Monthly Archives: September 2011

Social Media is Marketers’ El Dorado: Hype or Reality?

I am sure you noticed that also: it seems that with this economy (check the recently published World Economic Report 2011 by Financial Times), while worldwide financial markets suggest to pursue a modern “gold rush”, it looks like companies are rather pursuing some kind of “social rush”. Never like in these months businesses are talking about social media, using them, investing in them, hiring people to manage them and launching new ones. And funny enough, social media are the most frequent news on the traditional press.

The debate is still open: some say social media are a tremendous business and an incredibly effective channel for marketing and invest more and more on them (revenues are expected to double for Facebook and go from $45M to $400M for Twitter) , hire people, web agencies, buy platforms and reinvent their business.

Some others consider social media just a waste of time, a hype on its way to a decline and proudly tell they are not on social networks and they don’t need to be there. Maybe they did not notice their audience is there. I wonder why struggle with sending marketing messages all over places where your clients may just walk by, instead of those where they spend their time.

I am currently running a Social Media survey (please take it here, it’s just 10 questions) and my results say it clearly: more than half the interviewed companies are planning to increase their marketing dollars on social media for 2012. Final results to be published soon on this blog.

So I am sure many still wonder: will social media last?

Breath and relief: according to a recently published study by InSites Consulting, with a population of over 7Billion and 2Billions today already connected to social networks, only half of them (about 1B) are already on social networks. So there is definitely room for an improvement!

Social media adoption is uneven across the globe: In Europe, people join on average 1,9 social networks. In USA it’s 2,1; Brazil 3,1 and India 3,9. Uneven is also the social media awareness: while Social Insites estimates that Facebook awareness is about 100% of total connected population, and about 75% used it (with over half connecting every day), Twitter is used by only 16% of those who are aware of it.

With Facebook being at around 750M and remembering about that other analysis I posted back in July about the social media adoption curve, drawing from the Rogers’ model on technology adoption, this is an additional confirmation of my thoughts: we are almost half the way on the social media technology adoption curve. And with 2B connected out of the 7B, the more time goes, the situation should not change that quickly.

So, to answer our question: are social media the new El Dorado? The short answer seems Yes.

Yes, because according to this study, people join more than 1 social network, with Asia driving the truck to up to 4 social networks per person (I wonder how much this may be influenced by languages). See this image to learn more:

Please don’t jump yet for your happyness: “No” could still be a possible answer. The study also reports – sorry Google+, bad news- that about 60% declare they don’t want any additional social network, and about 93% are either not planning to leave the SNs they are in, or not entering new ones.

Surely, results leave some room for all those startups launching new social networks in these months. And creative ideas or social networks around shared passions (shopping, travel, sports, food, business, etc) are still likely to attract members- you don’t need to abandon your favorite social network and join a new one. You can stay on both.

Nevertheless, with these numbers in mind, and the current penetration of existing social networks, the message is crystal clear: big existing social networks will get bigger; small social networks will get smaller. After all, it seems this rule applies to the entire economy in this global financial cycle.

You may had an idea of how big Facebook is willing to become if you remember Mark Zuckerberg’s speech at the f8 conference, where Facebook presented the latest news and future developments about the most crowded social networks. When talking about the apps and developers of Facebook apps, he said Facebook has been working with “over a thousand companies to develop new things on Facebook”.

To all those who are still quite sceptical about Social Media and Social Media marketing (according to the preliminary results from my survey, lack of support from execs is one of the top reasons for not having a social media strategy), I suggest they have a look at this image and see that not only their clients are on social media, their clients are also waiting for them and asking for something! Also those whose social media strategy equals to having banners placed on social networks or a facebook page with zero interaction should consider a proper social media strategy. Need help?

Lessons learned:

  • Social Media are today what IT has been in the past: not just a tool, but a nessessary component of every business strategy
  • Your clients are on social media. Why are you wasting your marketing budget somewhere else?
  • Your clients are on social media and are willing to talk to you.
  • Social media are the easiest and highest potenial for word of moouth: have your sales on social media and have them listen to your clients needs.
  • Different geographies have different social media penetration and potential. That potential also applies to your business.
  • Never underestimate the importance of the word “social” in social media / social networks.

Related posts and resources:

Social media around the world 2011

View more presentations from steven van belleghem

Customer centricity and social networks: why one cannot exclude the other.

As it may have happened to many of you in these days, I came across a video featuring Steve Jobs on stage during one of his speeches.

This one was from 1997, when Steve Jobs went back to Apple as CEO to re-launch the Apple computer business.  One of the guys in the audience asked him – not that politely- how he was planning to revamp a tech company if he did not understand about technology.


I believe Job’s statement was way bigger than how big Apple’s evolution has been since then. He said having a technology and then finding a way to sell it and make people use it it’s pointless. Having a technology that does what people want it’s what we need. Start with the customer and then have the technology department figure out how to deliver what customers want.

Steve Jobs- a genial mix of passion, usability and attention to detail (did you read that other story about the yellow tone of the second O in the Google brand not displaying correctly on the iPhone and Job’s call on a Sunday morning to discuss about that urgently? You can find it here)- got ahead of the usability for its products with that statement.

Customer centricity is what a lot of C-level  presentations have been talking about for over a decade in any industry.  A customer centric approach assists an organisation in building important relationships with internal and external customers. Wow- this is social network- We knew the recipe since over a decade!

Yet, today, while people on social networks keep showing they are desperately looking for a bigger interaction with brands, asking for that customer centricity that everybody used to talk about, only half the companies have implemented some kind of social networks strategy. Preliminary results from a survey I am currently running (take it here, it’s just 10 questions and I will share results on this blog) show that only less than 15% of companies with a Facebook page – which is by far the only social media strategy for a large majority of companies- got excellent results from it.  The reason is simple: they are not doing it right.

Social media are built to listen to customers first, and answer then.

Not sure you recall, but call centers (and the cheap Indian call centers) were the biggest talk of the town before the social networks became “the” news. The boom of call centers  was a clear signal that clients do want a direct contact with companies, regardless of where we are- B2B or B2C. B2C should learn from B2B how important this is today.

Why? Time has changed, information are more available and understandable by users, media diffusion has intensified the need for communicating two-ways. And companies cannot be deaf.

Not sure you noticed, but when social media started rising, call centers declined: there was a new way to let clients interact with brands.

Being customer centric means – with no exception- being easily reachable by clients. If traditional marketing channels were looking at providing the right message through the right channel (think about TV commercials), nowadays the keyword is still delivering these messages through the media where the audience is- but the audience has moved to social networks, and the rules have changed. Clients now have a keyboard and they write to you if they are not happy, they won’t just use their remote control and watch another TV channel.

And delivering a message through a network that is “social” means brands must be social too. I’ve seen so many companies using social networks like they used other 1-to-many channels in the past.

I have seen many companies keep placing banners on communities and using their Facebook page or heir twitter handle or their LinkedIn group like they used TV commercials in the past. They do no interact with their clients. Social media management is in marketing’s hands today- which is fine-, but it actually also requires an effort that is typical of customer service and sales (for their account management role). Social media management and a social media strategy cannot stay only in marketing’s hands. And most of all, it cannot be in the intern’s hands or with an agency – which will surely give your brand (along with its reputation) in an intern’s hands.

Think about what has recently happened to Versace with their Facebook page or to Chrysler with their Twitter handle, to name a couple: they had to sither shut down comments on Facebook or fire the media agency serving them, respectively. When I read these stories, I keep reminding a Latin sentence: scripta manent, verba volant, which means “what is written stays, words fly away”. This is why social media should be in experts’ hands and it should be part of a formal strategy.

We must remember we are constantly listened (read) by our audience, and also they are willing to talk back to us. They want to interact. This is what social networks are about: being social.  So social media marketing is not just marketing on a new channel  but it’s building a relation with clients, hat same relation that is usually built with meetings with clients, with sales calling them  and asking if everything is OK to keep the client “warm”.

And, of course, since numbers show the reason why people follow brands on social networks (see the 4Rs in the “related posts” section at the bottom of this post), companies should give them what they want. This is customer centricity. It’s not what we think they want. It’s what they ask for. And clients are surely not deaf!

Related posts: