Tag Archives: Twitter

Notes From The Road: New media, old challenges

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For a local business, global platforms like Facebook and Twitter create some of the same challenges they faced with mass media. Buying in a national publication meant wasting money on impressions that weren’t geographically in your area. Buying in local publication meant investing much the same work to create the ad only to have it reach far fewer people in a reduced circulation. Speaking this week to small businesses in Raleigh and Richmond, it became clear that this same dilemma was on their minds in terms of investing in social media. Reading the same headlines we all do, these business owners acknowledge that the world is irreversibly moving in the digital direction, but when and how deeply they should jump into social media was a very open question.

For a local company it’s an important question too. Small businesses don’t have the budget, manpower or annual revenue to afford much experimentation. They can’t sustain ‘a couple slow quarters’ in revenue while tinkering with new tools to grow business. And most small businesses don’t get an infusion of investor dollars to grow their company with. Most of the time if something needs to be done, they roll up their sleeves and do it themselves.

With 52% of America’s population working in small businesses, the question of when and how to use social tools today is an important issue on a national level. Especially since these small businesses also can’t sustain the diminished returns coming from traditional media which get more expensive even as they become less effective.

It’s like installing a phone line, not like buying advertising.
So when should a small business jump into social media? Actually, my recommendation is not to jump at all, but rather to step in a little at a time. Small businesses can’t ignore social because it’s become a part of how we all shop for and consume products and services. If a small business doesn’t move into social now, it will be harder to do in two years. By the same token, small businesses are more fragile. Introducing too much disruption to workflow at one time can have significant adverse effects.

Unlike advertising, employing social tools means an operational change in how business is done. I try to explain it with an analogy; using social media is like installing a phone line, not buying an ad. When you buy an ad, you create it, run it, and wait for the phone to ring. When you use social media you install a new communications tool. You have to tend to it. No one installs a phone in their office and then just leaves it there. Social media works the same way. So it’s going to add to your workload. The trick is to add it to your workload in a way that can be absorbed by the business and which provides some return for the added effort.

Social media is also more like a referral mechanism than a sales call. No one goes to Facebook to be pitched, yet to a small business owner accustomed to working the phones, this environment is both a little foreign and slow to show revenue. Nonetheless, it is a new reality. Very few of us buy anything from cold calls. When the time comes to buy, we go through our decision making process. Until we’re ready to buy though, we don’t actively shop for things. That means the job of the business is to nurture a relationship during the periods when the prospect is not actively shopping. Doing so positions the business to be top of mind when the time comes to make a purchase decision. Social media is great for this, but to the hard-numbers sales guy that is a tough pill to swallow.

When I asked the business owners who were seeing growth with social media about their experience, they said it was like planting seeds. Those seeds took months, sometimes even a year or more, to germinate, but once they did, there was a shift. More referrals. More engagement. And ultimately more sales. It took patience and nurturing to get there.

Patience and nurturing in a ‘get it done today’ world.
That’s the big irony of selling in this say and age. Everyone in business, from Wall St. to small business owners, is under pressure to sell now, close deals and make numbers. Meanwhile the evolution of selling tools like social media, because they acknowledge the consumer’s ultimate control in the buying process, aren’t organized around the salesman’s deadlines but rather the consumer’s buying habits. These habits are impacted by individual details like need, budget, time to shop, etc. and care little for what sales goals the company has in mind.

Outside the New Yorks of the world, the transition toward social has been more gradual, or at least less all-consuming. That means for the majority of small businesses, it’s important to strike a balance. Now is the time to begin setting up shop in social media. Now is the time to work out the kinks in how you operationalize social media. If you put it off for another few years you’ll be that much further behind.

It is not, however, wise to abandon your tried and true (even if less effective that they used to be) traditional sales tactics. Events, local advertising and even yellow pages ads can still be relevant to some audiences in some markets. It’s more a matter of recognizing that those media are sunsetting as social is rising. This is a transitional period and we all need to jump in the stream and ride the current.

I am encouraging small businesses to break down what appears to be a ton of work to ‘go social’ into simple, small, steps. Do a little bit each day. Over time your social presence will build and the seeds you plant now will germinate. The way you sell will change too, it has to because the way your customers buy is changing.

Starting now means that you will evolve with the media landscape, minimizing the effects of disruption while reaping greater benefits over time. Social media is not going anywhere. You have time to address it. You don’t have to get it 100% right on day one (which is good, because you won’t). The point is to start now, keep an open mind, and change as the world around you changes.

Social media is evolution, not revolution.

Social Media and the big browser bias.

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It’s easy to think everyone in the world shares certain experiences. When we hear 800MM people use Facebook we can easily assume they use it just like we do – opening their laptops at work or tapping into a tablet computer. The social media revolution we’re steeped in seems to be happening all around us and the media go to great lengths to remind us of just how much everything is changing.

Occasionally though, we come across a piece of information that calls this into question.

This article on the ‘digital divide’ was pretty interesting reading. The data from the Department of Commerce is in some ways hard to believe given the seeming ubiquity of all things digital.  For example, only 40% of households with an HHI under $25K have wired Internet access in their homes. Now, you may say those are America’s poor, so its not surprising. True, but what about one of America’s fastest-growing market segments? A segment with over $1 Trillion in buying power today which is expected to grow to $1.4 trillion by 2013. Of this highly desirable and rapidly growing market group only 57% of households have wired Internet access. They are the Hispanic American population and they show up on many marketing briefs today. Similarly, of the African American population only 55% have wired access to their home.

When you consider all the hubbub being made about engaging Twitter’s 20MM or so regular U.S. users, the following market segments are worth reflecting on: Today there are 17.5MM African American people and 21MM Hispanic people accessing the Internet primarily via mobile devices.

Internet usage, including Facebook usage, is very different on a mobile device. Mobile websites are far simpler, often little more than navigation, text, images and the occasional video clip. Standard websites, viewed through a mobile browser are arguably even less engaging. They usually require a lot of pinching and pulling to make a page anywhere near legible. Oh, and filling out forms on a 320px wide screen if not especially gratifying. Even Facebook’s smartphone app pares down the experience for mobile by stripping out the custom pages from brand sites and reducing the experience to a wall, info page and photo gallery. That of course is for the 40% of cell phone users have smart phones anyhow. The other 60% on feature phones, more or less miss out altogether.

Those of us working in the digital media space tend to have smart phones and very likely tablet devices too. We tend to use laptops or have big display monitors at our work stations. Our homes tend to have wireless broadband connections too. And because we work this way, its easy to forget there are significant portions of the population who don’t. If we do forget, we can also neglect to address the unique environment these people are experiencing digital content in.

With budgets tight and time also short, its easy to focus on the big browser experience and leave the small screen an afterthought. Yet for some businesses, this can mean leaving a trillion dollar market segment unattended to.

Pulling The Plug on Your Social Media Strategy

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Today your business has dozens of choices for measuring social media. Platforms exist for evaluating everything from influence to engagement using various counters and algorithms. I recommend you begin with something simpler though. I think you should ask yourself one simple, illuminating question…

“If I pulled the plug on my social media efforts – closed it all down starting tomorrow – what would my business lose?”

To answer that question, first clear the playing field. Set aside for now the industry pressure of having all your competitors in social, therefore you have to be. Set aside too any mandate coming from the corner office.

Instead, ask yourself what your company would be like next week without your Facebooking, Twittering, YouTube channel, Foursquare badges, Tumblrs, etc. etc.

Draw two columns on a sheet of paper. In column A, add up everything you’d save by shutting it all down; the man-hours internally, the cost of content creation, the meetings, the analytics software licenses, the agency retainer fees. This all amounts to the true cost of what you’re doing now and its a good thing to have in mind.

Now in column B write down all the things you’d lose as a business without your social media campaign in place. What would happen if all those Facebook fans and Twitter followers simply went away?

Take a cold, hard look. If closing your social media campaign means losing a few coupon redemptions, the occasional mention among the bazillions of tweets happening daily, and the bragging rights to some six-figure ‘fan’ count you’ve yet to figure out how to make use of, then your social media strategy is probably in need of some refinement.

On the other hand, maybe closing down your social media stuff would mean you’d know less about your customers. Maybe it would mean you’d not have that convenient focus group for getting feedback on new product ideas. Maybe it would mean you couldn’t service your customers as efficiently, or detect and address their concerns as quickly. Maybe it would mean your brand awareness would drop because your name wouldn’t circulate as much on the blogs your customers frequent. If any of that’s the case, then your investment in social media is probably paying off even if you still haven’t been able to attribute sales to it, let alone define what an ‘engagement’ really is. (That’s okay, by the way, the entire social media industry is struggling to agree on terms like ‘engagement’, ‘activate’, and ‘influencer’.)

If you’re using social media to distribute coupons you’re essentially treating it like an online FSI or DRTV spot. That may provide some sales, but the cost of maintaining that program almost always comes out of profit margins as you continue to give away coupons in return for nothing more than a click count.

For a real return on your social media investment, your column B should be full of words like ‘insights’, ‘higher satisfaction’, ‘feedback’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘quicker’. These are the things social media can do that FSIs, DRTV, and advertising simply can’t.

Most companies are looking at 2012 and asking themselves what to do with social media. Everyone is going to invest in it, true, because no one wants to be the Luddite in their competitive set. But how much do you invest? And where?

Look down again at column B on your sheet of paper. What’s missing from that list that social media could do for you? Whatever it is, that’s where you should aim your strategy and make your investment this year.

On narcissism & outgrowing influencers.

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Facebook is a funny company. At first blush today’s update looked as though they were playing catch up in trying to integrate/imitate features of Twitter and G+ (just like they did with Foursquare some months ago). Worse, they seem to dash these updates off, ambushing their customers with seemingly disorienting features that quickly lead to bad buzz among the Mashables, Techcrunches and Twitters of the world.

On the other hand, Facebook is a mature enterprise now. In addition to 750MM users, it has 750MM users’ data. It’s by leaps and bounds the most popular social networking tool on the planet. It has deep pockets and deep resources and let’s face it, there are some smart folks working there. While they’re undoubtedly watching their competitors, I’d be shocked if Facebook felt so threatened by Twitter or G+ – which lag behind in membership by wide, wide margins – to just willy-nilly copy what those two do out of some sense of reactionary fear.

What if instead they were more Machiavellian. What if they were watching their competitors test new ideas and then moving quickly to replicate those that showed promise. This is the second-mover advantage and it has worked before.

Too far fetched? Okay.

What if, instead, Facebook made the changes it made because the opinion of influencers didn’t matter as much? What if Facebook realized its most valuable customers were not influencers?

Facebook today serves two audiences – its membership and its advertisers. (It has certainly erred a few times in helping the latter at the expense of the former.) With 65+% of the Internet using public in America holding accounts and significantly more user participation than other competitor platforms, the importance of social media power users is somewhat diminished in Facebook’s current business model.

To grow, Facebook needs to keep the masses happy, not the influencers (who, realistically, it probably can’t keep happy even if it wants to).

What if Facebook’s latest updates were aimed solely at its most valuable customer – the mass user? In this sense you could say the updates delivered a few benefits:

  • They automatically improve the news stream with algorithmic intelligence without requiring the user to fiddle with settings.
  • They deliver twitter-like friend streams and updates without requiring the user to join Twitter (and hope their friends are there).
  • They deliver circle-like friend handling without requiring the user to join Google+ (though I’m guessing with an average 150-odd friends, most Facebook users don’t have a need for ‘circles’ anyhow).

Forget whether or not we as power users find any of the above to be true. The important question, from Facebook’s perspective, is will the average user? Maybe Facebook’s version of circles and Twitter is good enough for most people. Going to market with ‘good enough’ is a proven tactic for dominating a marketplace.

Admittedly I am hypothesizing here but if the knowledge of what the average Facebook user will find useful exists, you can bet Facebook has it and is putting its top minds to work on making the best use of it.

I sometimes feel we working so closely in and with social media are a little too focused on our own worldview. We say we are advocates for the user, but which user – the average user or the power user? Like Narcissus, we might be talking so much to our conclave of other early adopters and power users that we wind up seeing only the reflection of our own opinions coming back at us. To read Twitter today, you’d have to believe Facebook’s latest update is a massive failure.

Less than 12 hours after the updates hit, my own Facebook newsstream seems pretty quiet. Nary a mention. Instead, people went right back to Facebooking. Were they initially shocked? Some were, yes. Was it truly so disruptive a change that it earned all the ‘hate it’ comments? Not really. Or at least if so, that hate was pretty fleeting.

Who knows, maybe most the masses are happy with the updates, even if we power users are a little outraged. It’s possible.