We were at Total Telecom's Wireless World and met Jeremy George, the emerging market mobile industry expert. Jeremy told us about his mobile industry experience, how the phone market differs to other continents, how the mobile industry contributes to African economies, what he thinks of analyst predictions, and outlines the opportunity for investors in Africa.
The media, public relations, companies we meet, best practice and things that get our goat.
Wednesday 20 June 2012
Who we met at Wireless World
We were at Total Telecom's Wireless World and met Jeremy George, the emerging market mobile industry expert. Jeremy told us about his mobile industry experience, how the phone market differs to other continents, how the mobile industry contributes to African economies, what he thinks of analyst predictions, and outlines the opportunity for investors in Africa.
Tuesday 19 June 2012
The sin of social media cynicism
The last few weeks have seen social media platforms criticised for their profitability, their privacy and their popularity. These are all important areas of concern for social media marketers – yet the contemporary marketing community responds with ire when anyone questions social media, as if doing so is sacrilegious. But in a JS Mill sense, the industry needs to question social media’s effectiveness to know the truth of its value. Particularly in the current climate, marketers that aren’t approaching these relatively new platforms with an air of cynicism may not be as focused on the return on investment of their activities as they should be. In particular those marketers that are exclusively executing social media campaigns – naturally the greatest proponents of social media marketing –should be the most cynical, as they’re the ones being given the budget. Being cynical is responsible, not reprehensible. So let’s be responsibly sinful, and indulge in some social media cynicism.
We’ll just start with a flag wave: when Twitter takes to TV advertising and running its own events, and LinkedIn exhibits at trade shows – both promoting their advertising services – it says something about social media marketing.
The figures for social media adoption are impressive: the UK alone has more than 30 million Facebook users and 10 million Twitter users. But realistically, this means the best reach UK marketers can hope for through social media marketing is half the British public – compared to the 96 per cent of UK households which have a TV and the 46.7 million British adults who listen to the radio every week. Further, many people have set up social media accounts, but don’t use them. In October 2011, only a quarter of Twitter accounts were active. Let’s face it, if the stats showed that 75 per cent of people with a TV never watched it, the cost of advertising via that medium would plummet. Add this to another problem with social media marketing – and something that’s actually counter intuitive – there’s effectively a lack of popular content channels compared to the hundreds of popular channels, programmes and sections available on mediums like TV, radio, and online news and print. When you think about it, non-social media represents a greater diversity of ways to influence people. The average number of “friends” a user has on Facebook is only 170 – and these “friends” are often derived from a similar social group to the user, so the user’s Facebook profile actually reflects a uniformity rather than a diversity of influencers. Thus the opportunity to communicate new ideas, products and services can be quite limited.
More cynicism came from CNBC and Associated Press in May 2010 where over-zealous marketers who choose to push all their money into social media advertising were challenged by survey results revealing that nearly six in ten Facebook users (57 per cent) never click on ads or other sponsored content on the site, while another quarter of Facebook users (26 per cent) rarely engage with such commercially generated content on the site. Granted, CNBC and AP have an interest in denigrating the advertising potential of Facebook, so consider their survey with the balanced level cynicism it deserves. Moreover those stats don’t really seem so bad when considering people’s personal opinion of online advertising in general. Most people don’t think that they are influenced by banners, skyscrapers and MPU ad units. But they are. People generally believe they ‘find’ stuff they want to buy on the ‘net. The concept that they have responded to a form of marketing doesn’t seem to enter their minds. They’re just wrong. Even when conducting searches through Google, Bing and Yahoo, it’s the search engine optimisation conducted by a marketer that brings up the product or service that the person decides to buy. What’s more, new ways of targeting people through social networks are delivering ads that are hyper relevant and hyper local to users. Such services are showing that Facebook advertising has to be done in the right way, by the right advertiser to the right user.
Also consider a strange result from a 2012 Chartered Institute of Marketing study that revealed that only 23 per cent of marketers believe that social media marketing can help brands to accrue new customers. The report, which looked at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn, also found that a third of the 1,500 marketers polled (34.5 per cent) said that their social media activity in 2011 was “not at all effective,” with only one in seven (13.7 per cent) reporting it was “extremely effective.” In spite of this, three quarters of marketers (74.5 per cent) plan to increase investment in the channel in 2012. Hopefully this isn’t a demonstration of irresponsible marketers throwing good budget after bad at the new, “cool” social media channels regardless of the results. It may be that these marketers have played around with social media over the past few years, realized what works and what doesn’t, and are investing in the activities that deliver results. It’s inarguable that the British public is increasingly embracing social media as an essential part of their everyday lifestyle, and social media’s incorporation into traditional media channels’ activities is driving adoption – however marketers must keep the absolute numbers of potential audience in mind.
The attributes of the social media audience must also be considered. Of course the younger generations have been faster to adopt social media – whether out of peer pressure, a carefree attitude to their personal data, a way of feeling popular, or just to keep watch on whether the person they fancied in school is single yet. More than 88 per cent of 18-34 year olds now have social media profiles, so huge amounts of marketers feel they must tap into this market. Yet much of this core target audience have either recently graduated, are out of work or, most importantly, have little money available to spend in the current economic climate.
A much larger problem is that there’s still something of a blind spot around social media. The medium is still very new and, while it’s difficult for marketers to ignore international networks of over 800 million potential customers, social media’s measurement metrics are notoriously woolly. Evaluation is a problem for many traditional marketing disciplines, including public relations, but such issues don’t affect other sections of the online marketing mix. There’re fewer problems discovering the return on investment for straight-up online ad campaigns or email marketing campaigns for example.
In tough economic times marketers need to be able to be held accountable, and need to be able to prove the ROI of any activity. The PR industry has struggled with this very issue, but with the right client or product and the right systems in place, it can be done. The best example is when working for the mobile apps industry. When Parker, Wayne & Kent provides media relations to raise awareness of new mobile apps, as we did for Skycom’s 0800 Wizard, we’ve seen app downloads being directly boosted by media coverage – in Skycom’s case multiplying their downloads ten-fold overnight. What’s more, the online news coverage has a long linger time, so the fact that those articles can been seen when users conduct searches through Google means that the PR activity lasts long into the future. As such we’re able to provide clients with demonstrable success and ROI from their relatively minor expenditure on PR.
This raises another issue for social media campaigns – the results can be fleeting. Whist the adage of “Today’s news is tomorrow’s chips,” hardly applies now as online media articles last pretty much forever, for social media there needs to be a new adage. Maybe “A hashtag at one, by two will be gone.” Ideally something better. You get the point.
Take 20th Century Fox’s recent innovative approach to social media marketing when it advertised its new sci-fi movie Prometheus during an episode of Channel 4 show Homeland. The ad, which was screened simultaneously on TV, online and on Zeebox, accrued a positive reaction, but the praise didn’t last very long. An Econsultancy blog revealed activity peaked at around 4,000 tweets on the night of the broadcast and #areyouseeingthis was trending briefly on the social networking site, but the number of tweets quickly fell back down to zero. Tweets broadcast during the show’s second ad break were all positive, but as you should expect when using social media channels, some more troll-like users poured scorn on the experiment for being “an advert for Twitter” and labelled it “boring” and “lame.” (You have to be prepared for public criticism with social media campaigns.)
Twitter’s appeal is its immediacy, but for such a large investment in technology, time and manpower – not to mention the cost of an entire 3 minute ad break in a primetime show – most businesses would expect a much longer lasting effect. Granted the campaign gained a bit more longevity by the pre-event coverage that the experiment was going to happen in traditional media such as the Radio Times, Digital Spy, the Metro and the spots on Channel 4 itself promoting the sponsored ad break. However that’s the interesting part. This social media campaign was reliant on traditional media to get it started and it was the media coverage that gave the campaign much of its value.
For most companies these sorts of ostentatious social media campaigns are well beyond budget limitations. It does, however, highlight the amount of investment that can be poured into social media without really considering the ROI.
The 20th Century Fox case study also challenges the dangerous perception that social media marketing is cheap, or even free. It’s not. Common costs for marketers implementing social media plans include content creation, training, measurement and monitoring systems. The major cost however is labour, and it’s often the most overlooked. To produce the amount of content that will keep people constantly engaged requires an enormous amount of man hours, and squeezes margins for smaller businesses.
A lack of clear measurement means that marketers are still unsure as to what those margins even are. Many companies now outsource their social media activity to agencies, use software to tweet for them – effectively setting up “bots” – while others employ staff members or even unpaid interns solely to handle it. While these costs are easily measured, the rewards still aren’t. Still less measurable is getting one or more employees working on the social activity in addition to their other duties. Social media marketing is a considerable investment, and unfortunately for marketers the ‘likes’ ‘shares’ and ‘retweets’ gained by their social activity isn’t often measured in sales, it’s measured in terms of influence, reach and volume.
ROI isn’t the only factor to consider when talking about social media, but it’s an extremely important one that all too often gets overlooked in the excitement it has sparked. In tough economic times every penny counts, margins are being squeezed and efficiencies have to be made. Social media can be an excellent customer service tool, and it’s getting to be that any company without a social media presence is regarded in the same manner as a company which doesn’t have a website. But this doesn’t mean that marketers need to throw half their budget into it.
Social media and the tools of social media marketing need to be integrated into every marketing communications activity so it no longer remains a separate discipline but is part of every marketing communications practice area: advertising, brand management, events, public relations, direct mail, promotional merchandise, point-of-sale, loyalty and rewards programmes – every marcomms channel. Moreover, to be efficient, social media marketing activities must be considered strategically, researched, defined and tested before committing to the activity. The best and most efficient social media campaigns are the ones that inspire the social community to engage with the brand, rather than force feeding users messages. Building a participatory social media community which encourages friends, fans and followers to create their own content takes the effort, resources and time away from the marketer and provides users with a much more involved, personal and engaging brand experience. In tough economic times like these, companies need to ask themselves why they should be investing in staff, content and agency costs when there is a massive community out there that will do all the work for them for free, if encouraged by the right social media strategy.
We’ll just start with a flag wave: when Twitter takes to TV advertising and running its own events, and LinkedIn exhibits at trade shows – both promoting their advertising services – it says something about social media marketing.
The figures for social media adoption are impressive: the UK alone has more than 30 million Facebook users and 10 million Twitter users. But realistically, this means the best reach UK marketers can hope for through social media marketing is half the British public – compared to the 96 per cent of UK households which have a TV and the 46.7 million British adults who listen to the radio every week. Further, many people have set up social media accounts, but don’t use them. In October 2011, only a quarter of Twitter accounts were active. Let’s face it, if the stats showed that 75 per cent of people with a TV never watched it, the cost of advertising via that medium would plummet. Add this to another problem with social media marketing – and something that’s actually counter intuitive – there’s effectively a lack of popular content channels compared to the hundreds of popular channels, programmes and sections available on mediums like TV, radio, and online news and print. When you think about it, non-social media represents a greater diversity of ways to influence people. The average number of “friends” a user has on Facebook is only 170 – and these “friends” are often derived from a similar social group to the user, so the user’s Facebook profile actually reflects a uniformity rather than a diversity of influencers. Thus the opportunity to communicate new ideas, products and services can be quite limited.
More cynicism came from CNBC and Associated Press in May 2010 where over-zealous marketers who choose to push all their money into social media advertising were challenged by survey results revealing that nearly six in ten Facebook users (57 per cent) never click on ads or other sponsored content on the site, while another quarter of Facebook users (26 per cent) rarely engage with such commercially generated content on the site. Granted, CNBC and AP have an interest in denigrating the advertising potential of Facebook, so consider their survey with the balanced level cynicism it deserves. Moreover those stats don’t really seem so bad when considering people’s personal opinion of online advertising in general. Most people don’t think that they are influenced by banners, skyscrapers and MPU ad units. But they are. People generally believe they ‘find’ stuff they want to buy on the ‘net. The concept that they have responded to a form of marketing doesn’t seem to enter their minds. They’re just wrong. Even when conducting searches through Google, Bing and Yahoo, it’s the search engine optimisation conducted by a marketer that brings up the product or service that the person decides to buy. What’s more, new ways of targeting people through social networks are delivering ads that are hyper relevant and hyper local to users. Such services are showing that Facebook advertising has to be done in the right way, by the right advertiser to the right user.
Also consider a strange result from a 2012 Chartered Institute of Marketing study that revealed that only 23 per cent of marketers believe that social media marketing can help brands to accrue new customers. The report, which looked at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn, also found that a third of the 1,500 marketers polled (34.5 per cent) said that their social media activity in 2011 was “not at all effective,” with only one in seven (13.7 per cent) reporting it was “extremely effective.” In spite of this, three quarters of marketers (74.5 per cent) plan to increase investment in the channel in 2012. Hopefully this isn’t a demonstration of irresponsible marketers throwing good budget after bad at the new, “cool” social media channels regardless of the results. It may be that these marketers have played around with social media over the past few years, realized what works and what doesn’t, and are investing in the activities that deliver results. It’s inarguable that the British public is increasingly embracing social media as an essential part of their everyday lifestyle, and social media’s incorporation into traditional media channels’ activities is driving adoption – however marketers must keep the absolute numbers of potential audience in mind.
The attributes of the social media audience must also be considered. Of course the younger generations have been faster to adopt social media – whether out of peer pressure, a carefree attitude to their personal data, a way of feeling popular, or just to keep watch on whether the person they fancied in school is single yet. More than 88 per cent of 18-34 year olds now have social media profiles, so huge amounts of marketers feel they must tap into this market. Yet much of this core target audience have either recently graduated, are out of work or, most importantly, have little money available to spend in the current economic climate.
A much larger problem is that there’s still something of a blind spot around social media. The medium is still very new and, while it’s difficult for marketers to ignore international networks of over 800 million potential customers, social media’s measurement metrics are notoriously woolly. Evaluation is a problem for many traditional marketing disciplines, including public relations, but such issues don’t affect other sections of the online marketing mix. There’re fewer problems discovering the return on investment for straight-up online ad campaigns or email marketing campaigns for example.
In tough economic times marketers need to be able to be held accountable, and need to be able to prove the ROI of any activity. The PR industry has struggled with this very issue, but with the right client or product and the right systems in place, it can be done. The best example is when working for the mobile apps industry. When Parker, Wayne & Kent provides media relations to raise awareness of new mobile apps, as we did for Skycom’s 0800 Wizard, we’ve seen app downloads being directly boosted by media coverage – in Skycom’s case multiplying their downloads ten-fold overnight. What’s more, the online news coverage has a long linger time, so the fact that those articles can been seen when users conduct searches through Google means that the PR activity lasts long into the future. As such we’re able to provide clients with demonstrable success and ROI from their relatively minor expenditure on PR.
This raises another issue for social media campaigns – the results can be fleeting. Whist the adage of “Today’s news is tomorrow’s chips,” hardly applies now as online media articles last pretty much forever, for social media there needs to be a new adage. Maybe “A hashtag at one, by two will be gone.” Ideally something better. You get the point.
Take 20th Century Fox’s recent innovative approach to social media marketing when it advertised its new sci-fi movie Prometheus during an episode of Channel 4 show Homeland. The ad, which was screened simultaneously on TV, online and on Zeebox, accrued a positive reaction, but the praise didn’t last very long. An Econsultancy blog revealed activity peaked at around 4,000 tweets on the night of the broadcast and #areyouseeingthis was trending briefly on the social networking site, but the number of tweets quickly fell back down to zero. Tweets broadcast during the show’s second ad break were all positive, but as you should expect when using social media channels, some more troll-like users poured scorn on the experiment for being “an advert for Twitter” and labelled it “boring” and “lame.” (You have to be prepared for public criticism with social media campaigns.)
Twitter’s appeal is its immediacy, but for such a large investment in technology, time and manpower – not to mention the cost of an entire 3 minute ad break in a primetime show – most businesses would expect a much longer lasting effect. Granted the campaign gained a bit more longevity by the pre-event coverage that the experiment was going to happen in traditional media such as the Radio Times, Digital Spy, the Metro and the spots on Channel 4 itself promoting the sponsored ad break. However that’s the interesting part. This social media campaign was reliant on traditional media to get it started and it was the media coverage that gave the campaign much of its value.
For most companies these sorts of ostentatious social media campaigns are well beyond budget limitations. It does, however, highlight the amount of investment that can be poured into social media without really considering the ROI.
The 20th Century Fox case study also challenges the dangerous perception that social media marketing is cheap, or even free. It’s not. Common costs for marketers implementing social media plans include content creation, training, measurement and monitoring systems. The major cost however is labour, and it’s often the most overlooked. To produce the amount of content that will keep people constantly engaged requires an enormous amount of man hours, and squeezes margins for smaller businesses.
A lack of clear measurement means that marketers are still unsure as to what those margins even are. Many companies now outsource their social media activity to agencies, use software to tweet for them – effectively setting up “bots” – while others employ staff members or even unpaid interns solely to handle it. While these costs are easily measured, the rewards still aren’t. Still less measurable is getting one or more employees working on the social activity in addition to their other duties. Social media marketing is a considerable investment, and unfortunately for marketers the ‘likes’ ‘shares’ and ‘retweets’ gained by their social activity isn’t often measured in sales, it’s measured in terms of influence, reach and volume.
ROI isn’t the only factor to consider when talking about social media, but it’s an extremely important one that all too often gets overlooked in the excitement it has sparked. In tough economic times every penny counts, margins are being squeezed and efficiencies have to be made. Social media can be an excellent customer service tool, and it’s getting to be that any company without a social media presence is regarded in the same manner as a company which doesn’t have a website. But this doesn’t mean that marketers need to throw half their budget into it.
Social media and the tools of social media marketing need to be integrated into every marketing communications activity so it no longer remains a separate discipline but is part of every marketing communications practice area: advertising, brand management, events, public relations, direct mail, promotional merchandise, point-of-sale, loyalty and rewards programmes – every marcomms channel. Moreover, to be efficient, social media marketing activities must be considered strategically, researched, defined and tested before committing to the activity. The best and most efficient social media campaigns are the ones that inspire the social community to engage with the brand, rather than force feeding users messages. Building a participatory social media community which encourages friends, fans and followers to create their own content takes the effort, resources and time away from the marketer and provides users with a much more involved, personal and engaging brand experience. In tough economic times like these, companies need to ask themselves why they should be investing in staff, content and agency costs when there is a massive community out there that will do all the work for them for free, if encouraged by the right social media strategy.
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