Brandthony

The one thing I’ve noticed in my short time working at Conversation, a fairly new social media agency, is that clients still have a hard time understanding the marketing value of social media initiatives. They fully understand the math: hundreds of millions of people are on social networks like Facebook more than any other Web site, but they still do not understand how to utilize the networks to communicate marketing messages. Sadly, attempting to communicate the network effect such an initiative can have seems so foreign from anything they’ve ever studied and experienced that explaining it sometimes raises even more empty, puzzled looks.

I believe, among other reasons, there are two main problems brands have with social media strategy. There are certainly others, but I want to keep this fairly brief especially since I have work to get to.

1. How does “communicating” in a “two-way conversation” with customers translate to sales and how do I measure that ROI?
2. I recently found data that suggests 55% of Twitter accounts are inactive. Not only do I not understand this platform, but it seems as though I won’t be speaking with any real prospects.

Let’s address each one at a time.

1. Communicating in a two-way conversation with customers is fundamentally not a “direct response” initiative, so why are we expected to measure its effectiveness by those metrics? Communicating on social media platforms is branding with the opportunity for sales, not sales with the opportunity of branding. I would argue that conversations can result in brand loyalty and sales, while marketers could argue that conversations could result in just conversations without sales.

Multi-million dollar TV ad campaigns with the intention of branding that could result in a lift in sales gets green-lighted without much of a problem. Whatever happened to the 80/20 principle, where 80 percent of business comes from 20 percent of your customers? What better way is there to constantly communicate in a friendly, helpful way with that 20 percent than through social media. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

Imagine the power your brand can have with the streamlined manufacturing and distribution power of the current corporate marketplace along with the loyalty and customer satisfaction engendered by Mom-and-Pop shops.

2. Now, some may argue that I should discuss Facebook here, but I’ll take on the challenge of explaining Twitter in a mere two paragraphs. First, the basics: Twitter is a platform where a person can “tweet” about anything they find interesting, whether it be “Am I stupid or is quisitive really NOT a word?” or “Wow, check out this cool video: www.video.com.” All of these tweets are archived and searchable, and if another person finds value in what another person is tweeting they can “follow” them and subscribe to their updates so they can keep track of what’s interesting to that other person, who’s often a complete stranger unlike the connections on Facebook.

Now, for the problem of activity. Sure, there are a lot of dead accounts on Twitter and I believe that will always be the case. But check out this information from yesterday’s USA Today by Nicholas Christakis, a physician and Harvard University sociologist who is co-author of a new book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.

Much of the work by Christakis and Fowler is based on research using the Framingham Heart Study, a key group of 5,124 adults within a larger network of 12,067 people in Framingham, Mass. Each had an average of 10.4 ties to others — totaling 53,228 ties.

Now, assuming that most adults have 10 solid offline connections, let’s assume only one of those 10 is on Twitter (10 percent isn’t a bad estimate). Now, let’s assume the average Twitter user has 49 followers. Now let’s also assume the average Facebook user has 120 friends.

Now for the following example, when I say “reach X% of connections,” I mean the connection has actually read and taken note of the message. If you reach only that one person out of that offline group of 10 with a valuable enough message, and they in turn repeat your message on Twitter and Facebook and it reaches 10 percent of their connections (169 total), then your message has now reached 17 other people.

Now let’s say 20 percent of those people (3 people) distribute the message to their network of a combined 507 connections and again reach a conservative 10 percent of their connections, now the message has reached a total of 67 other people. And so on and so forth.

And we haven’t even taken into account how online messages don’t live in a bubble online, and can be spread offline by people who were reached online. In other words, a valuable promotion can spread by word of mouth easier than ever before, and messages live on all media online and offline.

There are still many areas we haven’t touched on, including the fact that you can see what people are saying about your brand in real-time, and have the opportunity to not make the mistakes of, say, Kryptonite bike locks.

That’s the (truncated) true value of social media for marketers.

Another interesting read: ‘Flocking’ behavior lands on social networking sites (USA Today)

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1. 7 Keys to Measuring Your Social Media ROI
2. Great Post on the SEO Benefits of Social Media
3. Best of Social Media #1: Viral Culture, Pizza Holdouts, & The Value of Social Currency
4. The United States of McDonalds: All Hail the Brand King
5. 101 Reasons Social Media Will Destroy Everything We Know About Marketing…EVER!