Social Marketing: It's Not What You Think It Means
When most people talk about “social media,” what they’re really talking about is social marketing—the “tip of the iceberg.” This is quite possibly the most fundamental misunderstanding of Social Customer Management and social business. Often, senior executives will hire a strategic consulting team, specializing in social business, then hand them off to the company’s advertising or marketing teams. This setup sends what could have been a cross-functional voice-of-the-customer engagement into an outsourced marketing dead zone. Bye-bye executive sponsorship.
Social marketing only embraces one singular use case of social content: the part that generates customer interest in products or services. There is, however, a general misconception on the part of most consumer brands that social marketing is the be-all-end-all use case for social media or relationships with the social customer. I think the reason is what I call the “first exposure” problem: that most senior executives (people over the age of 40 or 45) were first exposed to social media via a big-brand marketing asset on the social Web (e.g., the Chili’s Facebook page or the Starbucks Twitter stream). Whatever the reasoning, social marketing is a single use case category (Jeremiah and Ray’s study gave it three subcategories, but we’ll be adding a fourth here).
SOCIAL MARKETING INSIGHTS (NUMBER 2)
What Is It and Why Do We Need to Use It?
Companies are confused about the gravity and influence of what the social customer is saying about them, because it’s simply not enough for a brand to run a Twitter or Google search of their brand name (try it—what action can you really take with the results?).
When a company says, “We’re really puzzled and worried because it seems like there’s more information about our brand on the social Web than we have customer data in our internal studies and reports, and we can’t tell which pieces of the data are the most important,” (e.g., “Facebook knows more about us than we do”) that means they have a problem with their social marketing insights. There’s one overwhelming common phrase in all social media and social customer strategy: listen before talking. Without deploying some kind of social marketing insights solution, a brand will have no idea what their customers are saying. The key value here is that not only will brands know who the influencers are in the conversation, but they’ll know which conversational streams about the brand are most important (“Why don’t you make a gluten-free pizza crust? Why isn’t there more available in plus sizes?”).
Which Consumer Brands Are Using It?
The list here is pretty mind-boggling. Unfortunately, social marketing insights are the 20-minute drum solo of the Social CRM use cases; everyone’s doing it but very few brands do it artfully or very well. Critical challenges typically faced because of this are (1) competitive differentiation and (2) razor-sharp metrics. At this point I would be hard-pressed to say that I’ve walked into many medium sized ($250 million+) B2C companies in 2010 that were not using some form of social marketing insights technology. Nearly every one of my clients has used it, from big brands like Hershey’s Chocolate all the way down to medium-sized companies like leisure-cruise brand Hornblower Cruises. When we were approached by Hershey’s a couple of years ago, they wanted to learn where their premium gourmet chocolate brands (Dagoba and Scharffen Berger) stood in the mind of the social customer relative to the competition.
Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here.
This installment begins Chapter 5: Social Marketing. Adam starts by clearing up a misconception, which is always a good way to start.
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