That day, many brand custodians went to bed excited about the possibilities of becoming part of the Facebook universe. A new social contract would exist between brands and consumers, which was principally based on reciprocal and one-to-one communication.
Needless to add, Zuckerberg’s
all-important speech ushered in a new era of social media. Agencies
promising clients a more interactive approach to marketing
communications sprang up. The words ‘engage’ and ‘converse’ became buzz
words that meant everything and nothing at the same time. But while you
could not accuse Zukerberg of modesty, there were two problems with his
vision.
The first was that it strangely assumed
that brands were as interesting or unlimited as people. In practice,
most people use social media simply as social media. The people on
social platforms are not ‘consumers waiting to be marketed to.’ They are
people with voices and they are talking a lot. What are they talking
about? They are talking about themselves, their opinions and the things
they are passionate about. And they want the world, their friends and
colleagues to know.
The second and, perhaps, less obvious
problem was that Facebook was from the start fully aware that it was a
business in existence to be profitable.
Naturally, the company figured that it
made much more money offering brands the opportunity to buy audiences
other than grow them organically.
Over time, Facebook began to narrow even
further the amount of natural growth that brands could achieve with its
platform in order to optimise the monetary value of their advertising
model.
These two shortcomings ensured that even
if social media had the power to drive meaningful two-way conversations
between brands and consumers, it must be the type that only a minority
would be a part of and even a smaller portion would respond to. It would
be wrong to pick on Facebook as being anything other than the
forerunner of this ‘re-traditionalising’ of social media; Twitter’s
approach is almost identical.
While this certainly does not bring into
question the opportunities available on social media to increase
visibility and stimulate interaction (that unlike traditional media can
actually be measured), brand custodians need to be prepared to face the
reality that social media is not the persuasive force of nature they
hoped it would be. Only five per cent of millennial consumers surveyed
by Gallup reported that social media exerts a great measure of influence
on them. The majority, about 65 per cent, say that it has no influence
on how or what they buy at all.
It turns out social media is simply a
fraction of a consumer’s experience with a company and as a result,
consumers are more likely to be active participants in a brands social
media community when they have previously made some sort of emotional
connection with that brand through other experiences.
Think briefly about your own behaviour
online. None of us click on the top returns from a Google search,
because we know they have been paid for. Yet many of us pay for them.
When logged in as ourselves, most of us marketers are completely
oblivious of the “suggested posts” and the banner ads on Facebook.
Again, many of us marketers pay for them.
The problem I see is that brands are
looking for the wrong returns out of social media. Many companies
turning to social media to get ROI in form of direct loyalty or to
motivate a switch have confused the context. Consumers are looking for
returns on inclusion- what they get in return for including brands in
their world. This is especially true because most social media
marketing, however well dressed up it might be, is still largely
interruption-based.
There is a lot of potential in social.
But this potential is scarcely directly tied to sales revenue. Social
media is perhaps a lot more intangible in its results than is being
promoted. The numbers might be measurable and verifiable, but they might
not mean anything in terms of subsequent consumer behaviours.
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