Tag: SMM

Throwing the marketing baby out with the bath water…

| March 14, 2012

While search engines seem to be taking social signals into account, there’s no need to throw the marketing baby out with the bath water.

If you haven’t got to grips with social media marketing yet, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve missed the boat. You’d also be forgiven for thinking search engine optimisation is dead, as online marketers working at the sharp end head en masse, lemming-like, to new pastures like Pinterest.

Marketers have always had a tendency to drop proven tactics in favour of the next big thing. As an ex-marketer myself, I’m allowed to say that! But common sense is really important, however exciting things get.

All you need to do is join Twitter or Facebook to see thousands of brands fighting to gather as many followers and ‘likes’ as humanly possible. But how many of them have a handle on the real-life business benefits of marketing via social media? How many ‘likes’ and followers convert to enquiries and sales, ultimately improving their bottom line?

A recent report showed that 45% of Brits don’t want to ‘interact with brands’ via social networks. Which is no surprise when they were designed with pleasurable, personal social interaction and networking in mind, not sales and marketing. And while millions of us enjoy social networks, even more of us don’t bother.  When you concentrate exclusively on SMM, you miss out on a big pot of potential customers.

Then there’s search engines, who need all the information they can lay their hands on to help them classify, rank and rate websites fairly and accurately in a crowded commercial landscape. There’s no way they’re going to drop boring old search engine optimisation, inbound link building, unique content and so on from their algorithms’ repertoire.

If your online marketing agency starts making noises about shifting your entire budget into social media marketing at the expense of SEO, DM, SEM and other comparatively old hat media, just say no. Innovative new media like Pinterest might be shiny and exciting but they’re extras, not replacements. The jury is still out as regards solid, reliable, readily reproduceable empirical evidence of social media’s marketing effectiveness. As such it really shouldn’t be treated as a replacement for established, better understood practices.

I know I sound like a broken record. But the best marketers always TEST a new medium to the nth degree to establish its performance and potential beyond doubt before rolling it out. And social media marketing is no different.

As I’ve said a tedious number of times before, variety is the spice of successful marketing life…

(Thanks to http://www.sxc.hu/profile/mokra for the excellently funny free image!)

Social media’s failings unveiled… to a resounding silence

| December 8, 2011

Are you into social media marketing? If so, have you read TNS’s Digital Life report yet?

Don’t be surprised if you haven’t. It came out a couple of weeks ago, only to be met by a stony silence from the SMM community. How come? Probably because it’s full of findings that social media marketers don’t want to hear!

In a nutshell it’s the biggest empirical study of consumer digital behaviour so far, involving 72,000 people over 60 countries. That’s what I call a relevant statistical sample.

Here’s just three of the research’s key findings:

  • the majority of consumers don’t want to engage with brands via social media
  • in the UK, 61% of us say we don’t see social media as a place we want to interact with brands
  • only 1 in 4 consumers in developed markets see social networks as a good place to buy products

And here’s a quote from TNS Chief Development Officer Matthew Froggat: “Many brands have recognised the vast potential audiences available to them on social networks; however they are failing to understand that these spaces belong to the consumer and brand presence needs to be proportionate and justified”.

As Marketing Week’s columnist and Associate Marketing Professor Mark Ritson says, “Social media literally means the communication channels that exist between people. Not between brands.” He adds, “As more brands attempt to grab attention and start social media conversations with disinterested consumers, more of them will switch off.”

The overall message from the TNS Digital Life report is this. Social media is a genuine world-changing development. But marketers who spent all their money and energy on it, using it as their main communications channel, are in for a “disappointing denoument”.

How many marketers have actually donned their consumer hat and realised social media marketing is fatally flawed from a human perspective? Hardly any. If they had, they’d realise how few of us actually enjoy having our social spaces clogged up by brands trying to sell us stuff.

Sensible advice? Test SMM carefully to see if you can turn a profit. But don’t, whatever you do, chuck all your marketing budget eggs in the social media marketing basket. You’ll probably end up being burned. Media variety, as always, is the spice of successful marketing life.

Want to know more?

Here’s a link to the TNS Digital Life report for 2011.

Is more than 230 Twitter followers ‘meaningful’?

| November 25, 2011

Apparently we can only maintain meaningful social interactions with 150-230 friends.

Does the same go for Social Media Marketing on Twitter?

We’re all human so there’s no logical reason to suspect we can handle more than 150-230 concurrent meaningful business relationships any better than we can personal relationships. And by all accounts we need to communicate meaningfully to make a commercial success of Twitter.

Thanks to things like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, it’s good news for big brands and companies doing large scale, nationwide SMM activity. You’d go mad trying to interact meaningfully with all those followers without special SMM management tools.

It’s good news for local businesses, small businesses, sole traders and freelancers too, giving us the scientific green light to create small, relevant, intimate Twitter communities instead of feeling we ought to build and manage millions of followers like the big boys. Horses for courses.

Interesting times…

Struggling with the social media marketing nitty gritty

| November 3, 2011

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I want to test whether small businesses convert better than companies in the media sector.

To get more small business followers, I need to follow more of them. So far, so good.

The thing is, adding more people makes my Twitter space noisier. Following fifty extra in my small business target sector, I noticed straight away that it’s much harder to focus. I’m missing interesting Tweets and losing touch with cool people because there’s too much going on.

I reckon the key so successful social media marketing is taking a personal approach. Putting quality over quantity, rather than gathering masses of followers, helps me interact with people better. Because they don’t get lost in the noise we can get to know each other, build trust and eventually do business.

I don’t want to chuck my media sector contacts. They let me peek into what’s happening in down-town Brighton: rich in new media creativity and a seething hotbed of serious geek talent. So I’ve gone back to square one, un-following most of the small businesses I’ve only just followed. I’m back on the right marketing track, but I’ve trashed my test.

The solution? Slowly and steadily un-follow people who don’t Tweet much/do too much of a hard sell, replacing them with small businesses prospects. In other words, exercise patience!

(Thanks to http://www.sxc.hu/profile/kkiser for the fab free blue bird image)

Hiscox small business research highlights SMM lethargy

| August 17, 2011

I have a few American copywriting clients. So it was interesting to see the results of Hiscox’s recent research revealing how the US small business sector feels about Social Media Marketing.

Having surveyed just over 300 American small business decision makers Hiscox discovered only 12% felt SMM was ‘a must’.

In dramatic contrast 43% said it was totally irrelevant to their business. 24% were singularly unimpressed, saying they’d only use SMM if they had the time. And just 4% said they couldn’t live without Social Media Marketing, split 19% Facebook, 15% LinkedIn and 4% Twitter.