While at the Corporate Image and Branding conference in New York City on Thursday, I was lucky enough to hear a presentation by Bernd Schmitt. The thesis of Bernd’s presentation, that successful brands think big and innovate in ways that disrupt the status quo, is hardly new, but his delivery was very engaging. In one almost throwaway line he suggested that it was “narrow thinking” that resulted in the financial bubble that catapulted us into the Great Recession. This was a great segue to my presentation because I think that very similar narrow thinking is creating a social media bubble today.
The AdReaction 2009 study conducted by Dynamic Logic finds that 59 percent of Internet users are actively engaged with social networking sites. (Click here to learn more.) Data from Alexa.com has identified Facebook and YouTube as the world’s second- and third-most-visited Web sites. If the eyeballs are on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (to name just a few), then that’s where brands want to be. Brands like Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and Dove have been widely praised for how well they have used these new channels. But as I suggested in my post last week, these brands owe a large part of their social media success to the strong relationships they already had with consumers. Apart from behemoths like these, the brands and businesses that have benefited most from the rise of social media are small.
For instance, in a special Economist report on social media, Krystin Rubin, the co-owner of Mission Pie, reportedly credits Twitter for part of the success of her business. The report suggests that over a thousand people now follow the baker’s tweets. So for Mission Pie in San Francisco, tweeting allows access to a large number of potential purchasers relative to its existing customer base. But one thousand followers does not even represent a drop in the ocean for a mass-market brand like Coca-Cola. The brand’s four million Facebook fans represent a more substantial proportion of Coca-Cola’s global customer base, but is still a small minority of the brand’s overall franchise.
The sad truth is that for most big brands, like the ones our clients tend to own, social media is simply another touch point—a great means to engage already loyal customers on an ongoing basis, but not a means to build presence. To build presence, a brand must resort to media with mass reach. And it is not just brands that rely on mass media for their social media success. Take the example of the Rage Against The Machine Facebook campaign, on which I reported over the holidays. Would 750,000 people have signed up to that campaign if the mass media had not covered it with growing attention during the crucial pre-Xmas week? I doubt it.
Before I close, here is another statistic from the Dynamic Logic AdReaction study. Of those people actively engaged with social media in all of its myriad forms, only 13 percent claimed to follow a brand. This tends to support the comment made by Brian Morrissey of AdAge, who pointed out at the “140 Character Conference” in New York, “People don’t go to these channels to talk about brands. If you’re not adding value, you’re spam.” And what value are people looking for? New product information, discounts, deals, competitions, and giveaways. So while some fans may be true loyalists, many are just looking for a deal. Unless you can find ways to truly engage people, social media sites represent a potential slippery slope that could lead you to pay your customers to be fans.
All of this leads me to believe that social media is no way for a mass market brand to disrupt the status quo. It is simply an additional means to communicate and engage your loyal customers. And unless you do it right by creating engaging content and listening to the response, you risk undermining your brand rather than strengthening it. OK, that’s my penny’s worth. What’s yours?
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February 1st, 2010 at 4:41 am
I concur
but is any of this suprising?
I keep it in perspective by following my formula C+E+O=Marketing Objective
The configuartaion of Communication + Experience + Overtures can be aligned to support many different marketing objectives: Trial, (depth of) Purchase, attitudinal retention etc…
breaking out customer segments and media completes the matrix and helps keep things in general alignment
My penny’s worth
cheers
Miro
February 1st, 2010 at 5:50 am
To Continue:
social media has 4 main functions
1. crowdsourcing
2. call center
3. passive research/sentiment tracking
4. conversation (buzz, pos/neg rants, and dialogue)
is it a disruptive channel? …potentially to some
but not enough bankable critical mass unless it somehow morphs into a viral event…which is truly a long tail probability
i think the more interesting question to ask is…what do consumers want?
do they want to be treated as ….consumers? (make me an offer and i’ll decide if i want to purchase it or not…make it shiny, bribe me, entice me)
or do they want to be treated like partners helping chart the course of the brand and the institution behind it by deciding where, when, how they choose to bestow their financial value upon the brand/institution.
For all the talk and new media channels …most try to motivate consumer-ism …some brand-ism and fewer still partner-ism
cheers
February 1st, 2010 at 6:49 am
Hi Nigel,
Totally agree, brand managers need to be doing stuff in social media off their own backs, instead of ramping up risk by hiring agencies to tweet and create content themselves, only to be massively disappointed by low returns.
Unfortunately, a lot of marketers still have a ‘follower and fan fixation’, which isn’t healthy.
One thing though, is disruption really the only way to grow a brand?
February 1st, 2010 at 9:03 am
Has anyone done any research into who ‘be-friends’ or ‘follows’ ubiquitous, mass market brands (as if information on said organizations is rare or valuable)?
I assume they over index on the unibomber/recluse segment of consumers who really need to get some real friends? The remainder probably being employee’s or agencies of said company.
Probably the same people who comment on corporate blogs?
February 1st, 2010 at 9:25 am
[...] Nigel Hollis – chief adresearch guru at Millward Brown – has been musing on the relative roles of Mass & Social Media and whether on [...]
February 1st, 2010 at 10:47 am
Agreed, social should be viewed as just another touch point in an integrated marketing strategy. High involvement brands have more opportunity to benefit in this space. Brand managers + their agencies should keep this in mind. To quote Alan Wolk: “Your brand is not my friend”.
February 1st, 2010 at 11:53 am
I’ve been thinking about the social media bubble for a while, but I’m more interested in what you’re saying. We’ve seen the “popularity contest” play out with some brands. In that vein, Facebook is a good test of past marketing. If the brand has done well creating a likeable brand, then people will fan the page. If it hasn’t, they won’t. And no real trickery will help.
One final point: if Coke’s 4 million fans are just impressions, then I agree it’s a small number. But if those people can be motivated, then the number is more like 4 million x 126 — the average number of friends people have online.
So the strategy is to amass then organize, it can actually turn into a profitable tactic.
February 1st, 2010 at 1:20 pm
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February 1st, 2010 at 1:37 pm
OK, more comment than I can sensibly comment on right now! Couple of quick thoughts:
Miro, nice summary of the roles for which social media can be used.
DCJ, I believe Dynamic Logic found 20% of U.S. Internet users were into social media and the rest were more ho hum. Not sure what that says about brand fans other than the fact they may not be representative of the broader audience.
Matt, good point about mobilization but to hark back to a previous question, have you got a good example of a brand that did so?
Google alerted me to that fact that Mark Earls thinks I assume social media are the same (but smaller version of mass media). Sorry Mark, you assume too much! I am suggesting that marketers are creating a bubble by not recognizing what it takes to play in the social media space but are jumping in anyway.
February 1st, 2010 at 3:26 pm
Nigel,
Thanks for posting! I wish AdAge and AdWeek would reprint this so more folks — especially corporate brand managers — could read it.
There’s a fuss and rush to do all things social media at many companies, without a sense of realism — that social is likely just another tool in the marketing toolbox.
Pete
February 2nd, 2010 at 9:08 am
Thanks Pete. And here is a new item to add to the mix. Pepsi is apparently dumping the Superbowl in favor the community-oriented Pepsi Refresh program based round Facebook. As noted in the post this is a major financial and cultural shift.
February 2nd, 2010 at 9:18 am
@Mike Laurie, is disruption the only way to build your brand? No but it sure is a lot quicker than brand-building by repetition. Our analysis suggests that growth depends on encouraging people to see your brand as “different in a good way.” Innovation, in business model, product experience, positioning or actions are the keys to creating that perceived differentiation.
February 5th, 2010 at 5:43 am
I wonder if it’s truer to say that brands can BE disrupted on social media but not disrupt?
DCJ - I suspect the brand fans are people with a lower participation barrier, rather than recluses: people who don’t really ‘curate’ their social media presence much. They see a “become a fan” button, click it, and that’s the limit of their engagement most likely.
As for the bubble - in marketing terms maybe it is, maybe it isn’t - there have been plenty of people in each camp for a few years now and the answer is still “wait and see”. The initial hype is already turning into a more “show me the money/ROI” proposition but even a lot of that is blogosphere tough talk. The one thing I’m sure of is that I can’t see a credible scenario whereby people stop using these tools.
February 15th, 2010 at 5:19 pm
Social Media Bubble? Absolutely. It’s not a brand building tool. As I see it, that’s the job of paid media -TV, Radio, Out-of-Home. Social Networks are tactical tools for Customer Relationship Management - enabling transactions and customer service, spreading word-of-mouth regarding the user experience and promotions. The example I like is how Dell generated $5M in sales on the Twitter channel. This represented a number so small, relative to their total annual sales, that it showed up as zeros on my calculator. Even at that, it wouldn’t have happened for an obscure brand. Thanks for putting Social Media in perspective. Cheers, Ted.
February 15th, 2010 at 6:00 pm
Hi Ted, thanks for the comment. Good point about Dell. I still find it suprising that so many people lose their sense of proportion when it comes to something like Twitter.