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RSSThe even funnier thing is that this is both shocking and not surprising. It's shocking, given the reach and depth of connection social media offers, yet not surprising because no one has unlocked social media in a way that demonstrates return on marketing objectives, such as reasonable expected range of outcome at for set amount of resource allocation. If you are a brand or an agency, there is not much more you can do but test various methods and watch longingly as your potential brand advocates and customers participate in a media category without you. But it's not the end of the world, as long as your competitors don't figure out how to benefit from social media in a scalable manner before you.
Balancing the attractiveness of the social media opportunity and the cost-benefit analysis of current social media advertising methods leaves us back at the start. What role should social media play in your media plan? I will be moderating this topic at OMMA Social next week. And I can't believe my luck, as I am looking forward to finding at least a couple of answers, given the amazing panel I will be leading. The panel is titled "Media Plans: Additive or Core Ingredient? Putting Social Media in the Mix" (http://www.mediapost.com/ommasocial/index.cfm?ip=Agenda) consists of: Joe Marchese, president, SocialVibe.com (who I hear is very funny and good-looking) Augustine Fou, SVP, digital strategist, MRM Worldwide Greg Verdino, Chief Strategy Officer, Crayon David Berkowitz, director of emerging media and client s trategy, 360i Rich Gagnon, Chief Media Officer, Draft FCB Adam J. Broitman, director of emerging and creative strategy, Morpheus Media.
Since I will be moderating, I thought I would get a couple of my thoughts out now. No surprise, I think social media should be a core component of your marketing mix. But test first. Social media marketing should have to pass the same test any other business relationship would. Allocate a reasonable budget to various social media marketing initiatives and analyze the results.
Once you find results that are favorable, or even comparable to your other online or offline marketing activities, look to scale those efforts, and continue to monitor return. The cost of monitoring your return this closely might throw off your ROI in the short run, but as you scale your efforts, testing results will become a smaller component of cost.
A lot of marketers would claim to be doing this, but they are not. What is more common is allocating far less budget to social media and looking at it more like buying a lottery ticket. Meaning: they're pinning their hopes on something going viral (aka winning the lottery) and if it doesn't, at least the expense wasn't too high.
Every marketer looks at social media and wants "The Blair Witch Project" (low budget, cultural phenomenon). Instead, they end up with a string of social media tests that seem to suggest they can't drive ROI from social media marketing. Let me be clear: There is no such thing as "free media," free media is just media you achieve by spending your time and money on developing assets that reduce the amount of money you had to spend to "buy media."
Throwing money at social media doesn't work, either. Achieving success in social media requires commitments longer than many campaigns are scheduled to run. So don't spread your social media budget over some artificial timeline created by your media plan, but regard it as an "always on" component. You can always scale up and down at appropriate times, given business cycles or product releases. But keeping a consistent presence can allow you to reap the full benefits of social media.
I would love to get your ideas about what specific questions to ask the panel. We will not be discussing the theory of social media, but rather actionable practices for developing asocial media presences with measurable results. What question would you ask this panel?
P.S. I gave in and started twittering...I am going to commit to it for a while and try to tweet at least twice a day. Feel free to find me at: @ joemarchese.
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"There is no such thing as “free media,� free media is just media you achieve by spending your time and money on developing assets that reduce the amount of money you had to spend to “buy media.� "
Adam - Monday will be fun. I agree a new type of agency is in order to better achieve effective social media for brand clients. As far as a no-brainer, as a new friend put it - brands have to fish where the fish are.
I think that the issue is, in part, a semantic one. As you say the word media is present in the popular term "social media" and one would expect that social media would make it to every media plan.
Part of the problem here is, where does the responsibility of dealing social media lie?
Sure, the media we are talking about is social, but that does not mean that buying a banner ad in a social environment in social media marketing. I feel that the first shift we need to make is how we refer to this space (at least in reference to our industry). When talking about how to best leverage social media for marketing purposes, I think we need to talk about "social marketing". Under that light, is this still the responsibility of the media department?
Perhaps social marketing should fall under that jurisdiction of the marketing department, or even the PR department. Or maybe there will be the formation of a new type of agency.
The bottom line is, I don't think it is a no-brainer that social media should be a line item on every media plan, as I am not convinced this is a function of the way current media departments operate.
This is a tough question and I look forward to hashing it out with everyone on monday!
I hate to say it because I will sound like a fanboy, but this is another (in a long string) of great articles.
I have a fascinating example where our client asked us to demographics on social media - instead we gave them mindsets. The way we developed the mindsets? By looking where people were talking.
Changed their entire digital marketing plan - as they can now address people according to the appropriate mindset. We know where they are when talking about entertaining vs. being a mom vs. fitness vs. weight loss. And we know what their underlying motivations and drivers are for each of those mindsets.
Take a look at:
http://www.3aday.org/Pages/Welcome.aspx
To see how they used this information to re-design their website.
TO'B
If this isn't already clear, then you should read "Groundswell".
How are companies to view these social networks as a recruiting tool? I believe one of our best marketing tools are our own employees. If we can get them to influence other folks to join our organization, we can save thousands of dollars in advertising. But do we want to open the firewalls to social media at the workplace?
As you probably know, there are a lot of question around how recruiters can use social media in the recruiting process. Social media is allowing people to become more of a "whole." I was telling a coleague of mine that I think social media is exposing all the assets we all have as human beings. Many companies want to support their employees achieve life and work balance. But I think in the past many companies would just close their eyes and not know what employees were doing on their own time. With the transformation of the internet and introduction of social media, we are all much more exposed and what we do on our personal time is becoming unvealed very easily. Furthermore, more people are involved in various activities such as boards, charities, sports, professional organizations and others. Companies are having to deal with that and it's hard to differentiate the employee from the human being.
On the other hand, if employee referrals are the number one source of hires, why not facilitate the process? Companies could not only allow people to network on the internet but could even train employees on how to refer employees if they happened to run into a friend or relative on SM who might be a good fit. I could write more about this but I hope you undertand where I'm trying to go with this. In summary, I think in terms of recruiting during a very tight job market condition, social media has a lot to offer as word of mouth to achieve many recruiting objectives. But I rarely hear anything in terms of "recruiting marketing communications," which is one of my functions.
Perhaps you can address some of these points or create some awareness around issues regarding recruiting through social media...