Losing faith in social media
Oh no I’ve said too much
I haven’t said enough
REM, lyrics to ‘Losing my Religion’
I recently wrote a guest post for Econsultancy entitled ‘Are we in a social media bubble?’, which suggested that social media was overvalued, both by investors and by marketers.
It was interesting to see the reaction. As you’d expect at Econsultancy, many people didn’t agree with me – but a good number did.
Some commenters described the article as ‘jumbled’ and ‘full of holes’, which was hardly surprising, since it was written on a difficult subject, at the very limit of my knowledge.
Others, including some professional social media marketers, offered balanced, reasonable replies. That was gracious of them, since on one level my post was a mischievous trollbomb designed to get a reaction – albeit one that I put a lot of effort into.
What I didn’t get, however, was a flurry of links to authoritative case studies demonstrating killer ROI or a deluge of sales from social media. When I was researching, I was worried that I was missing something – after all, could the social media gospel really be built on such a thin foundation of proof? Well, turns out it can.
The map is not the territory
Recently, I’ve been reading How to do better creative work by Steve Harrison, a brilliant former copywriter and creative director who worked with Drayton Bird and David Ogilvy. He ascribes the start of digital/social hype to the concept of permission marketing, popularised by Seth Godin.
Permission marketing hinges on the idea that customers want transaction, control and interactivity in their buying experiences – that they want a ‘conversation’ with brands. This seductive, powerful idea has become the central belief of digital marketers, particularly those working in social media. ‘Everything has changed’ is an oft-heard refrain – indeed, it’s being wheeled out all over again in regard to mobile.
However, permission marketing is just that: an idea rather than an observable real-world phenomenon. It’s a theory, or perhaps a rationalisation, that reconciles marketers’ existing goals with emergent consumer behaviour. It’s something we believe in because we want it to be true.
Intellectual glue
Rather than catering to an express desire to interact with brands, social media marketing tries to take people’s love of interaction and redirect it for commercial ends. The concepts of permission, interaction and engagement provide the intellectual ‘glue’ that bind marketing and social media together.
Dig around, and you’ll find remarkably little concrete proof that social media drives sales. Engagement, yes; cash money, no. As I noted in my Econsultancy post, a lot of the well-worn examples, like Dell, don’t look so pretty when you get up close. Try to cut through the brand-waffle to something concrete, and you’ll often find there’s nothing there. Hence the lack of evidential challenge to my post.
Hence, also, the weak pro-social media argument that ‘your customers are there, so you need to be there too’. Not ‘your customers are buying products like yours through social media, right now’. As yet, the most convincing argument we have is that brands have got to find a way to invade the social space somehow. But just because they want to doesn’t mean they can.
Of course, it may be that it takes time for social-media benefit to filter through from brand equity to sales. But time’s getting on. Where is Godot?
Gimme some truth
In my Econsultancy post, I drew an analogy between the subprime bubble and the social media boom.
Like all analogies, it illuminated some parts of the issue while obscuring others. Metaphors must be used with care, or you end up in a world of abstraction, seeing parallels that aren’t there.
What is certain about social media? Opinions are subjective and self-serving. Statistics are selective. But our own experience is always real, if only to ourselves.
So here are some of my own experiences of social media and the wider digital realm.
- I am 39 years old, with a young child and a reasonable disposable income but very little spare time. That puts me squarely in the target market for a host of brands.
- There are a handful of brands I really like – Apple, North Face, PlayStation. I have zero interest in engaging or interacting with them. I have desultorily friended them on Facebook, where I invariably skip over their updates. Life is too short.
- I have played one branded online game in my life (created by O2). I won some SMS credits that I had 24 hours to use. I would never spend time on any such online promotion again, and if one of my friends suggested I did do, I would feel embarrassed for them.
- I follow around 2000 people on Twitter. None are brands. I do not follow back anyone, business or individual, with a commercial or self-promotional message in their last three tweets. I have clicked on a sponsored trending topic once, and never will again.
- Twitter has played a part, but not been instrumental, in gaining me two or three pieces of work from new contacts. In each case, I think it was this blog, plus my experience, that sealed the deal, rather than my social presence. (For me, the major commercial benefit of Twitter has been in publicising blog posts, which encourages links, which improves SEO, which drives traffic, which generates leads.)
- At the time of writing, I have posted 8681 tweets. At one minute per tweet, that’s 18 eight-hour days spent on Twitter (and that discounts reading time). Since I tweet in work time, that represents many thousands of pounds in opportunity cost ‘spent’ on Twitter. The work gained from Twitter doesn’t outweigh that cost – nowhere near.
I’m absolutely not saying that my experiences are representative. I’m just saying they’re real. And, in fact, I suspect they’re more representative than a lot of social media pros would like to admit.
Why am I saying all this? To make the point that I can’t square my own experience with the party line on social media. Increasingly, I find it hard to espouse a vision of social media where people ‘out there’ are supposed to act in ways that I simply can’t identify with. It’s hard to give clients advice that I feel, from my own experience, just isn’t right.
Are you keeping the faith?
Comments (13)
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The point you raise about the cost of Twitter etc. is really interesting.
Facebook earned me about £32,000 last year, as I got a job out of it from moaning about looking for work in my status updates from an old contact who forwarded me a job opportunity when it came up at her firm. Plus, I got some freelance work through similarly jovial moaning.
Twitter hasn’t earned me anything yet though. I’m still waiting for Godot…
I’ve always used Social Media as a means of improving SEO and trying to make industry contacts, as opposed to actually generating business (and adopt the same mindset with the FirstFound social media accounts – we’ve had two leads from Twitter, neither created a sale) – so I wholly agree with you there.
As a networking tool, social media (or, as it used to be called, social networking) is nigh on indispensible. But as a sales tool? I don’t think it’s all it’s cracked up to be.
I think the most important fact is that people don’t want to converse with brands. With the exception of Apple evangelists, most people don’t bother. I mean, who wants a conversation with the company that manufactures their washing powder?
[…] I had a paragraph here, but then Tom Albrighton went and wrote a whole post this morning. And it’s extremely difficult to agree with. But we all know social media isn’t the magic cure-all that a steadfast few proclaim it to be, so stop telling us. Unless you can do it with some authority and verve. […]
It’s interesting you bring up the response to your Econsultancy article. I believe Peter Shankman is discovering the same reaction in his post on Business Insider right now. 🙂 It was fascinating to see how many people came out of the woodwork to tell him that he’s doing social media “wrong.”
On certain level, I agree with your overall assessment; I have no interest in conversing with brands. The only company I follow on Twitter is Namecheap because my website’s registered through their business, and I want to be alerted as soon as possible if a server fails or anything gets fouled up. So far, so good.
But I’ve had trouble building proposals for local businesses based on the idea that a viable Twitter presence will translate into sales. Some companies have seen an increase in sales through a large Facebook following, but I’ve noticed these are largely local businesses who don’t have the advertising budget of chain stores. Mom & Pop operations, if you will.
Other than that, I have no social proof that social media is the “In” to increasing revenue. Some social media experts have compared it to having a website and ALL businesses in the 21st century should have a website, yadda, yadda, yadda. But it’s simply a very different beast. I’m not convinced that social media engagement is turning into the catch-all for increased sales that so many companies hoped it would be.
Cash money, no. Media, yes. Off the back of twitter I’ve had a guest blog article on a respectable industry site, and some trade press. Two double page spreads for my running club in the local paper (decent circulation), hopefully another on the way tomorrow. This latter via someone I only met via twitter.
I find Twitter a bit of a time sink, truth be told. That said, I actually did change banks recently partly on the basis that they actively used Twitter, making it easier to ask them quick questions (the other reason was that they charged nothing for the same service my then-current bank was charging me $60 a year for).
But generally, I feel that people who tout it as the magic bullet for sales glory are selling snake oil.
I think you’ll find this article interesting…
I’ve been “doing” Twitter for about 6 months actively. I use it primarily to build contacts with colleagues and experts in my field, and maintain online relationships with them, some of which have moved offline as well. About 3 months ago I opened a second account, which I use primarily as a “business” account: I like to tweet things of interest to my target market there. I keep it away from self-promotions, and enter conversations that interest me. That account is far less active, however, so it wouldn’t be fair of me to compare the two accounts.
What I have learned, though, is that social media is a wonderful *public relations* tool, but the time spent maintaining a presence there must not be proportional to the number of clients one gets from it (e.g. “I need more business. I better tweet harder.”). It should be consistent on whatever level of frequency and engagement that doesn’t turn it into a time sink. Easier said than done, I know.
“There are a handful of brands I really like – Apple, North Face, PlayStation. I have zero interest in engaging or interacting with them. I have desultorily friended them on Facebook, where I invariably skip over their updates. Life is too short.”
I disagree here, I do take notice of brands on Twitter and Facebook, and I interact with them too. Maybe I have too much time on my hands… For me, social networking platforms allow an easy way to contact a brand and get a speedy response (compared to email). I’ve asked beauty brands about products and purchased products based on their response. Maybe I’m just a sucker?
“Twitter has played a part, but not been instrumental, in gaining me two or three pieces of work from new contacts. In each case, I think it was this blog, plus my experience, that sealed the deal, rather than my social presence. (For me, the major commercial benefit of Twitter has been in publicising blog posts, which encourages links, which improves SEO, which drives traffic, which generates leads.)”
This seems a little contradictory – if Twitter has played a part in gaining contacts then surely it has generated income for you? Of course your experience and blog are integral to this but without Twitter, people may not have seen your talent in the first place? Therefore losing out on contacts, potential clients and money!
Update: another full page spread in the local press via my tweety journalist contact 🙂
Hi Tom, I totally agree with your thoughts on social media. I remember Andy Maslen quitting Twitter last year (I think) for many of the same reasons you’ve mentioned above.
I don’t have any real inclination to connect with brands unless they’ve particularly impressed me or completely hacked me off.
I have never seen any convincing stats regarding Twitter and how it generated sales for a business. I’ve been using it for over 2 years now and have had no work as a direct result at all.
I can see how it’s useful for full time bloggers who want to build a following but not much else really.
Tom, your post included many of my own beliefs on social media. I do not engage with big brands on Twitter and have never been tempted to. For me Twitter is about connecting with other people in my field and also local businesses. It’s my sliver of “open-plan office” that lets me work from home on my own without feeling isolated. I can’t put any kind of monetary value on it, and I just accept that and look on it as the time I’d spend chatting to colleagues if I had any. It might not get me more work, but it does help to keep me sane, which definitely has some value.
I also use Twitter as an info filter – there is so much info out there, but you quickly get a feel for who posts links that are really useful. It saves me time following those links to things I’d never otherwise have found, rather than ploughing randomly through the web.
It’s hard to put a dollar value on social media efforts. This is especially true since social media should only be a part of your overall internet marketing strategy. I have clients that read my blog and followed me in social media for a very long time before making contact with me. It was a combination of multiple touchpoints that led to a conversion.