The real cost of free social media tools

Originally published in Campaign Brief December 09. I have been a little lax in my posting recently.

****

It comes as no surprise that Facebook has reached over 300 million users this year. Twitter has hit the scales at around 50 million. Yet these places are no longer simply for the warm and fuzzy feelings of catching up with old high school sweethearts. It seems every man and his dog (and yep, become an online fan of Lassie today) are using free software and a myriad of blogs to fight for a cause, stir up some nostalgia or to push their brand deeper into the realm of social media.

However, just because the tools are free, doesn't mean it's going to cost nothing.

Similarly, signing up for a free blog or Twitter and Facebook account does not sign you up for immediate success in the online social world. These seemingly effortless accounts may take less than a minute to create, but making them function as effective communications tools that amalgamate with a company's branding, marketing messages and culture takes more than time. It takes understanding, skills, experience and money.

Millions of people are tapping into social media the world over, which is at once a pro and a con. It's the kind of number to get you giddy with excitement; it certainly sounds like a tantalizing number of people to listen to what you have to say. You're probably thinking, that's at least hundreds of fans, followers and friends to learn more about our company, products and what we're all about.

However, it needs to be remembered that a company’s online presence is as real as its offline; it needs to retain its own branding and personality. Capitalizing on your daily tweets may mean initially investing a little time (and depending on your skills - creativity or hired help) to escape the rudimentary templates of free software. Designing a wallpaper, making your logo prominent and linking the account to your existing website may sound obvious, but it’s largely underrated. A recent study by global PR firm Weber Shandwick found that “fifty three percent of the Fortune100 Twitter accounts did not display personality, tone or voice”.

However, it is crucial that the underlying voice of the brand remains intact. The office tech-nerd or friend of a friend of a colleague who happens to be very web savvy cannot maintain a company’s online presence. The voice needs to come from above; the face of the company who can clearly speak the brand’s personality; with agencies providing the consultation and strategy on how to translate a traditional message into an online one.

Weber Shandwick’s study also found that many Twitter accounts seemed to have appeared simply to have an online presence. What were lacking were companies using this platform as a link to the community and demonstrating their brand as a source of information, trust and listening ears; they were not building connections with media, other business contacts or maintaining relationships.

Consulting firm Deloitte have found that Australia is lagging in the social media stakes. They recently surveyed a small section of directors from the top 200 ASX companies and found “very few knew much about it. Only one from a group of ten said it was a topic of discussion in the boardroom, yet there was unanimous agreement it should be.”

And having fans is not enough. If clicking a button to become one is the only active participation a person will have with your site, the only real prize at the end is having more fans than your competition. If fans are constantly bored with irrelevant content and not being rewarded with personal interaction for their allegiance to a brand, they may as well be nonexistent. What they see in their daily news feeds needs to keep them coming back for more – clicking through to the fan page, taking a participative approach to their following.

The flipside to this is the investment of time, intensive labour and possibly remuneration for someone to ensure the blog stays updated regularly, the tweets are relevant and not alienating, and the Facebook page is regulated and controlled. It takes an investment of dollars on the right minds to create ideas for unique ways to utilize online space. It takes allocated time each week to see these ideas through. An enthusiastic start to a weekly blog that dissipates into a spasmodically updated online blather doesn’t do much for a company’s profile. Keeping them keen is crucial – it takes nurturing, love and lots of commitment.

"Marketing across social media requires more time and attention to detail, but offers to reward brands that do it well with far more meaningful consumer interactions” says Hashem Bajwa, Director of Digital Strategy at Droga5 in New York. “Success in social media is less about building outbound messages in the form of an artifact, such as an advertisement – it's more about living systems that evolve and are linked together. This requires more time and effort than ever before" he goes on to say.

But it’s not all about hard work. A classic example of clever online strategy comes from the faces behind Movember. Turning long-term media strategy on its head, the fundraising venture for men’s health awareness lasts a three-month period from October to December, a perfect length of time to remind people of a worthy cause, create an active response and see the results at the other end. It’s quick, clean and effective without stagnating or becoming a stale message.

Reactions to new products or news from a company can be also very easy to garner. Simply look at the number of groups on Facebook that cropped up in reaction to Kraft’s grand new scheme to name its Vegemite spin-off “isnack v2.0”. The hashtag “#vegefail” spread quicker on Twitter than the product ever did. One thing is clear – public reaction is happening at lightning speed. Interestingly, Kraft’s Twitter account went virtually silent after unveiling the new name and its pride on supermarket shelves was compromised. The opportunities and repercussion from using these simple, online accounts are as limitless as the creativity of marketing minds or the passion of the people.

It may sound like social media could be the bane of a company’s integrated marketing efforts. It shouldn’t be. There are millions of people ready to listen, take part and respond. Understanding the inherent need for hiring the right kinds of creative minds to keep followers eager, and spending the time and energy on maintaining an active and creative participation on the tangled world wide web, makes it all worthwhile. It’s that old mantra of time equals money, reborn into a new era of social media. Keep ‘em keen. Make a solid investment of your time, energy and money - and see how they return.

Guessing Less

This article will be published in Campaign Brief, Feb 2010.

***

2009 was the year of the nosedive, for obvious reasons. The economy went pear-shape, and all things considering - everyone was wishing it were a different year, or better still, decade.

Suffice to say, this downturn translated into a different way of doing business. Spending changed and priorities shifted. Tightening the purse strings happened by force, no longer for the ulterior motives of commandeering massive profit. There was more pressure to achieve results - and ones that could be found in measurable terrain beyond feel-good territory.

This also came at a time when social media marketing began to really take off, with more and more opportunities to speak to a larger, more engaged audience. Facebook was becoming more than just a soapbox for sharing stories of baked goods and weekend frivolities, Twitter became a forum for sharing news, not just the weather.

It seemed social media was going through puberty. It was finally finding its adult voice and experimenting with the big wide world in new ways; yet the chest hairs of measurable results and success were not so easy to find.

Companies started experimenting with these social networking tools that offered seemingly endless opportunities. Marketing minds were fascinated with the creative potential available and excitement found in the unexplored. The lure of rapid word-of-mouth was out there with these tools providing a great platform for discussion and unsolicited recommendations and criticism by users.

Was this just a matter of pure coincidence? Or was it the result of cheap social medial tools forced into sweatshop labour to combat a reduction in spending? There's good reason to suggest it was both. Whatever the cause and effect ratio was (or still is) the timing has been perfect.

And the result of this shift in gears? What we are looking at now is not marketing budgets changing drastically in size, but rather altering in their breadth and depth. The total figures might not adjust much, but the size of each piece of the media pie will.

Forrester Research found in a recent survey of 114 global marketers that more than 50% will increase their spend on social marketing. The research group also discovered that 45% pull together funds when needed, and 23% scrape together money from wherever they can to put to use for various social media efforts.

Kristen Vang, Principal Digital Strategist at Thinq says "social media is not "alternative"; it isn't a flavour-of-the-month for the tech-savvy; it's just the way the Internet is now. Google displays tweets and blog posts as real-time search results; newspapers are rolling out online subscription revenue models; Hulu broadcasts the best American TV shows on the web (legally). Marketing managers and upper management need to understand and accept this before budgets will allocate digital it's rightful share."

Of course this kind of spend will all depend on the intent of each campaign. For example, an integrated marketing campaign we developed for a group of Western Australian wineries whose message to wine drinkers was to buy local, had approximately 30% of its budget allocated to a social media component. The results were impressive. Before the campaign – known as “Summer with The Locals” – had even launched in traditional media such as press, radio and outdoor, the social media forums of Twitter and Facebook had gathered over 1,000 fans and followers of the wine collective.

Spending a significant portion of the budget on communication with a loyal fan-base with these relatively inexpensive tools proved to be a catalyst for a successful campaign that could be measured not only with awareness but with people contributing individually to spread the client's message.

It’s the power of Facebook news feeds, online fan competitions, and simply the personal recommendations of individuals reaching out to their average 150-friend lists that stretch dollars further. And it's all because of that old chestnut, communication.

Awareness for the need to support local industry grew massively in the campaign’s infancy, purely with viral nature of Facebook updates and Twitter. And with the campaign’s traditional media supporting the social media presence, it only made sense that budgets were skewed in an online direction.

“Two years ago most of my clients didn’t have a line item in their marketing budgets dedicated to social media – now they all do. As a marketer, it is clear that the tide is really shifting with big brands like PepsiCo forging the way as they make bold decisions such as reallocating all their television Superbowl advertising funds to social media. Pepsi has realized what many other companies quickly are – consumers are in control of brand. The landscape has been totally democratised and as a brand you simply can’t afford not to be talking to your consumers” says Sarah Payton, Senior Vice President at digital agency Affinitive in New York.

However, social media adoption by marketers is still relatively low, especially in Australia. But we are on the brink of major changes. The epidemic is growing, and most companies today are with little doubt of the need to invest in social media; any uncertainty they are experiencing is now how to make it a long-term reality and how to translate this into monthly budgets and billings to client.

The success of traditional marketing has always been difficult to grasp accurately. So it's no surprise that the measurement of social media is going to be as equally as hard. This shouldn’t be a turn off, though. More than anything, it should be a reason to search harder for the results and answers to the "why" of social marketing.

And why? Currently it seems that social media spend is often “scraped together” to pay for what is considered a tentative or experimental solution. But while the results may not be startling obvious, this kind of afterthought mentality puts long-term social media projects in jeopardy.

There is now a need to look across various communications channels - and allocate accordingly. Otherwise an experimental attitude negates the idea that social media is here to stay. The campaigns need to be managed properly to garner results, or else there will be tomes of figures and dollars, allocated against "experimental" campaigns that appear without justification and will be easily quashed next time by powers that be.

Looking forward, we will see greater reliance on consumer intelligence and the continuation of the conversation with the faces behind the suburban computer screens. Social media marketing is here to stay, but to make it a permanent inclusion in effective integrated marketing campaigns, they need not only to work, but be seen to work. Beyond experimentation.