[teemdsocial]

The New ROI

Things were much simpler way back when—in the day, as it is said. Marketing had few options to consider: print, TV, direct mail. Calculating the ROI (or attribution) required two numbers: incremental revenue and ad cost. Think of a race with a handful of runners. It was easy to identify the winner. But things have changed.

ROI is not just one number

Today the race is more like a marathon with runners coming in and out of the race. Some runners are on relay teams, but passing the baton to teams you don’t know and can’t control. Calculating performance or attribution is impossible. Perhaps old-time comedian Fred Allen described the situation best when he said that advertising is 85% confusion and 15% commission. Today, we are glad if racers run in the same direction.

Stick with what is known: Status quo bias is a preference for the current state of affairs. Any change is perceived as a loss. The bias interacts with other cognitive processes such as loss aversion, existence bias, endowment effect, longevity, mere exposure, and regret avoidance.

Showing the big picture to the CFO

A CFO can take a rational position to stick with what is known—direct mail, for example—until things settle down. But social media can be very effective, and some, almost free (consider the ALS’ #icebucketchallenge). Also consider the competition, which may have 500K followers!

Let’s keep in mind that CFOs like to keep track of what is spent and relate it to revenues. They want to hear which channel is converting and do not want to waste resources on what doesn’t convert. CFOs often remind us that half the ad spend is wasted, but which half and on what? Gary Vaynerchuck says that trying to measure ROI is sometimes like calculating the “ROI of your mother.”

Your audience is social

It’s not that hard. First, define your audience and choose your media channel appropriately (e.g., don’t use LinkedIn for B2C or Facebook for B2B). Then build and engage with your audience. They will tell you what they like, and those that convert will define your strategy and approach. The hard part is finding the content that deepens, broadens, and diversifies your audience.

The right answer is not merely to post relevant, quality content regularly, at the best times of day or day of week. It is not just to employ quality images and videos, trending hashtags, or current content. Perfecting each skill can lead you down a different rabbit hole. It is better to marshal your marketing frontline -- anybody and everybody directly or indirectly in touch with your customers. They are aware of different themes, topics, subjects your customers want to learn about. Ask them. Make it easy to share their ideas and suggestions. Use them. Report back how the audience responded, engaged. Repeat.

ROR – It’s not a typo

Once you have created a process and an audience (10K, 100K, or 500K), build on the relationship(s) and determine how audience members are engaging with the brand. We can’t ignore ROI, but in social media, before we figure out ROI, we need to calculate ROR, or return on relationship. This a term that Ted Rubin coined:

“ROR isn’t a new concept in marketing; it’s the value that accrues over time through loyalty, recommendations, and sharing. It’s a back-to-basics measurement that calculates how well brands create authentic connection, interaction, and engagement with customers — and it’s time to relearn the concept.” ― Ted Rubin

You can monitor ROR by looking at a few numbers over time: # of fans, contributors, page views, posts, participation, reach, and traffic.

The customer’s journey from awareness (top of mind awareness) to purchase can be treacherous. Some readers or viewers never finish, lose interest, postpone the purchase, explore alternatives, or buy from the competition. Make sure that your audience becomes part of your team; they pull your brand along.

Forging a path: Our To-Do list

Recognize that more data doesn’t indicate greater accuracy, only more variables. Use the 80/20 rule to manage time and expectations:

1.    Identify the KPI’s relevant to your team and market.

2.    Understand the stages of the customer journey: awareness, research, choice reduction, purchase, brand advocacy, and determine how they can connect.

3.    Establish an expected return for each channel—some will be known, others mere guesses.

4.    Calculate the ROR, the engagement, of each channel (e.g., Facebook 3.4%, Twitter .02%)

5.    Optimize each media, select one at a time.

6.    Schedule when your team will re-evaluate both ROR and ROI.

Contact Yves at [email protected] or Thad at [email protected] and request a 30-minute, no-obligation, totally free phone or Skype consultation.

[teemdsocial]

Driving in a Fog – Integration of Message and Media

Seeing Beyond the Fog

You’re late, speeding at 120 mph, your satellite radio is blaring, your smartphone map app is recalculating, the fog is thick, the road is wet, and it’s hard to tell if the car is still on the road.

Introducing: The Advent of Corrective Marketing!

Is your marketing on the right track? Are you on the correct path?

According to our internal research, that’s how most CMO’s feel after recent changes in markets, economy, technology, and demographics. A road once clearly defined is now part superhighway, part country road, part off-road, and in some instances a yet-to-be-cut jungle path.

Stumbling in the fog

We have forgotten who to target, how to grab their attention, what to say, where to find them, or when to communicate. It’s not always our fault. Marketing by definition is a road, a road that is nearly always under construction and not always clearly marked.

TV plays in the background. The iPhone is inches away. Online, we search: how to spell, movie title, facts we should have learned in high school or college, news, sports, competitors, and partners. And then there’s social media. Media is no longer an overview of the marketplace. Marketing has become a sphere that covers an entire range north to south and east to west, smothering the consumer with relevant, targeted personalized messages.

Ironically, as consumers, we’re always on one type of road or another and switch lanes as frequently as we switch roads.  As marketers we try to “catch” consumers and ticket them with a prospective sale before they exit or have them exit where we wish. Consumers are constantly making corrective changes, switching lanes, changing exits, detouring around delays. Marketers must and should do the same.

The Road Ahead

Marketing has changed. It is no longer simply 360 degrees in scope, but has to be expanded to 720 or more degrees in scope, going back and forth on different paths and planes.  As marketers we need to more than adapt; we need to forge a new path that suits our brand, related to the consumer and to market demographics.

Most marketers continue with what ‘works.’ They use single-phase traditional or legacy media: TV, radio, print, billboards, direct mail, etc. Early adaptors added websites, squeeze pages, valueless media, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Instagram, off-line and on-line gaming, YouTube, SEO, email, UGC (user generated content), content editors, earned, paid, and owned media, etc. Later, they bring in new tools to measure and analyze (i.e.: to make sense of) market spend.

The big picture of big data

Technology has multiplied the venues and channels we use for marketing but generates so much data that we get stuck. We get distracted with too much information, including data that has no relevance or value. We may have lost sight of the objective. We still market to sell, but are successful only when the selling process is integrated, relevant, and beneficial to the consumer.

Honing marketing in the digital era

Silos become entrenched. Public Relations fails to share with marketing, Human Resources sometimes contradicts Public Relations, Sales is busy, Marketing is planning, the CFO is tinkering with next year’s budget, and Social Media and its media partners are on their own. Data indicates that all marketing media is more powerful when integrated and viewed by the user—the consumer—as having value. The negative impact of following the latest marketing trends exceeds headcount and media cost.

Forging a path to success: Our To-Do List

Our job has changed. There are too many different opportunities and too much data (more data = more problems). Here is a short list to align your marketing efforts:

Immediate:

1.     Build your brand internally first.

2.     Define the mission of each department and its target audience.

3.     Adopt the 80/20 rule to limit the number of channels a department works with.

4.     Identify the KPI’s relevant to your team and market.

5.     Measure each media line by line.

Subsequent:

1.     Document departmental budgets, expenses, people, and training.

2.     Confirm each department is on message and on brand.

3.     Verify the KPI’s and messaging work across silos.

4.     Optimize one media selected at a time.

5.     Re-assess redundancies and integration.

Navigating a foggy sea!

We suggest that not only is correct planning needed, but the need to be ready to manage a course change, an alteration or change of direction, is the key to safely travel in a fog.

Contact Yves at [email protected] or Thad at [email protected] and request a 30-minute, no-obligation, totally free phone or Skype consultation.

[teemdsocial]

Content: If you have to ask

During a meeting the social media manager asked us for “social media content.” Then he gave examples of the type of content that generates engagement:

Interviews

Company news

Personal stories

Cautionary tales

Lists

Fortunately, someone sounded the recess bell, and we escaped to deal with our own challenges.  The social media manager was not happy.  We could have added many different ideas to his list:

Forecasts

Profiles

Quotes

Success stories

Testimonials

And mentioned that images, graphics, etc also have a positive impact, … But beyond getting the post read and shared, what is the goal?

In this day of permission marketing, where users control what they watch or read, what are we selling? In reality all ads were always self selecting: when reading a magazine I skip pages and pages of ads. But Facebook and Twitter are fundamentally different. We follow friends and brands to stay connected. If all I see from my friend John are pictures of his meals at popular restaurants, I might lose interest and block him.  But if I can see that John is planning to attend our class reunion I could choose to join him for the trip.

What will sustain our interest in a brand or organization?

Understand how broad is the audience: Consumers, customers, users, company partners, friends of customers, …

Define their interest?  Do they want to buy yesterday, maybe someday, never, but enjoy reading about it, my friend has one, ...

That’s a start.  And they’ll let you know what they like, which helps.

We don’t write content to say we did. We write content to interest and grow our community.

[teemdsocial]

Are you in need of corrective marketing?

By Thaddeus Kubis

http://www.marketingtechnews.net/news/2016/sep/26/are-you-need-corrective-marketing/

26 September 2016, 10:10 a.m.

Have you ever considered this question? I ask it all the time.

Successful marketers have always been marketing and selling via an omnichannel stream, and integrated marketing is mostly self-corrective.

Corrective marketing involves using a holistic program that not only determines the problem areas but also offers a solution, a correction.

The advent and need for corrective marketing

Marketing programs are like a long-range space probe; it may take years to reach its destination and achieve its goal. During that long trip, the navigational jets are fired to allow for course corrections. I believe the same “course correction” needs to be integrated into your marketing efforts.

Define customer adjustments: Approach, price point, education, income, awareness, media, lead, location

The topic of corrective marketing came up when I was having a broad-based discussion with Yves Salama, Principal Consultant at Teem’d, a communications platform that focuses on social media.

We discussed the scope of marketing today and the influence and impact integration of media has on the process. We also discussed the need to redefine most social media strategies to incorporate them into an Integrated Brand Communication strategy.

The first step in such a strategy is to determine the channels needed to make the marketing process as omnichannel as possible, defining or anticipating the needs for the response channel or responsive media and suggesting corrective changes.

But be advised, do not make changes across the broad-based program without understanding that some changes will amplify, reduce, or perhaps eliminate the need for down-the-line corrections.

Align customer view across department adjustments: Social media, product development, customer service, marketing, HR, PR, sales, advertising

Yves proposed the following points during our discussion:

1. Define your customer

The 'your' becomes a major component; there is a difference between defining a customer and defining your customer.

2. Define how each department identifies and engages customers

We have seen multiple customer-based definitions constructed by the silo that is leading (and many times not leading) the process.

3. Look at all departments

How are they organised?

How are they trained?

How frequently is updated training offered? I call the updates 'marketing awareness training' and suggest that every marketer establish one day a month per department as one of these days

Clearly define the tools/media each department uses: Also, calculate the value of the media first to your customer and secondly to the brand

How do they calculate engagement/ROI? We have seen that ROI is calculated differently depending on the silo of launch, and this becomes a serious longer-term problem. What seems to be a tactical success can become a strategic failure

How are they budgeted? A sub-question involves information on whose marketing money is actually being spent. Market spend confusion thrives across multiple silos and departments.

4. Confirm they have a common understanding of your customer

Identify breaks: Demographics, segmentation, personas, and more. Think of the process of variable data personalization for your marketing program. Can your strategic brand message be massaged to support the value and view of the media tools selected?

Corrective marketing includes full-power boosters, but it also includes small, slight adjustments. You might revise a setting or make higher, fine-course corrections

Reframe: Rethink, repurpose, and redeploy. The digital revolution has its strengths and weaknesses. A major strength is the ability to remake, revises, reframe, rethink, and redeploy almost immediately—based on the feedback or, better still, the results. Print-based tools are more difficult to modify, but if you look at the print-based delivery mechanism as a second stage to the all-digital introduction, you may see an avenue that works

5)  What to do next, or, better said, what to do first?

Coordinate spend across channels adjustments: Customer support, print advertising, social earned, social paid, user generated content, broadcast, search engine, location/geocache

Boosters are needed

What is needed is a series of boosters - one for each silo listed, with a corrective control device that allows the marketer to literally 'fire the booster' to make a mid-course correction, to gain brand traction (PR, social, price) or to increase speed (direct marketing, enhanced product development).

This is also to activate cruise control and allow the effort to self-drive the success (a selected combination of the marketing tools offering the best ROI/ROR and, of course, the best value to your customer).

Rationalise the customer journey across departments adjustments: Social media, product development, customer service, marketing, HR, PR, sales, advertising

Summary

Sounds interesting? Sure. Consider the concept of linking corrective marketing to corrective planning and thus being prepared to change at any stage of the process, not only at the end of a marketing effort.

Continuing the booster comparison, most changes to a live marketing program are based on direction and not often on substance. Simply adding inflight corrections via the media booster to allow the 'flight' to achieve maximum planned success is one of the many corrections that can be made.

Corrective marketing includes full-power boosters, but it also includes small, slight adjustments. You might revise a setting or make higher, fine-course corrections.

Corrective marketing also involves constant monitoring and developing the intellectual capital to understand and determine when the corrections may be needed.

What corrective marketing is not is tweaking; it is the process of responding to weaknesses in the marketing program and integrated processes. Corrective marketing is a preplanned process that allows, 'live' on the fly changes to be made and offer the 'magic' of marketing with the science of marketing.

What do you think? Are your boosters ready? Are you ready?

Is your next marketing effort on the launching pad, and are you thinking of developing a corrective marketing option? You know where to go—call me at mission (marketing) central.

[teemdsocial]

Consider the Newspaper for Content

Newspapers and magazines offer different sections. Beyond the lead articles, there are national and international news, business news, local news, the editorial and opinion pages, health news all the way to popular sections like sports, human interest, and celebrity gossip section. Some papers have cartoons, ads and crossword puzzles.  Each section is generally run by an editor responsible in selecting and assigning stories to correspondents.  

Social media managers generally  don’t have the same level of support.  Nor do they have the resources. But they are advised to follow some principles: define personas, perform a content inventory and audit, conduct competitive analysis, use relevant keywords, all the way down to “write better content.”

In reality, the audience is wide and indefinite. Is it a prospect, customer, friend, employee, partner.  What are his/her interests: how to use the product/service, is it useful, how are users responding, expensive, easy to use, where, how, when, etc.  And where do they stand on the customer journey?

Those are the easy questions.  Harder is how to make the story stand out.

So when reading the paper, do you go to the sports section and skip over the lead or the editorial. That varies. And with so much variety, few posts fall in the 'must read' category.  Content should be rich to satisfy the wide range of interests your readers have, including  prospects, customers, friends, employees, and partners.

The social media manager can feel overwhelmed. But in reality, he should assume the role of the Editor-in-Chief and recognize that each person in the marketing front-line (sales, marketing, PR, product, CEO, CMO, etc) has a point of view, a perspective that addresses a specific and different interest.  

The difficulty isn’t with content, it’s with marshalling the marketing front-line to participate and contribute. With your help, they’ll know or learn how to make each post interesting.

[teemdsocial]

My nephew, the social media expert

Social media is easy. My 12-year-old nephew is an expert.  So why do billion dollar companies fail?

Companies know how to get things done.  Someone in marketing or PR hires an outside agency or brings in a social media expert to create a blog, a Facebook page or a Twitter account.  They meet once a week or once a month to review and approve different ideas or content suggestions, go over the metrics then move on to another meeting already in progress.

My 12-year-old nephew doesn’t plan his content.  He just shares whatever comes up: the soccer game his team won, the frog he saw on the hike, the new LEGO Star Wars Battle Droid Trooper Carrier, Noah, his new best friend,  his lunch and the new rip in his backpack. Without a specific focus, he’s naturally engaging with many different circles -- his Mom, Dad, Noah, grandparents, teammates, neighbors, and friends. He might even get a comment or two: LEGO cooooooollllllll.  

It’s hard to plan for ‘whatever comes up’ when the social media agency or expert is sitting in a cubicle. Harder still, to go around the different groups or departments who could provide content ideas and ask, do you have anything for me? PR, sales, marketing, communications, customer service and the C-suite keep different calendars. It’s hard to regularly bring them together at the same time to discuss ‘what should we post on social media today.’

Ads, billboards, announcements, are created, reviewed, edited, approved with a long lead time.  Social media has a narrower window and a different rhythm and purpose. It can be entertaining, informative, engaging, serious, playful friendly or professional.  It’s not about the social media expert, it’s about the company or brand.  It’s about keeping the brand top of mind, sharing information valuable to prospects up and down the sales funnel, keeping customers abreast of product improvements and enhancements to customer service, and reminding partners and employees the company is growing. This requires marshalling many different disciplines.

This is a knowledge management problem.  How can each department contribute to the social media conversation? Who decides? Who crafts the message? Who reviews and approves? Sounds like a process, but is it easy or hard?

My nephew makes it sound easy. He contributes posts that affect him or affected by.   Ask any social media expert how your company should go about using social media, and it will sound hard:

Define your strategy: get everybody onboard, define your objective(s), select target audience

Organizational: train your teams, establish a workflow, determine oversight

Execute: identify content, engage your audience, pick your channel(s),

Measure: select appropriate analytics,  measure performance

Breaking it down into steps and processes, a favored approach of consultants, makes it sound harder.  Coordination between different groups and people, hard enough to set up a meeting. Collaboration -- tough to get people to participate. Training -- expensive and they won’t show up. Content creation -- nobody contributes. Measure and analyze -- everybody has an opinion.  Hey! everybody’s a critic.

To tick off this effort from our to-do list, we look for the easiest path, an agency or a recent college grad.

There is another approach. Learn to play well with others: make it easy for team members to contribute their point of view on social, allow them to review posts before they are published and learn from contributors how to adapt and improve. Provide a forum where they can share questions, ideas and suggestions.

There are more elaborate or technical descriptions of this process. Adopt the principles of “working out loud”. Develop a sense of comfort and trust within the team and promote a spirit of collaboration where members find support, ie: create a positive feedback loop.

Learning by doing is a version of “modelling behaviour”, also creating a “community of practice”, where team members have a place to learn, to practice and share.  That’s how we learned to use email.  Social is easier. Everybody participates directly.  

My nephew does all this instinctively.  No need for training, for mission statements, for analytics.  He’s a natural.

[teemdsocial]

Has social media really become a standalone marketing tool?

http://www.marketingtechnews.net/news/2016/jun/02/has-social-media-really-become-standalone-marketing-tool/

By Thaddeus Kubis -- 02 June 2016, 13:01 p.m.

As a marketing communications integrator, I look to define and evaluate the added strength that converged, combined, and integrated media channels bring to the marketing table.After many tests, I still find social media to be a developing communications medium and one that needs to be viewed as a media tool—a channel rather than a standalone strategy.

In my search to determine if social media is truly social or whether it has become saleable media – or both, I have found many on both sides of the argument. The argument becomes more complex when you attempt to determine whether social media is a channel or a strategy.

My journey has brought me in touch with Yves Salama, consultant and principal at Teem'd, an innovator in the channel offering of social media.

Teem'd: A contraction of team, teeming with ideas and teaming up

Yves, via Teem'd assist companies, is in the process of organising and deploying social media teams in direct collaboration with the marketing teams and is supportive of the channel over strategy argument.

The tactical goal is to develop social media capability and extend it from silo-based marketing groups to include the integration of communications, public relations, customer support (CRM), business units, and regional groups, while staying on message and moving toward goals.

Is social meant to be social media and not saleable media?

My understanding of social is that it should be an interaction between like-minded or like-interested people, groups, and brands—true circle of marketing life.

Social needs to be shared, commented upon, responded to; the basis of social is that it also needs to be democratic, allowing all to participate at a level that is personally defined and shared.

The core mission of Teem'd is to provide this balance. How? By making it easier to communicate with fans, friends, stakeholders, and audience up and down the sales funnel via an integrated (strategic) social media program.

Organisations are already busy communicating with all:

Stakeholders and employees: C-suite, PR, HR, communication

Suppliers and partners: product management, operations

Customers: customer support, service, sales

Prospects: sales, marketing

These organisations use tools that Yves calls "the marketing front line." The problem is a front line is doomed if the background (the back office, the supply line, the process of supporting the front line) is non-existent or weak.

Teem'd, as do some others, offers the chain of command, the supply line to keep the front line feed on target, supported, and, when needed, replaced with a fresh (new message) front line.

The concept of the front line also means that social is the first avenue of "contact" or touching the target feeding the messaging.

Using email, phone, ads, articles, interviews, press releases, websites, social media, and conferences to get the word out—I would include legacy media, new media, and emerging media as part of the highly targeted integrated marketing mix—the front line becomes truly a brand pivot point ready to "attack" the needed targeted market or markets.

In Teem‘d's view each department (brand) has the know-how to address its own audience but does not know the many complex and contrasting issues of related markets.

It's difficult to transfer these skills, data, and knowledge to a social media manager.

Sooner or later, these managers find themselves in a game of broken telephone, and the message eventually published on social media is not the one initially expressed by everybody on the marketing front line. In short, a failed effort occurs, and an attack is not integrated and is nearly always doomed.

Is the front line leading or following?

The challenge: How to make the marketing frontline also the frontline developed for the overall marketing and communications plan on social and related media.

I see the problem as a view of social media regarded as a channel and not a strategy. Yves states, and I agree, "Social media engages—we can like, share, comment and respond."

All social media tools have that in common.  But the audience on Facebook is different from that on LinkedIn. As in nearly all social media, there is overlap, but as they say "not so much."

Soon the brand drowns with too much information. Interpreting outcomes eats up time, justifying new tools and metrics

B2C will do better in the first, B2B in the second; but the need is to present the target and brand better across all media, enabling via targeted integration a successful effort.

Yves continues: "The different channels are only part of the same overall marketing strategy. The challenge is to make sure they are aligned and integrated into a set of clear business objectives."

Is the current use of social much like astrology and magic?

Social media continues to evolve, fast—perhaps too fast—and with little (it seems) supervision.  Just when we get the hang of posting on Facebook or Twitter, they add images and video.

The metrics are becoming more nuanced (magic) and detailed with little definition (astrology).  We started out with a number of fans and followers (our audience or reach), then added impressions, locations, and demographics (their engagement).

And we're getting better with more details -- eight retweets, four favorites, six mentions, 12 clicks, among the 24-34 and 35-44, between men and women, etc. Comparing this week to last becomes difficult.

Today’s post drew 12 clicks compared to 24 last week—but more men than women, etc. but how valuable is this data, this reporting?

The social media landscape is also changing

Audiences continue to grow—creating a more competitive and complex landscape.

New competing channels are emerging: Instagram, instant messaging, Snapchat, - what is next? Brands develop new strategies: User-generated content, including context influencer blogs and personalities.

Soon the brand is drowning with too much information and interpreting outcomes eats up more time, justifying new tools and metrics, which justifies newer tools and metrics.

Overlaying that data on top of the awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, and purchase funnel requires a data analyst (astrologer), then a data scientist (magician).  We keep changing the baseline and methodology.

The danger is that it gets too complicated, and we forget to relate performance to sales, which is the ultimate goal of marketing and the final outcome of the magic of marketing.

No matter how you see social media—as magical, effective, or ineffective, the course that is being steered by the magicians at Facebook and others is defining the metrics to the betterment of social media not to the betterment of the brand. Perhaps a tool such as Teem'd can be the brand’s alchemist that can turn any media into gold.

Summary

All media is saleable in the end game.

The issues involve how to connect the consumer’s interpretation to the original purpose of the media. Has social been sold as a social interactive tool that was never intended to be a selling base or was social designed from the outset to be social and a sales tools at the same time?

Teem'd, in my opinion, allows you to control your use of social media, either as a channel (more positive) or as a strategy (less effective).

Over the next six articles I will be focusing on the glue – companies that offer services, support and products that adhere the various media with each other and also provide the critical need of any adhesive, to keep the connection connected under stress.

Send me your recommendations and I will contact firms that you feel meet the criteria of being called marketing glue.

[teemdsocial]

What makes social media different

The challenge: how to make the marketing frontline also the frontline on social.

The first attribute of social media is that it’s social and democratic.  It’s social because we can like, share, comment and respond.  Democratic, because everybody can participate. Makes it easy to communicate with fans, friends, stakeholders and audience up and down the sales funnel.

Organizations are already busy communicating with all of them:

C-suite, PR and HR communicate with stakeholders and employees

Product Managers and Operations communicate with suppliers and partners

Customer services communicate with customers:

Sales and marketing communicate with prospects:

They form the marketing front line.  And use email, phone, ads, articles, interviews, press releases, websites, social media, and conferences to get the word out.

Each department knows how to address their own audience.  It’s difficult to transfer this know-how to a social media manager.  Sooner or later they find themselves in a game of Broken Telephone, and the message published on social is not the one initially expressed by everybody on the marketing front line.

[teemdsocial]

Is your marketing front line also your front line on social?

Things are quick and simple for our lizard brain, the limbic system. Parents provide safety and comfort. Movies are fun. Companies sell. Customers buy.   The Sales department knows how to sell.  Everybody else, including cousin Vinnie in payables, is peripheral. To a system that can only distinguish between fight or flight, that sounds about right. Brand makes X, and sales sells.

Thanks to our neocortex (language, learning, planning) we know better. Selling goods and services involves a lot more -- marketing, public relations, communications, customer support, training, product management, C-suite (and we’re skipping over admin, purchasing, engineering, warehouse, etc).

Still, we like things quick and simple.  What do they make and who should I talk to.  Later, much later, our frontal lobes take over, we break it down: cost, training, delivery, time frame, value, opportunity, competition, etc.  

So when it comes to social media, we tend to simplify as well. Social media does not help make our goods or service, but can it help sales? We’ve heard the stories. One tweet generates a hundred thousand clicks, a thousand likes, hundreds of clicks / sales. Easy peasy. Before we know it, we are drowning in a new alphabet soup: BVI, SEO, SMROI, SEM, SMO, UGC, WOM,... It loses its promise: but it’s almost free! Then we get trapped in trying to justify that while it may not be free, the return is huge! That's a misdirection.

The first attribute of social media is that it’s social.  Makes it easy to communicate with everybody -- fans, friends, stakeholders and audience up and down the sales funnel. And your organization, it turns out, is already busy communicating with all of them:

Stakeholders and employees: C-suite, PR, HR, communication

Suppliers and partners: product management, operations

Customers: customer support, service, sales

Prospects: sales, marketing

That’s your marketing front line.  They use email, phone, ads, articles, interviews, releases, websites, social media, and conferences to get the word out.

Can the social media group communicate with all these different audiences? No. Each department knows how to address their own audience.  It’s difficult to transfer these skills to a social media manager.  Sooner or later they find themselves in a game of Broken Telephone, and the message published on social is not the one initially expressed by the everybody on the marketing front line.

Should social media replace these different forms of communication? No. Each audience should be addressed differently.  Not a good idea to mix new product announcements with news of layoffs. If we’re to trust the experts on “how to engage on social,” we should be honest, sincere, true, human and trustworthy. Anybody not attuned to each audience can not sound authentic.

So, how can an organization bring the marketing front line to social media? The lizard in all of us will quickly suggest a program to train, review, approve, supervise, coordinate and manage. A big job. Easier to look at social as a complement to what is done now. To redeploy on a new platform. No need to re-invent a new profession.

We previously described how a Community of Practice model can help contributors. Over time, even boomers can use social to engage their audience.

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The soft border between Social Media and Community

If the social media manager is the barker who attracts patrons to a circus by dramatizing the variety and novelty of the acts, then the community manager is the ringmaster who introduces the acts during a performance.  One draws crowds into the tent, while the other keeps them entertained.  

The barker knows what’s generally going on inside the tent, but not well. It’s hard for a social media manager to capture the personality and temperament of the community when he’s outside the tent.  

Companies with separate communities on online platforms can generate real value to members, and brand.  But often segregating communities reduces the word of mouth to the broader audience. I want to peek at the community in to see if it suits me. I like to lurk before I join. The barker and ringmaster can’t be both outside and inside the tent.

That’s the beauty and power of social media.  People manage their own interest.  They’ll watch these groups, but engage with those.  After I purchase a product, my interest shifts to learning more about the product and less about the competition. When I move, I am interested in the new neighborhood and less about the old. After my vacation, I don’t need to learn about what’s going on in Venice. Things change, interests change, needs change.  

So we need to redefine roles. The social media manager should reflect the different conversational themes in each community with the broader audience.  Similarly, community manager(s) should share broader themes going on outside the community.

Community participation is sometimes broken down into 90-9-1, where 90 percent lurk, 9 percent occasionally contribute and 1 percent manage.  We sometimes forget that the 1 percent emerged from the 90 -- we were all lurkers once.

Last century, there was a similar debate in sociology between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft -- community vs society, personal vs impersonal, traditional vs informal, and sentimental vs rational. They already recognized that community and society were not exclusive one from the other, but integrating and ever changing.  

Social media is still young. We should be mindful of building bridges along with community silos.

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Creation, evolution, and all that jazz

Being present at the creation has advantages.  Knowing how it all began provides second and third order understanding of how it comes together: how selecting the rug affected the choice of furniture and shades, how the first sale for a startup shapes the sales and marketing departments, and how a company got started can sometimes determine its success (theFacebook vs. Friendster).

Adding a new functionality or new service, like social media, is often influenced by the organization -- who is promoting the effort, how much funding, who’s responsible, how does it fit within the organization, how do they engage with customers, etc. Each company will create a unique and distinct effort. How the new functionality got started -- present at the creation -- helps explain it’s original objective.  

But things evolve and adapt along with the business landscape. Once hired, social media managers come under scrutiny: what’s the ROI, how often do you post new content, how many friends, fans, followers do we have, how does that compare to the competition, what is the total cost, how do we evaluate the effort, etc.  How they address these questions, will define their standards. The fit survive.  

Nothing new here.  

But social media is changing, and changing fast. We now tend to summarize content, adapt content for broader audiences, use catchier titles, breakdown content into different segments, use images and videos, recognize influencers, look for hooks, use paid, etc. Also platforms have changed: we moved from desktop to mobile, from Wordpress to Facebook, from Twitter to Snapchat, from Pinterest to Instagram, etc.

We are running faster but losing ground. It takes twice the effort with half the return. ROI for direct mail was down to 2%, email is a fraction of a percent, but at least those numbers held. With social media, the ROI was a fraction of a fraction and decreasing.

Social media as a billboard or direct mail will die off. My bet is that it will evolve to emphasize the social part of the channel.  Instead of selling, social media will develop conversations between marketing and the target audience. And the audience includes everybody along the awareness, interest, consideration, evaluation, intent and purchase funnel. There’s a lot going on -- almost all of marketing will get involved: sales, marketing, PR, communication, customer service, etc. They will all find better ways to engage.

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Wempe is expanding!

Walking on 5th Avenue in New York, I came across the notice that Wempe was expanding. Wempe, is a retailer of “exquisite timepieces and jewelry.” The watches are expensive.  The brands are well known: Rolex, Jaeger-LeCoutre, Breguet, Patek Philippe, and Vacheron Constantin. Some of the timepieces offer complications such as chronograph, moon phases, annual calendar, repeater, alarm, etc. Depending on the brand and uniqueness, they denote status and power.  An $80K Vacheron Constantin commands an authority and stature a $25 Timex Easy Reader Silver watch can not -- unless, of course, he/she has sufficient assets to convey a Walton-like frugality.

The question, is why does Wempe continue to expand when so much has changed:

Nobody cares about complications.  My iPhone does more, better

In China, Apple Watch has greater brand recognition than Breguet and Patek Philippe

Maintenance, insurance, and upkeep are expensive

But most of all, gone are the days when wealth reflected a static, known entity.  There are so many new and better ways to convey success and authority that exquisite timepieces may seem like an extravagant gauge best tucked in a safe. Could it be that the explosive growth of global GDP is spurring the growth of Wempe? That the 1% can afford $180K trifles to track leap years, without impairing their disposable income?  

I wager yes.  Cheaper to own an expensive timepiece than a $900K 1956 Buick Special. Makes me wonder when Apple will create a new tier of luxury products that can command authority and stature along with the democratic utility we expect?

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Optimism from Omaha

In his 2015 Letter to Shareholders, Warren Buffet reminds us that productivity improves lives:

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Infographic: Social Media Active Users

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These tools are indispensable for the global actor

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Social Media Manager: does the description fit the role

Job descriptions detail the role and goal of the position, the experience and training they expect from candidates, and an understanding of how candidates should fulfill their role.  But, they can also signal how the organization perceives that position. They can signal doubts on accountability/duties (what to do) or performance standards (how to do it).  

We’ll go over how one job description muddied the water.

According to Wikipedia, a “job description is a list that a person might use for general tasks, or functions, and responsibilities of a position ... some may instead comprise a simple list of competencies … “ But a listing of overlapping responsibilities reflects a lack of clarity

Develop digital marketing strategy ...

Define and execute social media strategy ...

Develop and lead execution of special digital marketing ...

Develop and execute digital strategies …

Also, defining the ‘who’ but not the ‘why’ can confuse the mission

Partner … to achieve goals

Consult … on ways … to achieve their goals

Continued from Wikipedia: “It may often include … specifications such as the qualifications or skills needed by the person in the job… “ Piling up requirements reveals a lack of understanding of how they fit together:

experience with … social media marketing ...

… influencer marketing ...

… paid digital media ...

… paid and organic search ...

Having read and reread the job description, I discern 3 key requirements and functions:

Proven experience in social media ( __ years), marketing ( __ years)  and analytics ( __ years). Years should line up with salary.

Develop a social media strategy to effectively engage different audiences with relevant content. Manage content and editorial calendar. Establish analytics to monitor performance.

Collaborate with relevant departments (PR, advertising, customer relations, sales etc) on how to use social media to complement traditional marketing. Develop and train key players to coordinate and manage content.

I welcome your thoughts and suggestions.

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Greetings