What you’ve heard is true; social media is the media game-changer. The “message is the medium” cliché has been turned inside out. The audience is the medium now, and we’re faced with unprecedented measurement and message control challenges.
The first challenge is relatively straightforward: get the right message into the hands of people who will embrace it, enhance it and share it. That will happen only if the brand or product can elicit great positive passion (e.g., Obama, Apple) or can convey fundamental utility or ubiquity (e.g., Blackberry, Coke).
The second challenge is to develop a methodology to measure and quantify effectiveness relative to the audience and the business objective. Most of us want results. We need to start thinking about how to evolve our definitions of success.
Embrace. Enhance. Share.
There is simply no substitute for having a good product. It doesn’t have to be unequivocally the best, but you have to deliver against some pain point: price, utility, ease of use, etc.
A simple SWOT analysis will tell you what to promote. Maybe you make servers. First of all, you clearly don’t need to be talking to the entire U.S. population. Maybe you just need to speak to CIOs in big companies. So what are you going to say to them? Are your servers the fastest? Most reliable? Most scalable? Most affordable? Maybe you have the best support.
Since social media is about dialogue, consider what people are going to say about your product or service. What do you want them to say? Why would they say anything?
Ultimately, in a social media play, we’re looking for influencers: advice givers or trendsetters who tend to share knowledge. In a sense, social media plays are exit polls in reverse. In a poll, a statistically valid volume of a sufficiently random sample is used to predict outcomes. Here, a decidedly not random sample, scaled and modeled on a known audience, is employed to initiate an outward dialogue.
Adding context, adding value
For obvious reasons, peer advice/recommendations are generally trusted more than advertising. The act of sharing your message is likely to give it context: “I love this”, “I hate this”, “This is funny,” etc.
Providing context is in effect an enhancement; someone you know has taken the time to propagate the message and tie it both to themselves and their recipient. The more tools or latitude people have to enhance the message, the more likely it is to be shared, and the more valuable it will become to both the sharer and the recipient.
Every client is hesitant to put their message in the hands of the masses because the potential for danger is high. Will they deface it? Put it in inappropriate places? Make it seem silly? The answer is yes. They will do all of the above just as surely as someone will draw a mustache on a poster. There’s a human impulse that you just can’t control for. What degree of control are we willing to give up? It’s a difficult question to answer.
As marketers, we have to search for moments to let go. We have to get comfortable with transparency and the notion that something positive can come of things that are negative or unfavorable. Our message will be in the hands of both our proponents and detractors, so we have to take stock. Are we being honest about our product? If not, we’re going to get skewered. Are we offering a true value exchange to the customer? People need to feel like they’re getting something in return for their support.
The measurement challenge.
The challenge of measuring social media is huge. One-to-one attribution is spotty at best. Real-time effects are reduced to apparent movement in site traffic and search activity. We need to develop an effective, holistic approach to measurement that weighs apparent correlations across marketing elements (including PR, promotions and traditional media activity) relative to business objectives over longer periods of time.
In our efforts to better understand and measure social media, base measures are tied to business objectives: sales, traffic, downloads, quote requests, etc. Overlays are PR calendars and media spend, plus new measures: blog postings, search volume, and a host of items we create specifically for use in social venues (e.g., On a daily basis, how many people put our “logo button” on their MySpace page? What did our Twitter traffic look like? How many times was our last e-mail forwarded? How many people watched our YouTube video?).
We’re currently looking for correlations between our base objective curve and the overlay curves. There are lots of things to look at. Nuance in each is a factor. How did blog sentiment look? What kinds of sites picked up our press release? What is the relationship among the elements? If PR spurred the blog mentions and the YouTube interest, are the three together responsible for the sales spike? What if I didn’t have traditional media in the mix? What would have happened if my online spend were higher? Are there other instances where I had the blog spike and the YouTube spike? What happened then?
When walls fall.
Surprisingly, nearly all of the tools necessary to monitor these factors are readily available. Many are free. We just need to combine the data, because what we have to look for are replicable patterns that emerge over time. The patterns will emerge. And the models that come out of these patterns will make us smarter, more efficient and much more predictive. But it’s going to take a lot to get there.
Siloed client organizations will have a tough time gathering spend and activity data from different disciplines. Internal walls will need to fall.
Agencies will be required to cast an unusually critical eye in terms of analysis. Indeed, analytics is going to feel a lot like cryptography. Analytics must become a strategic center, and the source of genuine neutrality. Agencies will have to acknowledge the interplay between PR and advertising, and paid and free media.
We’re going to have to learn how to manage expectations, especially with regard to ROI. How clients and agencies express and quantify success need to evolve.
Right now, it looks like the starting place is getting comfortable with surrendering some degree of both external and internal control. The audience is our customer and the final arbiters of our success or failure.
