Social Media Spin

A recently spon­sored nation­wide online dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and inter­ac­tive adver­tis­ing sur­vey by Sapi­ent revealed some insight­ful results from its respon­dents. This was no mere web poll, the par­tic­i­pants were “more than 200 chief mar­ket­ing offi­cers (CMOs) and senior mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als, all of whom are either directly or indi­rectly respon­si­ble for man­ag­ing dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing bud­get allo­ca­tion across mul­ti­ple channels”.

Here’s the top 3 results I think are espe­cially sapi­ent (Ha!) for those of us in social media:

• More than ¹⁄₃ of mar­keters sur­veyed revealed that they are not con­fi­dent that their cur­rent agency is well-​​positioned to take their brand through the unchar­tered waters of online dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and inter­ac­tive advertising.

• When try­ing to engage con­sumers with their brand, 90 per­cent of respon­dents agree that it is becom­ing increas­ingly impor­tant that their agency uses ‘pull inter­ac­tions’ such as social media and online com­mu­ni­ties rather than tra­di­tional ‘push’ campaigns.

• It’s no sur­prise that mar­keters want an agency that can report on where cam­paigns suc­ceeded, fell short and where they should be fine-​​tuned. Sixty-​​five per­cent ranked ana­lyt­ics at the top of their agency wish list.

These results are a real kick in the pants for inter­ac­tive agen­cies. I recently met with some execs from a local inter­ac­tive shop rep­re­sent­ing the 2^nd largest adver­tis­ing agency in the world. They were scared stiff to even con­sider talk­ing about social media to their largely tech clien­tele. This agency excels on the cre­ative side, and recently won awards for a great “viral video” they designed for one of their For­tune 1000 clients. But a search for this viral video doesn’t imme­di­ately con­nect it with the client it was rep­re­sent­ing! The only search results for the client pro­moted in this “viral video” are well below the fold. No viral video results at all show when I search for the com­pany name. It takes some real search­ing to even fig­ure out who the viral video was cre­ated for. There’s a HUGE dis­con­nect there. That client paid 6 fig­ures for this ‘viral video’ cam­paign, and yet find­ing out who the video is sup­pos­edly pro­mot­ing is a real chal­lenge. What’s the ROI in that for their client? It seems to have paid off more for the inter­ac­tive agency, what with the design awards and all.

This is the kind of thing mar­keters can no longer tol­er­ate. In the past, when adver­tis­ing suc­cesss was mea­sured only by reach, this may have been con­sid­ered a suc­cess­ful cam­paign. Now with the spe­cific ana­lyt­ics tools which make agen­cies much more account­able for the results of their cam­paigns, results like the ones above are sim­ply unacceptable.

Smart inter­ac­tive agen­cies will con­tinue seek­ing out social media pro­fes­sion­als and re-​​evaluating how to best serve their clients. Social media mar­ket­ing is cer­tainly not about cre­ative adver­tis­ing that still “pushes” a mes­sage on cus­tomers. That old stan­dard is crum­bling fast, and many agen­cies are hurt­ing as they scram­ble to under­stand the new medium that is totally “pull” based and customer-​​centric.

Some social media mar­ket­ing detrac­tors speak against the need for a pro­fes­sional stan­dard to this medium since its ruled by cus­tomers. But as a con­sul­tant, I look at things from both the busi­ness’ and the customer’s view­point. Busi­nesses are com­pletely like a fish out of water and frus­trated when they see cus­tomers lam­blast­ing their brand all over social net­works. So they gen­er­ally either bury their heads in the sand and throw money at their inter­ac­tive agency to cre­ate more dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing, or bravely cre­ate social net­work accounts and some­times anonomously get involved in a neg­a­tive dis­cus­sion about their brand and try to change opin­ions – unknown and with no author­ity, so often to be found out – heap­ing even more dirt on a strug­gling brand. Don’t think this won’t hap­pen with you or your clients – some of the biggest brands in the US fell into this trap.

A Social Media Professional’s job, espe­cially in con­sult­ing inter­ac­tive agen­cies and/​or their clients, elim­i­nates this kind of self-​​inflicted brand wound and can very often stop the hemor­rag­ing from pre­vi­ous deci­sions based on the tra­di­tional “push” men­tal­ity. In busi­ness, its the cus­tomers that mat­ter any­way – not the cre­ativ­ity of an ad. The real focus should be on build­ing rela­tion­ships with the cus­tomers, not so much on the Cre­ative Direc­tor of an agency. Social Media Mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als are needed as the solid bridge from tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing to greater lev­els of busi­ness trans­parency and cus­tomer interaction.

Check out the full text of the CMO answers here: Sur­vey Reveals Brand Mar­keters’ Top 10 Wish List for Agen­cies of the Future