June 14, 2010
In addition to knowing about the demographic make up of your community members and making sure they participate in your community — not just hang around reading other people’s contributions — you need to know something about the demographics of the social sites you want to work with.
I just read an article by Tom Stein about how small companies are giving up on Facebook as a marketing tool because they haven’t seen any returns on their efforts and some of the companies cited had been at it for a year or two. So is Facebook’s time in the sun ending? Maybe, but it will take more than a few anecdotes to make that call.
Consider this. According to a resent survey by Pingdom (www.pingdom.com) concluded that 16 out of 19 (84%) of the most popular social sites have more women populating them than men. The super geek sites Digg, Reddit and Slashdot have more men on them but the more popular sites including Facebook, Linked-in and Twitter all have more women visiting them. The average ratio of all sites surveyed according to Pingdom was 47% male, 53% female.
That’s fine as far as I am concerned because women spend the bulk of family budgets. But this neatly illustrates the flaw in the assumption that social media is a universal good. One of the companies that Stein references as being dissatisfied with Facebook happens to be Blank Label, a company specializing in custom shirts designed and bought over the web.
So, the question that leaps to mind now that we know all this is how many custom shirts does the average woman buy annually? Go ahead, think about it, I can wait. Bingo!
So at least in the case of the shirt maker, the over reliance on Facebook is an example of not understanding the delivery medium. It used to be so easy with print. Magazines publish detailed statistics on readership, subscriptions, demographics and more so that potential advertisers can make educated decisions on their marketing spend. The same kind of information is available from other sources on the web but you’ll need to do some work to find it and maybe collate it.
The point is that social media is just a tool. There are many kinds of social media — some tools are great at blasting out messages to friends but other tools focus on collecting information from your community. The focus on inbound data often gets lost with the result that we continue to “spray and pray” using social media as if it were direct mail or email marketing. Social media is powerful and easy to use but we still need to pay attention to how we use it.
The shirt maker might have a friend list of only men but — and here’s the difficult part — men might not go to Facebook looking for information specific to shirts. The fact that so many women use it suggests to me that men who go there have other things on their minds. So we see that just as in print advertising, lead generation is a fine art partly made up of the offer but much consideration should also go to placement.
It had to happen sooner or later, the only question in my mind is why it has taken so long. It appears that the backlash against social media is beginning. All I can say is yippee!
With trends like social media — or almost any trend — we tend to over imbue the idea or offering with our own expectations of what’s possible and inevitably we are disappointed when we learn that nothing could do all that. I think the old Saturday Night Live line “It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping!” nicely illustrates the point and social media has traveled a very typical path.
When I started writing about social media in CRM in 2002, few people saw its potential and it took several years before the concept gained critical mass. Then for a period of a couple years it was all that anyone wanted to talk about. People wrote books about it and gave speeches and many out of work PR and marketing pros became experts overnight talking about it from their blogs, Twitter and Facebook accounts.
The other day I ran across an article by Tom Stein titled “The ugly truth about Facebook for business” in which he documented multiple small business owners who said that Facebook had been a total waste of time and these owners had stayed with the technology, in some cases, for two years. The article goes on to talk about how much effort and time these businesses put into developing content for their accounts daily and how frustrated the owners were.
The only answer I can give to all this is, duh! It might be painful to hear this and hard to swallow but the reason for the lack of success can be boiled down to operator error. A year an a half ago Clara Shih wrote “The Facebook Era” (a good book, by the way) in which she plainly showed that Facebook and other forms of social media are good at keeping tabs on acquaintances, people we know casually or through a mutual association — just the kind of people who could be called customers. Our best friends might interact with us through social media but they also email, pick up the phone or eat and drink with us.
The difference is huge because the sum of all those interactions is bi-lateral communication in which we give information but we also get information too. The problem with using Facebook or any other outbound social media exclusively is that when used this way it is no more revolutionary than a dumb direct mail blast and we all know how well that works.
As I have written before, to be effective at using social media you need a social media strategy that incorporates both the outbound messaging that we love as well as ways that prompt user or customer input. It is the input that makes social media valuable and it is seeking input that we seem to have trouble with.
I don’t know why this is. Perhaps it has to do with the incessant need marketers have to justify their existence to the CFO. The usual approach is to heap up some statistics like the size of the base you market to, the number of impressions and similar things. We consider that real work but when it comes to asking open-ended questions to come up with a good idea that had been hidden and that we can use to refine products and messaging we don’t see the same value.
On other occasions I’ve suggested that the ratio of inbound social media use to outbound should approximate the 80/20 rule. I might go 70/30 but the point is that the preponderance of effort should be on listening and understanding or as Stephen Covey said in Rule 5 of “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, “Seek first to understand then to be understood.” Your messaging should be so chock full of knowledge and information that the recipient is compelled to act and that doesn’t happen if you’re spending a couple of hours a day just trying to dream up something relevant to say.
Now that we are getting over the phase in the social media bubble when we think it’s the answer to every affliction known to humankind, perhaps we can begin the process of understanding its uses better as well as the nuances between different types. Social media is a rich toolbox with many interesting and effective gadgets and knowing which ones to use and when is more than half the battle. We’re at least over the idea that all we need is a hammer and that’s progress.
My father-in-law is a study in concentration when he watches sports on TV. In his den he sits before a massive HD TV with the sound off, just watching. In a way it’s as close to being there as you can get, minus the crowd noise and a breeze if he’s watching golf or more serious elements if he’s watching football or baseball.
Being a New Englander, I guess he gets the habit from too many years of watching the Celtics. If you followed the C’s in their glory years from the late 1950s to the 1980s, the only way to watch was with the sound turned off and the radio tuned to the radio play-by-play from the legendary Johnny Most.
Most earned his spurs in Game 7 of the 1965 Eastern Division Finals against Philadelphia. The game was tied in the last seconds and John Havlicek stole an in-bounds pass from Hal Greer. In a matter of seconds it was over. The call went something like this: “Greer is putting the ball in play. He gets it out deep and Havlicek steals it! Over to Sam Jones…Havlicek stole the ball! It’s all over…It’s all over!!”
What this recounting cannot convey is the adrenalin rush, the euphoria of winning a close contest, made more dramatic by Most just about losing his voice as he repeatedly screams “It’s all over! Johnny Havlicek stole the ball and it’s all over!” That moment made generations of sports fans radio fans too and to this day, if we can get a radio broadcast of an important game we’ll turn it on. Second best is turning off the announcers and watching alone without the constant din of someone telling us what to think.
I have been thinking about Johnny Most and John Havlicek ever since tweeting became a competitive sport at live CRM events. When the analyst tribe attends a major announcement you can count on us to agree on a hash tag (unless the vendor has already suggested one) and the tribe goes wild transmitting minute by minute descriptions and analysis of the event to the world. Some of the transmissions are banal repetitions of what the speaker is saying, others attempt to provide spot analysis and still others re-tweet prior tweets that the writer agrees with.
Some people take this activity deadly seriously and keep score of how many tweets they make and how their score compares with others and I have participated in the tweet fest along with everyone else.
Today I am in San Francisco and in a little while Marc Benioff will announce an alliance with VMWare. There will be many analysts and press invited for the event and most will be tweeting the news as it happens. I am going to try something different today. I’m going to turn off my sound and listen to the whole presentation while taking notes. Then I will spend some amount of time figuring out the meaning of what I heard and once that’s done I will write my analysis of the announcement and publish it.
This may sound funny and incredibly retro but I am doing it to make a point. There may be good news reasons to tweet the play by play but I am not here as a news person. I am an analyst and my job is to dig into the news to interpret it and draw some conclusions. My conclusions may not be perfect, they may not stand the test of time, but analysis requires careful consideration of all the facts.
So good luck to the tweeters. I hope they all set world records for number of tweets. I’ll see you after the game.
New research from Harvard Business School and the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project give new perspective to the social media and social CRM phenomenon and raise a yellow flag for all those people proclaiming social media the second coming. First Harvard.
The Economist ran one of its special report sections this week (the issue with Steven Jobs dressed as Moses on the cover) on social networking. While generally laudatory of the technology’s promise — headlines include “Profiting from friendship” and “A peach of an opportunity” — the report also delivered the unvarnished and synamic truth about adoption.
A section titled “Twitter’s transmitters, The magic of 140 characters” quoted the work of Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, a Harvard Business School professor, and one of his MBA students Bill Heil. According to The Economist, the researchers surveyed more than 300,000 Twitter users in May 2009 and reported results that include:
- More than half said they tweeted less than once every 74 days (not quite twice per quarter).
- The most active 10% of twitter users published 90% of all Tweets.
By comparison, the article says that on other social networks, “the most active users typically produce 30% of all content.” Holy #$%^ Batman!
So who are these people? According to Pew, they’re the kind of people you might want to have a beer with — when they’re older. As reported in “Fast Company” Ninety-three percent of teens between 12 and 17 go online, 66% say they text. The 18 to 29 group also has a 93 percent rank of online users and though the numbers slip for real adults — 81% of those 30 to 49 and 70% of those 50 to 64 — the numbers are very healthy.
Get more numbers here: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/zachary-wilson/and-how/pew-survey-finds-increase-social-media-internet-time-decrese-blogging-te
The question though is what are these people doing when they are online? Teens are giving up on blogging, their numbers are about half what they were a few years ago. Facebook is the big winner for kids and time-starved parents like Twitter. Only 15% of young adults bother to blog, down nine points over two years.
What’s it all mean?
The Fast Company article ends with this, “Meanwhile, blogging is on the rise for adults over 30, who increased to 11% from 7% in 2007. And 47% of adults now use social networking sites, up 10% from a year ago.”
It seems the most economically viable demographic is getting its act together but there are caveats. There are many more readers than writers — that’s not surprising, it’s human nature. But I think you need to be wary here. Diane Hessan, CEO of Communispace, likes to remind me that in social networking, participation is very important and knowing the demographics of participation is vital.
The ten percent of Twitter users contributing ninety percent of tweets with more than half logging on very occasionally is a red flag for anyone contemplating social media marketing because it exposes an important truth that membership is not participation. There is no t enough data on the Twitter users who tweet once per quarter. Do they go to Twitter daily to read stuff? I am sure some do, but I wouldn’t want to base a marketing campaign on it.
The decline in blogging is a clear indication that there is, or soon will be, less to read on blogs and less to comment on, though there will be more personal stuff to see on Facebook, if you have a lot of friends.
I have recently seen a number of CRM products that capture such valuable information as a person’s Twitter, Facebook and Blog account information. The vendors are certain that this information is the source of new insight and business opportunity, even in the B2B space. I am not. This data suggests that just as vendors are ramping up, the raw material that they expect to mine may be drying up. Notwithstanding the 11% of adults over 30 who are blogging more, it seems to me that people are moving to personal expression that may not have a great deal of business utility.
Some of the explanation for this may be the rotten economy but we’re about four months into a turnaround, and numbers complied last May are already becoming obsolete. Business activity is picking up but it is unclear if people are turning to social media to do their business networking.
The lesson from this, for me, hews close to Hessan’s advice. You need to understand who is participating — not their names and other identifying data but participation per person or organization, demographic data and the like. A lot of 17 year old boys might be attracted to the new models on an exotic car site for instance, but you wouldn’t want to develop a marketing campaign for them.
Clara Shih is a friend I met through Salesforce.com. She recently published The Facebook Era, which looks at the relationship of social networking to front office computing. She is really busy these days promoting the book and she recently left Salesforce to pursue new ideas in social networking and to form a company dedicated to the task.
Shih is bright and articulate and she’s been involved in social networking and social media for several years. She even wrote a little code — the first integration of Salesforce and Facebook (Faceforce now Faceconnector). I caught up with her in an airport as she was leaving to visit family in China. I wanted to congratulate her on the book and learn about her thinking on some important issues surrounding front office computing and social networking.
I think we’re in violent agreement on most points and I have to respect the fact that she spent a year researching social media — especially Facebook — and writing her book. One thing Shih makes clear in the book as well as in conversation is the disruptive nature of social media, “As disruptive as the Internet was for any industry,” she says. “Who knows who and how will be critical in sales going forward.”
True enough.
As the market continues to move from one where innovators sell to early adopters toward one with more stability, we can expect that personal relationships will become increasingly important, that only makes sense. When early adopters buy something it’s to gain a competitive advantage by being the first to implement a new technology. Early adopters are like the one eyed man in the land of the blind. They buy stuff and play with it to find a profitable use. They don’t need a lot of hand holding and often the most basic documentation is fine so it’s no surprise that selling to early adopters is pretty easy.
Most of us today have lived through a long series of new waves not just in technology but throughout the economy and we have all been early adopters. The new economy is a lot more about mainstream buyers and many of us might have forgotten (or never learned) how to sell to them. That’s where social media comes in and it’s why the amalgamation of CRM and social networking is such a big deal — if it gets done right.
What exactly is meant by doing things right is a tricky question. According to Shih, if you think about a maturity model for the space, “We’re about at phased 1.5. In phase one people didn’t understand what it (social networking) was or why it mattered. We’re at the stage now where people know Facebook and Twitter but they don’t necessarily know what to do with them in business.”
Shih makes the analogy to the early Internet when no one knew how to monetize their investments in Web sites. In a lot of cases companies simply “…tried to apply old models to new media,” it sort of worked but today we’ve moved on in many respects. Whenever you apply old models to new media you are basically trying to extend the old paradigm, getting the most you can out of it before you have to invest in something new and expensive. It also gives you time to see which models are most likely to be the winners because no one wants to go down the wrong path and end up spending twice. Not that that ever happens in the software market.
There is also the issue of developing the right metrics for measuring success and to do that the business objectives need to be in place. So what are the business objectives and which social networking tools are right for each objective? “It depends,” Shih says diplomatically. “There are different tools for different environments,” and her book goes into more detail. But suffice it to say that a blog has a different purpose and orientation than Twitter with a 140 character limit.
It might seem that several social media are carving out niches for themselves. Facebook for sales, Linked-in for personal networking and Twitter for quick bursts, Shih is the first to acknowledge that things are very fluid. “We’re in an exponential growth phase,” she says, “ Everything can change in a year.”
Right you are. In a year we could have more clarity or simply more companies contending for hearts and minds (and wallets) as the social networking boom takes over in full force. If things work out as Shih expects, there will also be a company headed by her to advise companies about social networking and its uses. WE could all use the help.
