Razorfish: Facebook, Twitter Don't Make Customers Feel Valued

Razorfish

While marketers have flocked to social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, consumers still don't view them as important ways to engage with a brand, since they don't meet their expectations. Most people still prefer to connect with brands through more traditional methods, such as email, company Web sites or word-of-mouth.  

That's among the key findings from a new report from Razorfish titled "Liminal", based on its own primary research, customer data from a study for Virgin America and social network data compiled by online tracking company Rapleaf on 100,000 consumers. The goal was to look at customer-relationship management more from a consumer's standpoint than a marketer's to understand how people choose to interact with brands.

Across the board, consumers cited "feeling valued" as the most important element of brand engagement. "This demonstrates that both the hipster who DMs a company on Twitter and a boomer who sends a letter in the mail both ultimately want the same thing. Thus, companies should worry less about building out numerous channels and touchpoints and more about ensuring each customer interaction communicates value," advised Razorfish.

The study also found the "consumer in control" mantra of the last few years may not be as apt as assumed. Among the six qualities that define engagement -- feeling valued, trust, efficiency, consistency, relevance and control -- control ranked as the least significant among consumers. "Apparently, the consumer does not need to be in as much control as we thought, seeing other things as far more important," stated the report.

While social platforms like Facebook rate highly for delivering control and relevance, they aren't as successful in helping brands make users feel like valued customers. But companies can take steps to change that perception. The study points to a feature on the Facebook page of upscale shopping club Gilt Groupe, for instance, which gives fans advance notice on sales and is responsive to customer needs.

As part of its study, Razorfish also created the Consumer Influence Score, an equation that helps brands assess the lifetime value of a consumer based on their influence and reach, as well as purchase intent and buying power. It adds a person's number of Twitter followers and number of Twitter updates with the number of social networks he or she belongs to plus the total of unduplicated friends across all social networks to arrive at an influence score.

The equation relies heavily on Twitter, since the microblogging service "is the most public and trackable of all major social platforms," noted the report. The Consumer Influence Score is the flip side of the Social Influence Marketing score introduced by Razorfish in 2009 to help brands measure their own social media standing. 

9 comments about "Razorfish: Facebook, Twitter Don't Make Customers Feel Valued".
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  1. Doug Garnett from Protonik, LLC, January 31, 2011 at 3:44 p.m.

    Gotta love this comment about their "value" equation: "The equation relies heavily on Twitter, since the microblogging service "is the most public and trackable of all major social platforms," noted the report."

    In other words, we can't measure what's really important. But we can measure this. So, what the heck. We'll CALL it important.

  2. Mickey Lonchar from Quisenberry, February 2, 2011 at 2:50 p.m.

    To say people are 'not feeling valued' by Twitter & Facebook is like saying they are 'not feeling entertained' by TV, movies, etc. It is NOT the medium, platform or channel that engages; it is the content.

    I'm surmising that the reason participants were said to prefer brand engagement via email (a classic 'push' channel with no opportunity for feedback) over, say, Facebook (a dynamic medium that allows for real time conversation) is due strictly to the content they associate with the various platforms. Organizations have figured out 'what works' with email. Not so much with social media. It amazes how many lame pages with no content strategy to speak of are out there. How in the world could a follower feel 'valued' when all they view are what I call 'chewing gum posts' ('Happy Groundhog Day!'; 'What flavor rice are you serving tonight?'; etc.)

    Social media gives marketers a unique opportunity to help solve problems and deliver solutions to followers. Until marketers figure out what this means to their followers, you'll continue to read about studies like this one.

    http://www.quisenblog.com

  3. Darcy K from inVentiv Health, February 2, 2011 at 7:02 p.m.

    What is your source for this remark you attribute to Razorfish? I've read the whole report and Googled parts of the phrase, and it appears nowhere!

    "This demonstrates that both the hipster who DMs a company on Twitter and a boomer who sends a letter in the mail both ultimately want the same thing. Thus, companies should worry less about building out numerous channels and touchpoints and more about ensuring each customer interaction communicates value," advised Razorfish.

  4. Hannah Paramore from Paramore|Redd Online Marketing, February 2, 2011 at 10:01 p.m.

    Doug, great point, and one of my pet peeves. Most 'standard' media measurement is just an idea somebody made up or something that was easy to do. It's not usually grounded in anything real like sales results. I'm afraid this latest offering from Razorfish is just more of that. The most frustrating part is that people who control advertising budgets will really ascribe some value to their index because it's a study and a tool with a name created by a company whose name they recognize. But that doesn't make it right - or predictive of results.

  5. Kevin Horne from Verizon, February 3, 2011 at 12:52 p.m.

    I haven't read the report and i won't, but that next-to-last paragraph is just f**king craziness ! How many companies are going to track their customers BY NAME on Twitter and Facebook??!?! How are they going to match the online handles to real names?

    Most companies can't even get a match on customer names across their own financial, marketing, and/or sales databases!

    RAZF is becoming more like McKinsey every day...

  6. Patrick Jebber from MONSTERS Unlimited, February 3, 2011 at 7:32 p.m.

    I'm curious. Is the Gilt Groupe a client of Razorfish?

  7. Kathy Broniecki from Envoy, Inc., February 4, 2011 at 4:14 p.m.

    What? I lost interest in this research after this sentence: "This demonstrates that both the hipster who DMs a company on Twitter and a boomer who sends a letter in the mail both ultimately want the same thing." Being a boomer myself - I'm well qualified to say that I can't remember the last time I used my walker to trek down to the post office and mail my letter. Quit lumping all age groups (BOOMERS) together!
    BTW, I can tell you that my last dissatisfied tweet about skinstore.com had amazing results which made me a customer for life.

  8. Teresa Caro from Razorfish, February 9, 2011 at 4:30 p.m.

    As co-author of this report, I'd really like to thank everyone for their comments. Since the actual report is about 75 pages long, I thought I'd take this opportunity to illuminate a few things that would be difficult to get to in a news story.

    We did the research in Liminal because, while it's obvious there are more and more channels with which people and brands can communicate, there hasn't been much in the way of research about what people are expecting to get out of different channels, what's most important to them when they engage with brands (feeling valued, efficiency?) and also, what channels they use and how that might differ according to demographic. We hope Liminal will help brands figure out how to conduct what is now an ongoing two-way dialogue with their customers over multiple touchpoints.

    That said, since the proliferation of channels continues, ultimately any study like this, in part, is going to be a snapshot in time. We suspect, as Mickey did, that one reason Twitter and Facebook don't deliver for most customers right now is that brands aren't using them to provide the experience that people want. The same could be said for websites once upon a time.

    There also isn't that much study of how the value of a customer changes for a brand when that person is highly influential, be they Oprah or simply a steadfast brand fan who likes to publicize their passion. We refer to this in Liminal as enhanced, or eLTV. However, as we said in the book, as a measure it's a work in progress. The main point is that brands need to move beyond valuing their consumers based on how much they spend with them and evaluate their influence on other people as well. Many brands can also add in their own data and observations about their customers to determine which ones have high eLTV.

    To clear up confusion about boomers (and the walkers we hope none of us ever has to use), no matter which age group the people we studied were part of, they ranked what we called the six Engagement Elements in exactly the same order. It's not as though one demo favored feeling valued to a brand while another preferred being in control of the interaction. However, while it's true that, broadly, different age groups are more likely to have differences in which communications channels they use, that by no means translates to all "hipsters" or all "boomers" using particular channels. There are hipsters whose first instinct when they want to interact with a brand is to pick up the phone; there are plenty of boomers who "Like" brands on Facebook or Tweet a customer service issue - and like Kathy pointed out many brands are actually responding to the Tweet and meeting expectations.

    Hope that helps. And thanks again for commenting. If you would like to discuss further feel free to reach out to me directly - teresa.caro at razorfish dot com

  9. Anthony Miyazaki from Florida International University, February 20, 2011 at 1:01 a.m.

    The underlying problem with Facebook, Twitter, and other interactive social media platforms isn't necessarily the content, but the fact that the expectation of interaction is not fulfilled by the brands that engage these platforms for marketing purposes.

    Too many brand managers think that daily postings on social media will translate into "connected" customers. Yet, their failure to utilize the two-way interaction potential leaves customers thinking that they would have something of a connection, but not having one.

    Take commenter Kathy Broniecki's experience with Twitter. Her expectation when she tweeted was that there would be a quick reaction, which in this case she received and, as she mentions, this made her "a customer for life."

    Too many customers who make comments on Twitter and Facebook never have a response from the brand. Yes, we all know it's difficult to respond to hundreds, even thousands of posts/messages/tweets per day, but that's the cost of social media. It's like opening up a toll-free phone line and not having the staff to answer it. Customers will get angry and feel "less valued."

    Why this occurs is at least partly to blame on the metrics that brand managers seem to use for social media: they seem to think that "likes" and "followers" are some indication of success. They're wrong. They need true "connections" when it comes to social media.

    As a brief observation of the nature of social media and this particular article, I find it fascinating that we're not hearing back from the article author, Mark Walsh, on a daily basis (although we did hear from report coauthor Teresa Caro). Don't get me wrong. I'm not blaming Mark at all. He clearly doesn't get paid for responding to comments, just for creating new content. And herein lies the problem. Why have articles on the internet with comment capability if you don't pay your content writers to spend time responding to comments? Thus, my fascination isn't that we don't hear from Mark, it's fascination that whoever pays him to write the articles isn't wise enough to pay him to interact with the readers. This is the "connection" that Media Post News and Online Media Daily should be trying to nurture. Content (fresh, new, innovative) is great, but don't forget Community as well!

    Be sensible.
    Anthony

    P.S. I wrote about your article here:
    <a href="http://e-marketingforsensiblefolk.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">e-marketingforsensiblefolk.blogspot.com</a>

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