I am fascinated with consumer conversations about brands. Most of the times they do not really care about what brands say, they have their own chats around why and how they use their products and services. And brand key message is most of the times lost on them. Because they do not CARE about your message. They do not CARE about your brand.
Can you fulfill their need asap? Can you provide great product and service? Then they will talk about you, recommend you.
Otherwise your entire advertising plan for the upcoming quarter, year, is bound to fail. Key messages born in the creative laboratory of an agency that does not necesarily use your product will maybe (if you are lucky) get their attention and maybe (if you are even more lucky) get them to try your product. But they will forget your shiny messages and start their own conversation threads. And then your key messages blows up in pieces and research done on carefully selected audience samples loses relevance. They will post hundreds of messages on how to fix your product, they will seek help from other users and complain about customer service, they will mock your beloved ads that cannot answer their questions on product functionality and your lack of social care.
Brand managers have to stop focusing on reaching as many people as possible and start thinking about what customer experience they offer across touchpoints.
Maybe a shift from potential reach to customer personas, from counting down impressions to counting down potential leads, from just prompted research done in a small room on the outskirts of the city to listening to people’s organic conversation threads.
As a social media analyst I am a big believer in getting insight from those social media conversations. And I have a couple of reasons:
it’s organic – you know for a fact that users reactions are not prompted by any incentive or marred by intermediaries:
you can test it out on different digital touch-points and validate your hypothesis:
it can tell you a story you were not looking for, a story about your customers and their needs and message for the brand; 4) yes, you can also assess key message and USP.
Should Social Listening And Social Media Analysis Replace Traditional Research?
No, not always – this guy points out a couple of the shortcomings in this article (to mention a few – lack of scalability, organic – you cannot ask your own questions, sentiment analysis has higher costs).
Should you test it out? Yes! Do test, see what works for you and with what ROI and then decide. But please, oh please, do stop and LISTEN for other conversations around your industry. Maybe you will find insight that goes a step further than assessing campaign reach. Maybe you will find out what matters for your customers enough for them to take the time and write down what they think. Maybe you will find out what type of experience they would be willing to pay (more) for.
I am a young professional in advertising and I spent the first 2 years and a half of my career at a desk, trying to find communication solutions for business needs someone else pinpointed in a brief or in a list of delivreables. Most of our clients were big top 500 companies, more precisely their brand managers, who sometimes have vanity KPIs I found difficult to correlate with the business needs per say. This weekend I left my desk and met some business owners whose sole KPI seems to be the survival and growth of their business.
I went to a local event here in Bucharest held by Inside Coach Academy, an organization trying to connect small business owners or creative professionals with coaches who can help them gain the skills needed to make their business thrive. The event was practically a sales pitch created to promote the courses these coaches deliver. In theory, I had no business being there.
However, it proved insightful, not necessarily because of the presentations, but because of the dynamic between the coaches and the audience. The presentation I was most keen on listening to was scheduled last and it was dedicated to digital marketing and social media, with ad men from iLeo (Publicis local digital agency) as coaches. The most vocal among the audience were the small business owners, they raised questions and demanded no bullshit answers.
I recognized the ad men pitch, the structure and step by step approach: ok, we need the overall strategy for our digital brand, then the distribution channels of our message and then we evaluate the performance of all our efforts. Of course, with some variation and intermediary steps. All common sense in the ad world, nice and clearly structured. And then the questions poured in: what about site design? and digital analytics? tracking conversion rate, improving site UX and UI? what is the ROI of social media? Would the course also focus on local case studies or just big brands with big bucks to invest in digital marketing? Who should take this course — the business owner or the marketing and communication specialists?
It was amazing, I am telling you. I was smiling all through the Q&A session — all these questions were so down to earth, specific and well informed on how digital marketing can help support a business, not just a brand manager’s status quo. These people are focused on how to make things work and bring in more business. Of course, they do need structure and guidance to understand the bigger picture of how digital marketing can help support their business (proper research and strategy are, I think, a big pain points for beginner entrepreneurs), but their drive for relevant results and thirst for understanding how they can use digital marketing to help their business grow are important.
Should entrepreneurs take responsibility for digital marketing? It depends on the industry profile and size. If you own an online bookstore, you’d better understand online publishing, for example. My honest advice for all of them is to make sure they have an overall understanding of how digital marketing can or cannot help their business before turning in all the effort to a dedicated specialist. They will, first of all, know who to recruit and how to evaluate their work. Just to make sure they do not end up working with brand managers who thrive on vanity KPIs, not business results.
I finished reading Jay Oatway’s signature book: “Mastering Story, community and influence: how to use social media to become a socialeader” this week. It focuses on three topics: story, community and influence and is addressed to business leaders trying to connect in order to exploit the power of social media. The message that welcomes them is most appropiate: We want to do business with those who make social media feel less like mass marketing and more like customer service. We seek out those whose influence has grown through caring for their community. CARING FOR THEIR COMMUNITY. The idea is that, as social media spread, the broadcasting era heroes drifted away, DIED. Why? They simply lost the power awareness gave them. Now wannabe leaders need to give back to his/her followers and build relationships on a win-win basis.
One of my favorite examples from the book supports this argument: Oatway talks of a campaign devised by big names in Hollywood entertainment. These VIPs, deemed influencers in traditional media, wanted to raise money for a charity. Their message was: we will stop any social media activity until our followers donate x amount of money. The result: the campaign was stopped as not enough people donated and the Hollywood stars were somehow embarrassed that their popularity only took them so far. People could just as well live without their tweets as those provided no real value. I love this example as it talks volumes of topics I am really interested in: building influence and credibility by providing value for members of a community, the failure of turning popularity into influence (I do believe celebrity endorsements will only get a person to listen to someone else, the workload of getting that person to TRUST you is the real challenge). Socialeaders in the Romanian market? I highly doubt it.
Unfortunately, I think Romanian business leaders are not yet ready to become what Oatway calls socialeaders.
Right now, they still have issues trying to figure out the ROI of social media in business terms — for example, still trying to calculate the monetary value of a follower, they are miles away from even considering entering the social media arena using their own name. They need time to first interact with this kind of medium, then stumble upon consultants who can advocate the value of sending out tweets to industry peers or putting their name on a white paper to be distributed to his followers. Honestly, I wouldn’t even lend them this book before getting them on Linkedin or Facebook.
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