thefunnel

Normally I try generate unique content, and not reiterate what others are doing, but today I participated in a MarketingProfs seminar regarding the “State of Social Media”, and this is well worth a brief comment. This research is an in depth view and benchmark into more 3000 companies (both B-2-B and B-2-C), and how they use social media, how they measure it and what their success so far has been. There’s a few surprising findings / recommendations.

1) There’s hardly any difference at all between the usage in B-2-B and B-2-C. Same tools are used trying to achieve the same things. You would think B-2-C would be much further ahead, but no. They are exactly in the same place with approximately success rate for what they’re trying to do. Except of course that their participating audiences are larger.

2) The objectives around Social Media are pretty fundamental – driving traffic to the web site, generate awareness and look for negative PR comments. Again you would think B-2-C would have more creative goals.

3) Although Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are the big ones, there’s a large number of smaller “industry specific” applications, so practitioners really need to know what their customers are using on a micro level. Twitter might not be it, although everyone is talking about it . You need to find out what the “work persona” is using.

4) Of the people that are using Social Media, only an average of 35% say that the efforts are successful meeting expectations. Pretty bad, compared to more traditional e-marketing activities like email marketing, or maybe the expectations are too low for email.

5) The average number of Twitter followers for companies are greatly skewed due to a few high hitters. The norm is about 150. So if your company have 150 followers you’re doing OK.

6) Only 12% of companies have strict and clearly articulated Social Media policies, and > 60% of marketers practicing Social Media do it “on their own time” (not being paid for it or part of their objectives)

Why doesn’t marketing work? Why is marketing in such a mess in many companies? Why does companies that claim they’re marketing and customer centric, end up in trouble? Have you ever wondered why? Here’re a few.
In many companies marketing doesn’t have a place at the C table, and therefore, doesn’t get heard. You would think that the other people could represent marketing, and they might be able to on some level, but when it comes to deep understanding of marketing and customers, being a generalist often isn’t enough.
Everyone is a marketer. Sometimes people that do marketing, or are appointed to marketing positions have little or no formal marketing training. Being streetwise and learning on the job is good, but nothing can compensate for a marketing mind. You wouldn’t have a surgeon without formal qualifications operate on you, would you? You wouldn’t appoint a marketer to key position in human resources or financing would you? (there are exceptions).
Lack of an outcome based marketing. Some marketers only provide fluff, with no metrics and very little accountability. Activity based marketing does more harm than good to the marketing profession.
Marketing doesn’t control the message anymore, the customer does? Social media have put the customer in control and everything upside down compared what it used to be. In addition with all the choice, no one can manage it all. Companies are struggling to make sense of it all, and deploy the right resources in the right places. Marketing is truly becoming everyone’s job, and that calls for guidelines and governance, but at the same time letting go of some of the control and moving towards transparency, risk taking and empowerment. Not having enough marketing minds around, doesn’t help either.
Companies don’t walk the talk. Customer intimacy, customer loyalty and customer retention are all familiar concepts, and many companies practice these disciplines, but how many companies truly understand the customer LTV, and how many really put the customer first, even before profit, short term, if there’s a long term gain? I believe that most of these types of marketing programs have never really worked. They might have appeared to work, but only because there were enough customers and business for everyone. Not anymore. The biggest scarcity in business today is availability of customers.

One way to measure social media is through using NPS as a metric. Think about it. Social media is all about customers having conversations about your brand, and the ultimate question is, would they recommend your product, service or brand, or do they fall into the category of talking negatively about you? So if you track the conversations, and develop a way of rating these conversations, you have a metric. The metric is about your brand, the communication channel just happen to be social media. Combine this with some other marketing best practices, such as unhappy customersare each likely to talk about you with 10 other customer, which has a compounding effect on the negative conversations about you. Example. Let’s say your promoters % is 80 and you detractor % is 20, leading to an NPS score of 60%, quite good. However, lets now imaging that all the detractors talk to ten of their friends, therefore amplifying the negative message to 200%, while only two of your promoters talk positively about you leading to a a score of 160%. Suddenly your real NPS score has turned into a negative 40%. Using this math, you need 8 out of 10 of your customers to be a promoter, and a maximum of 1 out of 10 to be a detractor to hit a NPS of 60%. This really shows the power of social media, and the importance of customer satisfaction, and the importance of participating (by at least listening) and helping to create positive conversations. It’s could also be a way to determine what your social media strategy should be. If for example you have a really high NPS score, you need to go all out and capitalize on this. If your NPS score is low, and although you can’t control social media,  you need to consider a different approach.