5 reasons why brands fail with social media

by iain

1)  You can listen all you want

One of the great trends amongst the majority of social media agencies, and social media marketers, has been to implement social listening tools and procedures. In some quarters this has been way over hyped as the great and the good that social media brings to corporates. It has it’s place, but you can listen all you want, unless you are actually marketing across social networks, you are missing 90% of the value that they offer to your brand. Listening is important, but engaging is what marketing is about.

2) Social media is treated as a silo

If you have a separate social media strategy, you probably have already failed. You need a strategy around your marketing campaigns of which social media is an integral part. Granted social media gives you new ways to target people, and opens up huge possibilities with spreadable media, but should this not be just viewed as another channel which makes up your online strategy? After all customers and prospects may engage with you on several of your online destinations – your Facebook page, your blog, your corporate Twitter account, your campaign landing pages, micro-sites and your corporate website.

When companies treat their website differently from their Twitter account, which is managed separately from their Facebook page, and likewise with landing pages and micro-sites, you get what I call content paralysis. Great stuff might be being created and happening in different silo’s by different teams, but it just isn’t flowing through to the other channels. Often the larger a company, the more guilty they are of this.

If there was a single tool to create marketing promotions once and distribute them across all your online channels, including your social media sites/accounts, automating certain activities along the way, then this would make life easier, a lot easier. If you agree then reach out to me @oldstriker on Twitter, or richard_engagesciences on Skype, I have a solution for you :)

Unfortunately this has come too late for many of the brands that sponsored the World Cup. The Econsultancy report ‘How did brands use social media during the World Cup’ http://bit.ly/aBdVL9 shows that brands are still spending huge sums of marketing dollars sponsoring things like sporting events, even running some great content and competitions on their websites, yet not actually making the content work for them across social networks, therefore missing out on the actual long-tail of engagement, and the viral possibilities that Facebook and the like promote. What a waste!

3) Great content is hard to do

To go beyond listening, and leverage the viral nature of social networks, most experts tell you that you need to create great content. This stimulates the desire to share and allows your marketing efforts to really benefit from the inter-connected relationships of hundreds of millions of users. Problem is that great content, really great content that goes viral, is really, really hard to produce. Some companies like Oddcast have done great things to make it easier to produce viral content, but there is an easier way. Use templates for campaigns that have proven to be popular viral tactics – things such as sweepstakes, competitions, groupons and coupons, and quizzes all gain traction across social networks and appeal to people to get engaged and share.

4) Location, location, location is not just relevant for property

Never has this been more true than with what is beginning to happen right now with social networks. We are on the verge of a revolution, and most marketers are blissfully unaware. Foursquare, and Gowalla have led the charge. These are social networks that provide location based services and games. Foursquare for example allows you to ‘check-in’ to destinations via your mobile phone, and in return you friends can see where you have been and where you are. The huge rise in users of Foursquare has led Facebook to admit that they are planning location based features as well. What does this mean? Well it means that using EngageSciences you can create competitions and promotions that are dependent on people actually visiting physical destinations and ‘checking-in’ with the mobile. This is actually a fundamental change in what online campaigns can do for offline businesses.

5) You can’t miss what you can’t measure

Dabbling in social media, with no real way of measuring success, will leave many companies frustrated by their efforts. The much used term ‘joining the conversation’ is something that can be amorphous in terms of the measurement of goals. Focussing your social media marketing on brand engagement or lead generation through the use of promotions, allows very precise tracking of success metrics. The focus on conversion, whether that be the number of times a campaign drives consumer engagement (interactions) across web and social channels, or the number of leads generated through a range of call to actions, is the goal of the campaign. Be sure to use tools that provide the end to end process and tracking from promotion creation, distribution and call to action conversion. Goal management is the life and blood of future investment in social media marketing, so make sure it is central to the way you assess success.

14 Responses to 5 reasons why brands fail with social media

Sam Ford says: July 21, 2010 at 11:06 am

Great post. On the listening front, I think the biggest mistake people make with “too much listening” isn’t listening at all: it’s that they concentrate on hearing (collecting as much data about what people are saying) and don’t do much actual listening (doing something with that data). Engaging with what people are saying might lead to actually reaching directly out to them, but there are a variety of other active responses companies often don’t consider…

Judith says: August 3, 2010 at 7:37 pm

Really good post. I am so glad you addressed this! As a former reporter and PR person and now in social media good, valuable content is hard to do for many companies. They think Tweeting and FB and Linked In will bring customers over night. I read somewhere that measuring social media is not the same as measuring SEO, often times that is confused. Your paragraph on location based services has me wondering. How does this play in B2B vs. B2C? Any thoughts?

Richard Jones says: August 4, 2010 at 9:34 am

Judith thanks for your comment. You raise a good point. Location based services have a ton of interesting use cases I can think of in B2C – for example Mattel just linked up with Foursquare to run ‘trail hunts’ with prizes for their Barbie Video Doll launch. For B2B I think the use cases are less clear, but I am very interested to hear others thoughts on this.

Madeline says: August 6, 2010 at 1:41 pm

Are either of you aware of any studies on the use of social media by the affluent? Which social media avenues/applications are they using and how?

Levente says: August 15, 2010 at 7:57 pm

Hello everyone,

exciting to read all these good thoughts and ideas. I’d like to share my thoughts – as a comms person, who is responsible for the social media presence of a B2B IT company – about how a B2B can leverage the possibilities of a location based sm service. As I see, the topic itself ( what a B2B should do with social media) should be handled differently from B2Cs.

As for the location sharing: B2Bs can use it firstly on conferences and on (sometimes outdoor) exhibitions. We can share the location of the event, and post short notes and photos along. We did it ones and it really worked out, and planning to do it in the future, and develop the usage of it.

Buzz Gap says: September 9, 2010 at 1:23 pm

In response to Judith’s question and Levente’s response… B2B at evnts and conventios is right on. The challange is social media is so fragmented… I am looking forward to consolidation. What would be really cool is LinkedIn licensing or building Foursqure “check-in” type functionality… that would bring online networking live to conventions and events… this would be a HUGE value to a B2B business development and marketers!

Bob Newkirk (Buzz Gap)

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