Fast and slow fires

In a traditional marketing campaign like advertising, email campaign or direct mailing you measure the ROI (Return On Investment) from the beginning to the end of the campaign. As soon as the campaign is over the effect is gone or almost gone as there is little or no influence afterwards.

A social media marketing campaign however is long lasting: you know when you start it, but you never know how long it will last. For example we still have a few blog posts driving high traffic from 3 years ago. So measuring the ROI becomes more complicated as the result and return can build up slowly over a long time span. Some social media efforts didn’t have much effect in the beginning but were long lasting. Others were an instant hit but their influence evaporated rather soon.
So having fast and slow fires in social media marketing.

So in order to measure the ROI of a social media marketing campaign or effort you need time and patience.

Initial investment

Measuring a traditional marketing campaign has the advantage that the initial investment can be measured easily – for example:
- The press release writing and distribution
- The creation of the ad and the ad space bought

In social media however the social is a part of the investment that has likely has happened before the start of the new campaign. The company or product has already:
- Followers
- Links into other social media
- Subscribers to the blog
- Generic Internet presence
Hence calculating the initial investment already becomes difficult as you build upon an existing network or support structure, which is hard to calculate in.
The actual effort of the campaigning can be rather small: just a blog post or even a few Tweets that get the necessary attention can be enough.
The part of the initial investment that is easy to measure can be much smaller than the total investment made previously which needs to be spread over all other social marketing campaigns.

Impossible Social Media Marketing ROI

As defining the initial investment is hard to figure out exactly and the return of your campaign can bring in results during many years, how can you ever define the exact ROI ?

Still even if you can’t measure your Social Media Marketing you should listen, monitor and analyze each of your Social Media Marketing campaigns in order to score and classify each of them. You will make distinctions between successful, not so successful and failures.

The social media dream

We have been sold the dream that social media is:
- Free
- Available for all
- The users are the contributors adding the content (user generated content)
- The users promote the content – may the best win
A real democratic environment!

The social media business

However the social media sites own the content you create it after you hit share. They will control it and manipulate it for their own benefit.

This is due to the business for social media websites they need:
- Ever more page views
- Getting more users
- Getting more visitors
- Matching content with the adverting proposed to them
- More advertising
- Happy advertisers
They will use your content in order to reach their goals – not yours.

At the beginning of a social media website their goal is to attire crowds massively. Thus they will make sure the popular or eyeballs grabbing content is promoted. Them ore visitors and page views the better.
In a later stage once they have achieved a certain level of audience, they will aim for more advertising revenue.

If the content you are providing by posts, comments is not supporting their crowd attracting or advertising goals, then it will be manipulated in order to be less findable or just omitted. You are not in control.

Hence think twice if you are going to use your social media for your marketing as much of your efforts could be wasted.

Social media marketing in a censored world seems a gamble

Portals, Google, Napster, MySpace, Bookmarking, Youtube

In the early days of the Internet, portals promised to deliver all possible links to information and entertainment you needed.
Soon Google Search took over which brought the decline of the portals. However the clean interface of Google was not entertaining at all.

In order to fill the missing entertainment gap Napster, MySpace and Bittorrent were all the hype.
MySpace was quickly conquered by music groups bringing entertainment to the Internet.

Shortly during the iPod era, Podcasting came and went away again.

As search on Google is cumbersome for most people (what should you look for in order to get entertained ?) bookmarking (Reddit, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, …) became popular as people got direct links to infotainment and the bookmarkers got their ego boosted when scoring high.
The big disruption came from YouTube which brought short entertaining video on demand.
Abruptly MySpace died thanks to Facebook and Youtube.

When Twitter emerged as the massive platform for promoting links in real-time (and without constraints or cheating) the bookmarking era came to an end. However Twitter is not entertainment.

Google+ should aim for entertainment

Now we have Google+ which should challenge Twitter and Facebook – but still it won’t bring entertainment as User Generated Content as well as bookmarking links are not entertainment.
The Hangouts on Google+ could become entertainment places but that can only happen if professional entertainers see their benefit and can make money by creating these Hangouts. making money can only when they get a piece of the (soon expected) advertising revenue on Google+.

The quest for entertainment

Still the real quest is that people need entertainment on the Internet as they want to be entertained.
Currently Facebook, Twitter or Google+ doesn’t solve the quest for entertainment on the Internet.

- YouTube (and Vimeo, Dailymotion)
- Adult websites
- Gossip and Celeb magazines
are still the most entertaining places on the Internet but they bring not the entertainment of a TV show (Oprah, Soap operas).

What shall arise as the first real entertainment platform on the Internet ?
As the Internet is a big place a start-up with a proposition might already be lurking around.
As all marketers will have to become entertainers (even in B2B) the quest for entertainment on the Internet also concerns them.

Social media is no longer social

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and many others all started out as communications and online relationship building platforms without ads.
Now all social media have become advertising channels for highly targeted ads based on the user intelligence as they need to make money for their investors.
Just like soap opera’s they have become carriers of advertising under pressure of the investors.
In both cases the content draws in the crowd and the ads are carefully targeted.

However the more focus on advertising the less evident it becomes for users to communicate and build relationships as the platforms have become:
- Increasingly more complex in functions and features.
- Cluttered by ads
- Slower in loading the pages due to all of the above
The advertisements are becoming distractions from the real purpose of the people using it and the simple and clean layout is gone.

Social media is no longer social as it is just has become another advertising channel like soap operas.

Google Plus has started out without advertising while still under invitation only but it won’t take long before ads will appear once the gates are open for everybody.

Social media will go like portals

The question now becomes if it is still interesting for a company to:
- Advertise on social media
- Invest time and effort in social media

At the end of the nineties portals were all the hype. They were competing with each other by adding more and more functions and features in order to capture more market share. Their user interface became cluttered and load times increased.

At the same time the Google search engine became popular as it presented a clean user interface without any clutter. Then the decay of portals was evident.

Now the decay of social media is near as they:
- Are competing heavily on functions and features: Facebook vs Google plus / Twitter vs Tumblr
- Are more and more populated by bots
- Have become advertising channels just like soap operas

Moreover the content in social media is not getting any better as more and more companies post their editorials on social media and try to promote their products and services: companies take over from people on platforms intended for people.

Next after social media

If a new communications easy and convenient channel for the public emerges then social media will decrease in importance just like it happened portals.
The new communications or relationship building platform needs to be:
- Accessible easily and convenient in use for all without complex user interface like Facebook
- Bot free – unlike Twitter that has more bots than humans tweeting and re-tweeting
- Capturing the attention and be interest generating

Maybe the new communications channel it is already available – like ChatRoulette ?

Do you still use social media for business or product promotion?

Business goals

The business of Google is selling advertising on their search engine (Adwords) and aside content which they analyze (Adsense).
In most cases your business is related to getting found on Google. The more people find your website, the more likely to get leads.

These two goals don’t exactly match up.

Online marketing techniques

In order to get found and appear high in the SERP (Search Engine Result Pages) you will use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques, Content marketing, Link building and Social Media Marketing. The better you score:
- The more your business will get found on the Internet
- The lesser you will buy advertising from Google

The power of Google

In order to counter all possible marketing techniques, Google can and will change the parameters of their search engine with the aim of selling more advertising.
Apparently they change it all too frequently in order to change the rules of the game.

Of course Google can change all possible parameters but still the search results need to propose valid and valuable content on websites which limits somewhat their possibilities.

Staying on top of Google

The best online marketing for your business is to excel in all possible aspects of online marketing, which requires;
- Abundant of content in relation to your products, solutions, market, industry segments or verticals
- SEO for each page of content
- Link building for as many pages possible
- Distributing your content beyond your website
- Engaging customers on Social Media in order to get even more content and links

The online marketing battle is not so much against your competitors but obtaining more presence on the Internet than any of your competitors in order to oblige Google to show your content high is as many search engine results.

How well does your company score on Google ?

During the DotCom era most companies got a website and believed they would be cool, become credible and successful instantly. Of course having a website wasn’t enough to be successful on the Internet.

The same is happening over again as companies have been going into Social Media by starting a blog, getting a page on Facebook and tweeting Tweets on Twitter. Social Media marketing has been portrayed as being cool for companies.
However Social media Marketing is more complex and requires more effort than just having some corporate or new product content on a blog, a Facebook page about the company and Tweets about the company, the CxO’s or the products.
Hence most companies made the same error again: they went with the flow (or trend) to be cool but didn’t questioned what was required to be successful in Social Media, just like they forgot to investigate how to be successful on the WorldWideWeb as it was call before the turn of the century.

1. Target customer audience
For a start you need to know your target customer audience. Who are your customers and your potential customers. Moreover you should know who amongst them would ever read or see any content on Social Media.
If you mainly sell to CxO’s of large traditional corporations, it is unlikely your Social media Marketing will ever have any effect or success.

2. Content
You need to have interesting content that will be interesting for your target audience. Not content that gets interest from people that are not from your potential customers group.
make sure your Content Marketing addresses your customers or potential customers.

3. Realism
Getting a lot of interest or comments from people who will never buy from you is only blurring the reality as you think you a scoring with your Social Media marketing, but in reality you are just wasting your time and effort.

4. Editing
Your content has to be written or presented in an appealing or pleasant way. Even the best and interesting content badly written or presented without imagination will score much lesser or even get hardly any interest.

5. Entertaining
People on Social Media will find information and select what they want to read or see and will decide nearly every second if they will continue to consume the information or not.
if your information is not utterly important or life threatening – which is in most cases – your content needs to be entertaining in order to keep the attention of your audience.

6. Measure
Whenever a company invests, thus also in marketing, it needs to calculate the Return On Investment.
Probably this is hard to achieve with precise numbers and amounts of sale, but at least you should try to measure if you reach your target audience or not.

Once having a website was cool, now posting content through Social media is cool, but in the end only lead generation, sales, generating revenue and making a profit are the real cool things in business.

How cool is your company in Social Media ?

Convincing the CxO for social media marketing

Marketing analysts, marketing guru’s and marketing bloggers have all long praised the use of social media for company marketing. This will have convinced most of the Marketing managers but what about the ever hesitant CxO level business executives?
How can you as Marketing manager convince your CxO?
Well NOT!

Awareness social media

If you have to convince the CxO level, you will never get real support.
All the CxO’s in the world have heard about Social media: at least they are aware of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn thanks to TV news and the press. They probably even have experienced it themselves or their relatives.
Awareness doesn’t mean they are interested or see the benefit.

Social Media Battle Field

Hence even if you manage to convince them to approve to use social media for company marketing, then they will be ready to shoot you on the Social Media Battle Field at the first glitch of problems or issues. They will never ever be on board with you for social media marketing. Forget it. Else the Social Media Battle Field becomes your war.

It is better not to try to change the mind of your CxO about social media marketing.

Be prepared for social media marketing

However be prepared for the case your CxO asks why you aren’t using social media marketing as then someone else has influenced and convinced them of the use of social media.
In that case it is not you. It is not your war.

Is your CxO in favor of social media marketing ?

Friends on Facebook

It is easy to find people you know as prospects or customers on Facebook through the search function. Then you could add them as friend which will send a request to them. Will they accept your request to become “friends” on Facebook? That’s a challenge.
What is the benefit for them to become your friend ?

The social media gamble

What is your benefit to become friends with people working at companies that are prospects and customers?
Why would you want to become friends with your prospects or customers?
You will enter into their personal life and start knowing better their interests, habits and doings. This could give you an advantage over your competitors or additional opportunities with your customers as you know them better.
If you have common interests then becoming friends could be beneficial. If not then it starts to look as a disguised sales effort where you are intruding into their private lives.

If they accept to become your friend, then at the same time they will start finding out things about you, which in the end might not stimulate your sales at all as you could have quite different opinions, views or interests than they do. Thus every statement you enter into Facebook needs to be carefully checked.

Also if you “like”, “comment” or “share” statements or interests of your friends, your prospect-friends and customer-friends can become aware of certain things they don’t agree upon or have a different view upon which would not help your sales.

Becoming friends on Facebook seems turning out to be a gamble: you could benefit from it by knowing better the people at your prospect and customer companies to be used at your advantage, but it might also turn out negatively as business and pleasure don’t match.

Connections instead of friends

Will being friends on Facebook:
- Increase the chance of closing a deal? Possible and not possible
- Increase sales to existing customers? As they will be remembered frequently of your existence it could be
- Generate more leads for you? Probably not: as chances are minimal that the friends of your business friends are in the same business or have a need for your business.

Maybe it is better just to stick with LinkedIn by building an keeping your connections of business relations on this less personal social media as is less outspoken as Facebook.
Connections on LinkedIn can be useful but will not bring more insight into prospects and customers.
Being friends on Facebook could bring insight from both parties which might be less beneficial in the end.

You can find our company on Facebook and on LinkedIn.

Professional social media websites

When people search online for information, products and vendors they not only inquiry on your website, blogs, social media but also on LinkedIn (and similar professional social media websites like: Ecademy, Xing, Viadeo, …)

Not only your company page on LinkedIn is important but also each of your employees present on LinkedIn. People will browse your employees and even investigate on them by looking at their curriculum and pictures for evaluating your company. This means that even your employees on LinkedIn are a part of your marketing.

Employee profile

Your company page on LinkedIn is fully under control of marketing.

However the profiles created by each of your employees are personal which makes them difficult, if not impossible, to manage.

There are so many aspects that can influence people in their buying decision or not buying decision:
- The headline of each employee: besides the job title more information can be placed
- The higher education of your employees
- The good and accurate career steps mentioned for each employee
- The picture (good looking people do sell better)
- The recommendations about their work

Groups and discussions

Your employees can become member of groups on LinkedIn and actively take part in discussions in these groups or even pose questions in order to start discussions.
These answers and contributions to discussions and the starting of new discussions will portray an image of your employees and your company which might have more influence than all of your marketing as the content and the discussions give a deeper insight into the thinking or perception of your employees and thus of your company.
All your ads, trade shows, white paper syndication,… and editorials are superficial compared to active participation in discussions on LinkedIn.

The discussions on LinkedIn are becoming an important part of your marketing beyond the control of marketing.

Managing LinkedIn

It is a challenge for marketing and even company management to manage and control the presence and content on these professional social media sites. Especially as the content and information is personal and not under control of the company.

How to mange this is up to each company. This is not something that can be decided without top management involvement. Setting restrictions or strict guidelines is probably the wrong action as the profiles and the participation in discussions is private.
Giving a helping hand and advice is probably the best solution for managing LinkedIn as a company.

How does your profile look on LinkedIn ?
Do you have recommendations on LinkedIn ?
Do you participate in discussions on LinkedIn ?

The marketers of Social Media Marketing have created many new words as it was a new media and environment and probably in order to stimulate the hype.

The Social Marketing Media Crapola Vocabulary explained:

- Social graph:
  Drawing virtual relationships just like a rainbow virtually

- Social media optimization:
  Make organized noise in Social Media

- User generated content:
  Hoping your users generate content as you aren’t able to create content

- Followers:
  Probably your competitors wanting to know what you are up to

- Mash-up:
  Mix some content of others for content marketing when not being capable to create content

- Blogosphere:
  The heaven universe strictly for bloggers where you cannot enter

- Micro-blogging:
  When writing more than 140 characters is a challenge to you

- Meme:
  Only your negative or bad news will spread through the Internet

- Vanity monitoring:
  Problematic Internet message monitoring when social media marketing goes wrong

- Enterprise 2.0:
  In the sixties we had Star Ship Enterprise now we have a virtual enterprise to boldly go …

- CRM 2.0:
  The electronic Rolodexes trying to re-invent themselves

- Social CRM:
  Monitoring and repairing dumb and wrong things about your company on the Internet

- Wiki:
  As long Wikis don’t leak it’s OK for you but if a Wiki leaks then problems

- Crowdsourcing:
  Hoping the crowd will do the job you don’t want to do

- Social search:
  Searching on all of the crapola web services

You have probably learned nothing but maybe you had a laugh