an overview of social media marketing
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8/9/2019 An Overview of Social Media Marketing
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An Overview of Social
Media Marketing
Published April 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or
any information storage and retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher.
Copyright © Spice Consultants (London) Ltd 2010
Eric Swain
Director of Social Business
Spice Wellington House,
East Road
Cambridge CB1 1BH
www.spice.co.uk
eric@spice.co.uk
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What is this paper and who is it for?
This is an overview of social media marketing. As that suggests it aims to be two things: First, it’s an
overview not an in-depth treatment of the topic. It is aimed at the person trying to understand the
basic concepts behind social media marketing. And second, it is focused on marketing, on describing
how a good social strategy can aid your company’s marketing efforts. There are other benefits to be
gained from meaningful engagement with social networks (product development, consumer insights,
and brand management to name a few – all of which are arguably marketing, but that’s a different
discussion), but this paper isn’t going to address those topics directly.
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The Future of Marketing
Before getting into the role social media can/should p lay in a company’s marketing strategy, I want
to lay some groundwork about the state of marketing currently.
Traditional (old) marketing is less effective than it has ever been. It is noisy. It does a lot of
shouting. It’s in your face, interrupting what you’re
trying to do. Traditional marketing tries to force
itself on us, interrupting our TV shows or magazine
articles or views of the countryside. It’s been doing
it for years. And we are now getting very good at
ignoring the messages.
Traditional marketing broadcasts its messages to
everyone within ear- and eyeshot. This scattergunapproach is terribly inefficient. Marketers fling out
a message with the hope that a fraction of the
recipients will respond positively. Of course, you
can do some targeting - industry specific
publications or programmes that appeal to a specific
demographic, for example - and this can help response rates. But the reality is that most people
who see your ad have no interest in what you’re selling, or it’s not the right time, or have condition
themselves to block out the messages.
Seth Godin refers to something he calls the TV-Industrial Complex. This is the idea that for the past
40 years or so there has been a symbiotic, cyclical relationship between TV (in the form of
advertising) and big corporations (big brands) where the corporations developed a product, bought
TV ads to promote it, which lead to growing retail distribution and sales. The increasing sales meant
more profits which bought more ads and the cycle continued, growing ever larger.
The overwhelming success of the TV-Industrial Complex was predicated on three things: numerous
growing markets for new products in the post-war West (especially America); consumers with
increasing amounts of disposable income and the desire to acquire things; and a relatively few mass
media outlets to occupy the consumer’s attention.
These three environments are no longer prevalent in the same way today. Most markets for things
we need or generally want are dominated by existing brands and are saturated. We as consumers
have made our choices about which pain relief or soap powder or supermarket we use (or we are
hyper-aware of what’s on offer) and we aren’t looking for anything new. And, the current financial
conditions notwithstanding, our desire to spend has been severely stunted. Couple that with our
increasing consumer savvy brought on by years of being bombarded by marketing hype and we have
become inured to advertisers’ messages.
While changes in the first two have played important roles, it is the change in the third environmentthat has really impacted the success of the old TV-Industrial Complex and, indeed, traditional
Figure 1 - photo from Tranchis
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marketing on the whole. The growth of the Internet, cable and satellite TV and radio, and local,
regional, national and niche publications has created an extremely noisy atmosphere and an
abundance of outlets for our attention. We no longer have the time or the inclination to listen to all
of the messages flying around.
Moreover, the success of advertising in the past era meant that agencies exploited the format more
and more. We’ve all experienced this “ad creep”. Remember when there were only a few ads
during a TV show? In America the amount of time dedicated to ads in an hour of TV has doubled
since the 1960s. Also, the average length of an advert has shrunk over time from 1 minute to less
than 30 seconds. These factors mean we are being bombarded more ads more often than ever
before.
And we are getting sick of it. And we are ignoring it. From TV, radio, and print ads, billboards, cold
calling and junk mail, we are increasingly tuning out traditional “interruption” marketing.
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The New Marketing
So if interruption marketing isn’t working so well anymore, what is? Welcome to the New
Marketing.
New Marketing is about being found where your customers are looking, when they are ready to buy.
The New Marketing is about permission rather than interruption. It favours interaction and
engagement over traditional jumping up and down and shouting, “here I am! I’m great! Buy me!”
The New Marketing is about being found by your customers and potential customers. This means
being front and centre in two places: on the Internet and on the lips of friends and colleagues. The
first place is the story of Google and the explosion of the web. 10 – 15 years ago we wouldn’t have
given the Internet a second thought when looking for information about products and services.
Now, it is almost universally the first place people look. And it makes for the obvious marketing tool
because you get your company/product/service in front of a customer who is already looking for it.Talk about a hot prospect!
However, this paper isn’t about search strategies and how to rank well on Google (though we’ll
touch on that later). There are other resources and help for that, including Search Engine Watch ,
Search Engine Land , and especially my colleagues at Spice . This is a post about the second place
you need to be to be found by your customers: on the lips of friends and colleagues – otherwise
known as Word of Mouth (WoM). More to the point, this is a post about the intersection of the
Internet and WoM. This intersection is one of the pillars of social media for marketing purposes.
A study by MediaLab discovered that a recommendation from a friend would make 76% of people
more comfortable with a product or service – more so than advertising (15%) or even personal
experience (68%). In some ways I find it astonishing that people trust the opinions of others over
their own experience but I suppose we often seek validation. On the other hand, I am not at all
surprised that so few respond well to advertising and other traditional marketing channels (see
above).
One of the ways social media excels, for our purposes, is enabling the spread of information,
opinions and recommendations through people’s networks of friends and friends of friends across
the Internet.
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What is Social Media?
Social media or social networking is people having conversations, connecting and engaging online.
As opposed to traditional broadcast
media, which is a one way stream of
information, social media is characterised
by two way interaction.
It’s about creating and furthering
relationships using social platforms like
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace,
Bebo, blogs, etc. Now, we’ve all heard
about these platforms; you’d have to be a
particular kind of isolated not to have.
However, many of us make the mistake of limiting our understanding of social media
to these tools themselves. This is
misguided, as Jeremiah Owyang of
Altimeter Group asserts:
“(When it comes to social media) companies focus on the tools and
technologies, yet fail to understand the behaviours of their own customers
onl ine. As a result, they miss the mark.”
Don’t focus on the tools! The power of social media comes from people using the tools, whichever
tools, to create self-organised communities of like-minded individuals. And it’s the characteristics of
those communities that present opportunities for businesses to inform, understand and connect
with the people who buy their products and services.
We can see this at work all over the social networks. People join particular groups, follow/friend
certain people, and engage in discussions about topics which interest them. To apply some old
terms to this, social media enables and reveals micro-demographic groups with potentially very
narrow, targetable interests. If you sell widgets, it would be very beneficial to be plugged into the
widget fanboy community.
Figure 2 - photo from ktylerconk
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Why Does Social Media Matter?
By all accounts the growth of social media usage is astonishing. A few statistics:
By 2010 Generation Y (or Millennials) will outnumber Baby boomers; 96% of them have
joined a social network. These are your customers... now and increasingly as they get older.
Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activity, including beating
personal email. 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on
the internet is on social media sites.
If Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populated place in the world, behind
only India and China. [In January 2009, Facebook had 150m users; in February 2010 it had
400m].
Universal McCann reports that 77% of all active internet users regularly read blogs.
Twitter’s year-on-year growth rate is more than 1000% with 80% of usage taking place on
mobile devices. People update anytime anywhere – imagine what that means for badcustomer experience!
More stats like these can be found on Econsultancy here and here; as well as on Jeremiah
Owyang’s A Collection of Social Network Stats and Socialnomic’s Bigger Than You Think
video.
While impressive, statistics themselves don’t tell the whole story. More important than the actual
numbers is what we see in the underlying trend; namely that social media is growing fast and
spreading widely and not just in participation but in usage. People are spending more and more
time on social networks and are discussing, and being influenced about, companies, products and
brands.
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Can Social Media Help My Business?
Can social media help your business? I’d like to say “yes” without equivocation but I can’t do that in
good faith. Participation in social media is not a miracle drug, take one sip and all your problems are
solved. However, given what we have discussed so far in this post, it is clear that companies need to
incorporate a social media approach as part of their marketing strategy. [Again, I am concerned here
with marketing – I believe, however, that we should be looking at making our entire businesses
“social”, incorporating socialness in many or most aspects of what our companies and we do. That
will be a future topic.]
As a marketing strategy social media can deliver value in three main ways:
1. Community and relationship building – Engagement, being part of the conversation around
particular topics or areas of interest, builds familiarity and trust with people, and garners
notice. Being an active, positive brand in the marketplace = good brand image. Customers
want to deal with businesses they feel a connection with.
2. Creating authority - by helping people, giving away info/expertise, answering questions,
providing insight, etc. in the social network arena a company establishes its credibility, its
value, its quality. Customers want to do business with authoritative, quality brands.
3. Search engine success - When ranking for organic search results (e.g. appearing at the top of
the list when people search for something), Google weighs offsite Search Engine
Optimisation (SEO) efforts (external links to your website) 75% to 25% for onsite SEO
(keywords used on your website). One of the best ways to build quality links is through
blogging and social networking engagement. This is important and will remains so. But, it is
in the collision of search and social media, social search, where things get really interesting.
Generally speaking, there are two parts to a social media marketing approach: content and channel
distribution/engagement.
The heart of any social media marketing programme is content, usually created through a blog but
also can include video, pictures, polls, whitepapers, ebooks, reports, e-newsletters, etc. In general
content is information in one f orm or another that makes people want to pay attention to you. It’s
helpful, informative, interesting. It is through this content that customers or referrers find out about
you, what you do, and how you can help them.
This is a subsection of social media marketing called content marketing. Content marketing refers to
the technique of creating and freely sharing informative content as a means of converting prospects
into customers and customers into repeat buyers.
Creating great content for your marketing is important. But great content doesn’t distribute itself. It
needs vehicles (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) for people to pass it along, discuss its merits, argue
over its controversies, blog it, mash it, tweet it and even scrape it. This is where the social networks
come in. [This is an oversimplification and, in some ways, does a disservice to the real connection
and conversation aspects of social engagement, but bear with me.]
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The best distribution network in the world is
pointless if you have nothing to deliver
across it. You might have a million followers
on Twitter, but unless you engage those
followers, they won’t listen and you will
achieve nothing. Equally, what is the point
in fabulous content if no one ever hears
about it?
Social media is an unsurpassed tool for
getting content distributed. On the flip side,
great content gives social media life, by
giving people something more interesting to
talk about than what they’re ordering right
now at Starbucks.
Figure 3 - graphic from Intersection Consulting
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allowing employees to be as personal, natural and authentic as possible in their dealings with
others).
Manage
This is the day to day execution of the programme. Depending on the strategy, it may include some
or all of these: content production and publishing, content distribution, reputation management,
community engagement, customer support, business intelligence (competitor activity, customer
insights), brand management, market research, monitoring, measurement and analytics.
Measure
I mentioned measurement as part of the management function because there is a regular ongoing
aspect to it, but I want to highlight it further as it should be a significant part of your entire
programme. It is through proper measurement that you understand if your objective are being met
and, if not, to help you reassess your strategy and/or tactics (or even the people responsible for
carrying them out).
Measuring is defined by both the “what” and the “how.” What are we going to measure? Is it
measurable? Is it the right thing to measure? The “what” question goes back to the strategy
development piece and should have been defined then and there. The currency here is probably
numbers or statistics: numbers of followers/friends, number of social mentions, click-throughs,
comments, website visitors, discussions, emails delivered, and, ideally, sales. But the currency might
also be less defined: positive or negative press, change in sentiment about your brand, company or
product, tone of discussions, and positive or negative word of mouth.
The “how” begins with monitoring (which should have started even before the strategy work) using
tools and processes that enable you to track the results of your activities. This means social media
monitoring tools, conversion metrics, web analytics, RSS feed counters, even things like feedback
forms, surveys, and customer recommendations.
However, monitoring is not measuring. People often get them mixed up. Measuring is how we
calculate the results of our monitoring over time against our objectives to test whether we are
achieving them. Again, measuring is so important because tells us if we are having success.
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Review
As your social media plan progresses you should be analysing your results against the milestone
expectations you established at the outset. Review your plan regularly and if things aren’t working
as you intended, adjust your approach. It is a cyclical process of regular reviewing and refining.
Figure 5 - The Process Flow
I would argue patience. Social media marketing takes time. It needs to build slowly as your regular
interaction and engagement increases familiarity and builds trust. So, your plan should reflect this.Don’t expect skyrocketing results in a few days or weeks.
We’ve talked here about using social media for marketing, for making connections to “promote”
products or solutions and sell more stuff. However, within the review process is an opportunity to
understand your customers and to tweak your offering(s) to better fit what they want. This may
muddy my “marketing-only” message with something that leaks over into product development but
I’ll risk that because it underscores the important two-way nature of proper engagement in the
social networks.
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Summary
The marketing landscape has changed. Consumers are responding less and less to traditional
marketing messages. Instead they are seeking the recommendation of friends and colleagues and
the familiarity of personal connection and interaction. And this is where social media marketing
comes in.
Participation in social networks, online, and in blogs is growing at an astonishing rate. The most
important thing about this for marketers is the proof that people are gathering in the social spaces
around shared interests and ideals. Organisations and brands now can connect with interested
potential customers by engaging with them in the networks. The overwhelming prevalence of
people using social networking and looking to those networks for information and recommendations
about products, services and brands means that companies need a social media strategy today or
they risk falling out of touch with their customers and behind their competitors.
Social media efforts should be treated with the same rigor as other business planning; they should
be properly strategised and structured with end-to-end processes put in place and appropriate
methods established to measure outcomes and success.
I hope that this whitepaper has helped readers understand the rationale for and principals behind
social media marketing. If you have further questions, you can get in touch with me here:
eric@spice.co.uk. For more information about Spice’s range of services, please visit
www.spice.co.uk. We are always happy to have a chat to see if we can help.
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© Copyright Spice Consultants (London) Limited 2010. All rights reserved.
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