Social Media Marketing Needs to Be High Quality And Human

Most Thursday’s my colleague  KP and I have a 30 minute beer and talk shop on the interplay of Search, Social and Display, I tend to work more in Search and Social areas, KP more in Digital Exchanges. 

Our last chat was about Twitter and how advertising on it feels like Search and Social in terms of Keywords & Profiles (FYI: Increasingly Twitter staff have been hired from Google) but also a little like Digital Display in terms of reach across editorial content in that many Twitter users are arguably content providers in same way Yahoo! or The Guardian is…just a lot more succinct.

There are many ways that Twitter advertising could be a great media for brands as Twitter posts have above average expression of user intent, a small % have extreme viral-ity. Yet right  now the advertising formats are very basic and certainly the adverts I see “Promoted” seem to show very little leverage of what makes Twitter special. Today a Gambling advert was promoted mid stream. I’ve not seen a relevant & enticing Twitter ad targeted to me yet despite the fact I reveal quite a lot of intent in posts. But this is also linked to some of the advertising early adopters in digital such as Gambling companies falling outside my interest. So those who adopt advertising on a platform early are not always the right types of advertiser to compliment and showcase the underlying platform itself…to some extent they can cheapen in. 

My view is any emerging advertising funded platform should make it super easy to get quality advertisers from day one…by hunting the advertisers they want, who can showcase a great synergy of advertiser and media platform. Forget sales cycles and budget cycles for a while, forget sales commissions for a second, in the quarter before you open up sales formally, allocate $5,000,000 of ad inventory and “Gift” it to fast moving, innovative clients and agencies for free. (Agency guy suggests media owner should give free Inventory shocker!!)

But by handpicking your advertisers and giving them sufficient credit to be creative, you encourage adverting that is innovative and creatively thought through. You do this NOT to primarily get a case study (you’ll get that too), but to prove to your existing platform users that the inevitable monitisation by advertising is not going to be the first cracks in the facade of your otherwise well regarded service. At least in the early days handpick advertisers who are going to add something to the lives of your users beyond the usual free gambling credits or mobile phone contract offers or gaming.

Basically it is early days for Twitter advertising and Twitter need to think hard about what advertising they take and how they run it, with a heavy focus on innovative advertising that really aligns to the immediacy, advocacy and engagement of Twitter rather than just seemingly run of site generic adverts.

A great way to use Twitter advertising would be to leverage sentiment, geo-targeting and fast moving situations to your advantage. The revenue opportunity is often small, but the brand engagement opportunity could be large. 

Fictional Example :

Become the hero who Cheers up bored and frustrated commuters, There are no shortage of severely delayed passengers in the UK, especially in winter and around holidays.

Imagine you are a restaurant or pub chain with locations near large long distance train stations. 

Start Monitoring tweets mentioning station names and train company names. When a long distance train with capacity to carry 1000 passengers is delayed by an hour, you can expect Twitter to register the impact on some level.

Tweets may come in “Bored at Euston waiting (AGAIN) for delayed train to Glasgow.”

Your agile response could be: “Waiting for delayed 19.15 to Glasgow?, Nando’s feels for you. Free beer at Euston Nando’s (with every meal) to cheer you up”

The easiest tangible outcome may well be modest revenue canibalisation in that you give away free beer to a crowd of people who may have come to Nando’s Euston anyhow to kill some time.

But the really valuable and primary outcome is the positive brand equity, and the positive word of mouth of generated. A “Thanks Nando’s” Tweet would be nice, but the inevitable but less trackable offline mentions will be just as valuable.

It’s a micro branding exercise but marketers are going to need to get used to finding ways to scale many micro social brand building exercises into a larger than the sum of its parts social engagement strategy. To date too many social marketing advertising campaigns have revolved around uploading 10,000 different Facebook Creatives / Targeting options on the basis that social advertising is about what shading of image variation targeted at a demographic gets the highest CTR. Real social marketing needs to think hard about the SOCIAL context and that means people and their lives, context and timeliness. 

You wouldn’t blurt out a personal reccomendation for a good hairdresser while your friends talked about what cars they liked or during a friend moaning about their boss…WHY? because it would be bizare for a start..but more so it would prompt them to say “Were you listening to a word I was saying?”  The best social advertising will likely be that which proves it is listening…not in a creepy way, but a useful way. The problem is listening is an active and not passive skill and requires a lot of effort. But the reward for being engaged is usually high, and the relationships you form are far more enduring. 

So do I think social advertising is a great Direct Response medium for many advertisers who will see 480% ROI on sales?

Not usually and that is not the primary objective I would target right now via social marketing. I’d target engaged interaction, authenticity, differentiation from the crowd by being real and accessible.

I suppose the giveaway is in the word Social – It is relatively rare that you attend a Social Event to buy something, more often you go to get to know people or mix, to enrich relationships.
Relationships are the key to having stable sales and long term customers powered by more than just stand out price, product and location advantages (which you may not always have all the time)

The kicker is…..you cannot do highly engaged social marketing with small teams, as you cannot easily scale engagement. Automation of Social to enable scale is kind of ironic.

Just as you know that your call centre cannot handle hundreds of personal engagements (mini relationships in time) with 2 people, you need to scale up for highly engaged social marketing so that you have staff (brand ambassadors) available when your customers are in need &/or open to interaction. And right now, not many companies are prepared to hire more than a handful of Social Media ambassadors let alone dozens. But if you really believe your brand will be maintained, curated, made or lost online…then it is time to invest in enough capacity to handle real time, real world, 2 way, public dialogue.

Using Social Media to boost SEO Performance

In 2012/13 brands will increasingly require strong & frequent social media signals in order to gain & maintain high organic ranking.

Social Media is disintermediating search engines in some areas, forcing search engines to focus on enhancing the use of social media generated signals into their ranking algorithms in order to ensure optimal search results freshness & organic results relevancy, or have older, less relevant results than a social media platform.

Also, simply, isn’t a tinyurl link  sent to 1000 people maybe worth similar or more than an obscure link on a barely maintained blog? Of course this depends on relative ease of spamming and trust factor of the publishers.

Social media platforms are disintermediating search engines for fast-moving viral content, where minutes can be the difference between new and cool or “what….you haven’t you seen Fenton yet”?
Search is an intrinsically pull medium, where  social media is both pull and push.

You cannot effortlessly get a stream of data from a search engine and stay entertained, it needs query after query, click after click. Social media platforms can push endless streams of bite sized consciousness, like a frivolous Bloomberg ticker (unless you’re organising an armed uprising which is no laughing matter). Yet Social Media platforms are still responsive to a query, and whilst search on Twitter and Facebook is very basic, that will only grow in capability.

Why not merge the top 5 search engine results into the social media platform search results.

Ta da…no real need to leave Facebook during The Walking Dead, one search gets your mates ironic comments, a tweeted URL of Zombie Survival techniques and the top 5 search engine results for Zombie.

Twitter & Facebook, G+ allow you to run at the pace of the pack when watching live broadcast programmes & events on TV. A large % of the dual screen population who simultaneously watch TV whilst using a laptop and/or smart phone are using these social platforms much more heavily at TV time than they are using search engines.

And don’t forget that TV viewing is the no.1 way we spend our spare (online revenue generating) time….so if your online property gets disintermediated in this prime time, you have big problems.

Social platforms allow both the ability to communicate, a very human need, whilst simultaneously digesting data. Add to that, TV and print adverts are increasingly directing users to their Facebook page and bang….you’ve skipped the search engine. In this scenario the only online ad opportunity occurs on Facebook or Twitter (or Google+), as you’re no longer navigating as heavily via the search engine.

Imagine watching I’m A Celebrity Get me Out of Here.

Simultaneously researching the contestants via a search engine may yield some results for weeks, months or years old articles on the washed up celebrity du jour yet the same search on Facebook or Twitter, G+ etc will yield comment on what they did 30 seconds ago…and the ability to directly interact with that comment, plus graze on various links hand selected by friends.

Staff at certain search engines are very concerned about Social Media full stop and this TV & Second and Third Screen phenomena is a risk to monitor as it is yet another phenomena that is training people to search on social platforms.

Search Engines cannot be left behind, so maybe they’ve developed their own social platform!

But that’s not enough…search engines will need to have their SERP results as up to date as possible as well. This FORCES search engines to pay greater focus on social signals, fast-moving signals regardless of if they even wanted to. It’s that or be the slow kid, wearing last season’s trainers.

No search engine committed to organising the worlds organisation wants to have search session abandonment to Twitter, Facebook etc because the user couldn’t find the freshest content on their engine.

Therefore as search engines must ensure premium FRESHNESS of their results to protect & evolve their own business, it makes sense that certain aspects of social media are no longer complimentary to SEO, but simply are part of SEO. Also, as social media mentions etc become increasingly a mirror of society, it may be strange to so heavily weight organic search results on web links alone. Should a site with 1000 links but no word of mouth dicussion be in a high organic position?

Social Media doesn’t require SEO to thrive, though the skills that make a good SEO often make a good Social Media person.

In the medium term it’s arguable that the same level of effort spent on optimising social signals will yield greater benefits in SEO than traditional SEO methods alone.

I’m certainly not suggesting the phenomena discussed above will kill search engines, but simply force them to boost the ranking weights of social signals, signals we as marketers need to leverage in their own right as well as for SEO.

Essentially since Social Media signals will become an increasing weighted set of influence factors for organic ranking, every SEO manager will need to factor in how they are going to ensure they have constant strong and frequent social media signal supporting their SEO objectives.