We've been at this social media stuff for a little while now and we've seen some changes over the past couple of years. Companies have moved from a curiosity of the attention is has gathered, to a genuine wanting to learn, to now a tepid "dip the toe in" approach to trying it out. And this is definitely a normal cycle to getting into something that is new and unfamiliar.
However, it still surprises me to see the marketing person in the room systematically dismiss the power of authenticity as a marketing tactic. That is not to say that they are against social media, or utilizing any of the tools that are available to us in this space. It's just that they are more comfortable to move the discussion around these programs as a "customer care" issue or a corporate communications issue. As a legitimate marketing tool, the discussion begins to take an odd turn.
Our question is... why?
There is no doubt that these tools help with reputation and customer good will. The difference is that those are marketing tools as well. Marketing is a communication of value to the audience. And in that vein, marketing can move beyond a communication of value to actually bringing value to that same audience. In an article in Entrepreneur, they talk about something we have been educating in social media for a long time now: "People love being heard and feeling that someone cares." Though their article is advocating for customer service as a marketing tactic, the lessons still apply to social media. Engaging people in the brand and letting them know they are valuable brings a loyalty that other marketing messages can't match.
So back to the question of why...
Though there are a myriad of reasons (we're sure), one theory is the question of the return on investment (ROI). Marketing has definitely worked out a great model for known tools such as direct mail, print advertising and the like. However, social media doesn't present as simple of a model. It reminds us of the question of ROI with regards to PR. A lot of PR practitioners would avoid the ROI conversation at all costs stating why it goes beyond impressions, and why impressions don't have an intrinsic value. Yet when P&G came out with their study that showed PR had a higher return than advertising, it suddenly was en vogue to discuss (even without the real details or statistical modeling behind it).
We believe that PR was more complicated because of brand PR, reputation management, grassroots, analyst relations, etc. But there is a model--ask P&G. And there is a model for social media as well.
Right now you can read/see/hear any number of reasons why you can't (and shouldn't) look to prove a return on investment. Harvard Business School associate professor Andy McAfee says: "There is not enough ROI for figuring out ROI. it is an intellectually bankrupt exercise." Essentially saying that marketing is tough to measure in a vacuum. It's financial outcomes come through a chain of cause and effect relationships. Jason Falls says that "The problem with trying to determine ROI for social media is you are trying to put numeric quantities around human interactions and conversations, which are not quantifiable."
But we definitely have been working on a model that can help. As discussed in a previous post here we thought that validating social media measurement was important to getting the attention of the hard-core marketing research folks. Perhaps this model can do just that. And perhaps, that will get more marketers to engage in the authenticity conversation as a marketing tool and not a customer relations tactic. Perhaps you can put a numeric quantity on human interaction. The sales profession has had statistics that show the increase in likelihood of a sale based on how many times they "touch" a customer, the wine industry says a customer is 80% more likely to buy a bottle of wine once they've pulled it from the shelf. Companies have monetized lead loss generation when negative postings hit the first page of Google, and so on.
So social media needs a model. We can't continue to blog our way out of coming up with this model, and we have to respectfully disagree with Andy McAfee. We think that the person that comes up with a way to show real impact to the financial bottom line using social media (in this economy) is going to find that their time was well spent. They just might have to look at all the points along the cause-effect relationships.
Now, does anyone have the formula for authenticity and trust?
(Photo Credit: Felix Heinen)
