'Social by design' marketing: A misleading myth?
Posted by Danyl Bosomworth in Marketing, Social CRM on Thu, 03/11/2011 - 01:12
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In this series of Smart Insights Best Practice Advice, Danyl Bosomworth of SmartInsights.com shares tips on best practice to get better results from digital marketing. This week, Danyl responds to suggestions from Facebook's COO that brands should make marketing 'social by design'.
I read this interesting article recently on Ad Age, Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook’s chief operating officer) speaking at the Association of National Advertisers in Phoenix.
Sandberg had a few key messages to share which I’ve summarised here:
- Make marketing (and business) “social by design” – yet given her position at Facebook she is really saying make your marketing “Facebook by design”?
- For Facebook not only is overall sharing doubling every year via “Zuckerberg’s Law,” she noted, but the number of daily fan page “likes” also has doubled in the past year to 100 million daily
- “If you look at the numbers for almost any brand, but certainly any brand that’s invested any time or effort on Facebook, the number of people who are your Facebook friends massively dwarfs the number of people who visit your website,”
- “So I think one of the questions this industry needs to ask itself is why? Why continue to build as many micro-sites as we do when we know it’s so much easier to reach people where they already are?”
- “Other ads only talk one way,” whereas operating within Facebook with “for the first time, real identity, real relationships, real personalisation, marketing can really fulfil its promise.”
Facebook are cleverly citing Nielsen data now too, and so able to position themselves more aggressively in the marketers mind with case studies such as American Express. I think this is a good thing, using data is.
Is it misleading though?
I fear so. The silver bullet attitude towards “SEO” has always worried me (a blog post I’ll write sometime!) but then reading this, Sandberg is making a few bold statements that I’d suggest are very misleading regarding Facebook’s potential too.
Common sense and the ever growing list of marketing silver bullets through history (Facebook / social media, SEO, direct marketing, advertising) surely we can learn that integrating is best, using a relevant mix of media that’s totally focussed on your customer being the focus, that of course being dependent on objectives and budget too? Or, is it just me?
Our three considerations
- Be careful with “fans on Facebook massively dwarf website visits?”. Engagement and interaction on (owned media) your domain vs Facebook will be “massively” different too! Time spent with your brand will be more on your owned media sites, than outposts like Facebook, the quality (in terms of purchase intent) is likely more too given that they’ve come to you.
- Facebook is only an engagement platform IF your fans visit you Facebook page regularly. Remember Jeff Widman (of Pagelever) cites harsh data bursting this bubble, suggesting that 1 in 200 see your posts and less that 5% ever come back to your page. So, we sadly see it, Facebook is most often leveraged as just a broadcast platform pushing messages into the consumers wall, messages they most likely will not see much of!
- “Social by design” sounds a relevant mantra, I’d prefer to see “Customer by design”. The consistent truth in all of the talk of media, content or social is the the customer – the rest are just means to communicate. Just consider where else your customer is online to realise that Facebook is not the only place… as demonstrated by Brian Solis' prism.
Dave Chaffey has written before on owned, vs paid, vs earned media. To summarise, the main types of media are:
- Paid media. Paid or bought media are media where there is investment to pay for visitors, reach or conversions through search, display ad networks or affiliate marketing. Offline traditional media like print and TV advertising and direct mail remain important accounting for the majority of paid media spend.
- Earned media. Traditionally, earned media has been the name given to publicity generated through PR invested in targeting influencers to increase awareness about a brand. Of course, it’s still an investment. Earned media also includes word-of-mouth that can be stimulated through viral and social media marketing and includes conversations in social networks, blogs and other communities.
- Owned media. This is media owned by the brand. Online this includes a company’s own websites, blogs, mobile apps or their social presence on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. Offline owned media may include brochures or retails stores.
There is also overlap between the three different types of media. It is important to note this since achieving this overlap requires integration of campaigns, resources and infrastructure. Content on a content hub or site can be broken down (atomised) and shared between into other media types through widgets powered by APIs such as the Facebook API.
This post by Joel Rubinson is also well worth reading on getting into the maths of it for your brand.
He uses the example of a brand with 10% household annual penetration and 20 million units sold in a year ($100 million in retail dollar sales), and with the media as:
- Facebook fans: 1 million have liked the fan page
- TV annual advertising budget: $10 million which buys 1 billion 30” impressions
- Owned website: 300,000 monthly unique visitors.
Exploring ‘time with brand’ with each of these media, while Facebook is both an engagement platform (if fans visit your page) and a broadcast platform (fans get updates in their streams), the percent of fans who revisit the fan page can vary wildly. Robinson suggests “time with brand might be driven primarily from those updates which you can imagine generate only a few seconds of attention among that subset of fans who happen to be on Facebook around the time of the update”. In the example, the percent of fans who visit the page monthly is low.
Meanwhile, with TV, assuming that 100 million of the impressions are delivered to users and that 20 million actually register in some way, Robinson establishes that leads to around 10 million minutes of time for the year, so just under a million minutes of time per month. But owned media comes out on top in Robinson’s example, with 300,000 monthly unique visitors generating 1.8 million page views and 2 million minutes of time with brand.
So don’t be so hasty sacking-off micro-sites, instead think about integration of them with Facebook’s fantastic plugins like Facebook Connect and Facebook Comments, rather than over-emphasising the importance of Facebook. If you stand back, consider your customer and use data, it’s common sense, really.
Danyl is co-founder of Smart Insights and a digital marketing contractor. His experience spans brand development, direct marketing and digital marketing, with roles both agency and client side over the last 12 years.
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Smart insights indeed !
Thanks Danyl - very interesting analysis.
Our experience has been that clients benefit much more from owned-presence and this should be the hub of online communication and engagement. You are right that paid and earned media have valuable but limited roles.
The tools are available for every brand to deliver really as much "owned-brand" interaction as they want to. We think this will become a market differerentiator. Companies who interact online will win-out over those who don't. We see this already happening in many sectors from private banking to recruitment and education. The shift is not just about choice of media locations - its about moving to social business processes.
-- David Bashford, Director SITEFORUM Social Business Suite, www.siteforum.com
Social Butterflies and Social Relationships
Thanks for exploding the fans on Facebook (FB) vs. site visitors myth. From our perspective as loyalty consultants, we've been seing a lot of firms chasing social media and frankly, getting more active loyalty program members acquired online or instore than the brand can acquire as fans on FB. The biggest difference is the level of engagement with the brand -- the loyalty program creates a context for collecting data THAT THE BRAND HAS PERMISSION TO USE. While some consumers are comfortable sharing their info via FB, many others are not. There are data analysts who will provide individual customer insights based on FB data--including how to use the friends of fans for acquisition. This is a slipperfy slope. Far better to pursue the balanced perspective Danyl presents for using social media as part of a portfolio that supports branded sites.