narrower. In fact, even the Occupy Movement, which has effectively called attention to the most obvious “us and them” gap, has been criticized for its lack of diversity, particularly in southern cities where there are large African American populations.
This is ironic in an age of social media when we have remarkable tools to connect us to each other. But what do we use them for? To find more people just like us. Take a look at your Facebook friends, your Twitter followers, your Google + circles. Chances are they are a mirror reflection of your upbringing, your background and your profession. When I went to college, 30-plus years ago, even unimaginative housing administrators worked hard to match you up with someone from a different background. Now our kids use Facebook to find roommates whose tastes match theirs, reinforcing a tendency for both parties to stay in their mutual comfort zone.
As I thought about Reich’s argument, something else struck me. There are two places where we create “communities” that do work — juries and military service. Granted in the case of the latter, people’s lives depend on one another. But think about juries.* We stick 12 strangers in a room, present them with a very serious responsibility, and in most cases they fulfill their duty with the utmost of diligence.
So here’s my idea for saving America in case the Occupy Movement doesn’t work. It’s an idea that could help us increase empathy. It takes full advantage of social media’s true potential. It’s a program that steals from the military and juries — practices that do work — when it comes to creating interdependency.
Mandatory social media service
- We require every 18-year-old in America to participate in mandatory social media service as part of a daily or weekly routine for one year.
- We assign our young adults to a racially diverse online social group comprised of 12 people from different regions, backgrounds, income brackets. (Google+ is a potential platform.)
- We present each group with a social challenge – obesity, jobs, poverty, high cost of education, even the problem of young men getting their sex education from watching online porn – and we ask them to solve the problem.
- We give them benchmarks, goals, and require an outcome in the form of an idea, a program, a new policy or maybe just a video.
- Finally we aggregate all of the solutions on one public website where the press, our legislatures, businesses and educators can access, rate and maybe even implement the ideas.
No doubt there are details to work out. Does each group have an official moderator, someone to coach and keep track? What happens when partisan differences challenge collaboration? How do we make technology and Internet access available to everyone? Is there translation software good enough to serve multi-lingual users? But these are all solvable through trial and error in the course of developing the program.
More importantly, we’re not asking anyone to give up an entire year of his or her life or make a significant sacrifice. We’re simply asking them to work together, as a community of concern, to find some kind of common ground that might yield a solution to a problem or an idea worth pursuing further.
Will a group of strangers on a social platform really solve big issues like unemployment, poverty, obesity, and urban violence? Maybe not. But as a society, we might solve our most pressing problem. The need to create greater empathy and understanding between and among people who are different but share a vested interest in America.
Think this idea has potential? Send a link to this post to your congressman or woman. Got a better idea? Please share.
Photograph courtesy of: Konstantin Sergeyev, who has some great images of the Occupy Movement on his Flickr page.
* A thought put in my head when Esther Dyson asked Sandra Day O’Connor a question about their effectiveness.
