When I first started tweeting and blogging, the big thing everybody was talking about was, “You need to network and really engage with people.” That seemed to be the end-all and be-all of most social media advice you got. This advice was offered regardless of your business. If you were a marketer – you needed to engage. A lawyer? You’d better engage. A salesman for cans of dried soybeans? Yep. You’d better engage.
The problem I’ve had with this is that just talking to people makes marketing (or selling) kind of difficult. If I ask you how your ill family member is doing, you might like me better as a person, but will that make you buy from me? Not necessarily. In fact, in that kind of scenario, what I do for business is probably the last thing on your mind.
Now, the tide is turning and we are trying to talk about social media as just another marketing channel. However, I fear that there are some big steps missing in this transition. How can we go from just “talking” to actually using social media as a marketing platform?
What is marketing?
Initially, I was going to make this post primarily about the dichotomy between “talking to people” and marketing. I asked my Facebook crew how they defined marketing. I got a wide diversity of answers, only a few of which were the results of me knowing some very smartypants people (i.e. marketing is lying, marketing is a myth). I lead a hard life. Anyway, here are some of the answers I got:
“Building a structured awareness of a product or service to a targeted buyer.” ~Bob Reed
“Marketing is basically everything behind the process of creating lifelong customers.” ~Olivier Blanchard
“For me, marketing encompasses everything from POP, packaging, media to the person the company hires to deliver their widget to the masses, but I’m pervasive that way.” Molly Cantrell-Kraig
“Marketing is the art and science of communicating the value of your product or service to prospective and current customers.” ~Sean McGinnis
“Influencing (positively and/or negatively) consumer behavior through targeted messaging.” ~Andree Cojocariu
I also remembered that while back Heidi Cohen had gathered insight into how people defined marketing. Heidi notes that the American Marketing Association defines marketing thusly:
“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”
I guess they should know.
So, I had my definitions of marketing. But then my friend Nic Wirtz threw me a little curveball. He said, “I’m stuck. Social media is mainly ‘talking/engaging with people’.” If that’s true, I began to wonder if social media “marketing” is really an appropriate phrase to use.
The catch with marketing on social media
Here’s the big problem. With so much emphasis early on focusing on “engagement” and “the conversation,” marketing got framed as bad, as did selling. If by sheer chance you talked to someone who needed a car and you sold cars, then you were the beneficiary of social media serendipity, but I’m not 100% sure that’s marketing, at least based on traditional definitions. If you talk to people a lot and they know who you work for but you never talk about business, you might be sharing value with potential customers, but it’s a value that does not always tie directly back to your business.
Knowing that most companies need to make money in order to survive, some companies have tried to barge into social media communities with a strong “buy me” message. Note what happened, for example, when Toyota decided to message countless people with promotional messages around Super Bowl time. These kinds of ploys make people feel like marketers and marketing are yucky (professional term). Note, for example, how Dan Perez reacted when marketers started jumping onto the Pinterest bandwagon. Certainly those kinds of tactics aren’t positive either.
So, if talking to people is NOT marketing and marketing on social media sites is evil, what do we mean when we say “social media marketing?” Is this some sort of hybrid created by Dr.Xavier in his secret hideout?
Social Media Marketing
This is a case where, honestly, I really don’t have a 100% solid answer. Wikipedia defines social media marketing as: “The process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites.” That could well be part of it, but the purpose of marketing is really to create sales, right? I mean, that’s what you’re hoping for. Maybe this is how people got so confused about ROI. If you are driving traffic to your website, it may look like your social media marketing campaign is a success. However, if all of those people are visiting and then leaving without buying (or maybe without even coming back) you’re in a bit of a pickle.
So, if we can agree that marketing is NOT talking to people, and if we can agree that marketing on a lot of social media sites is most definitely frowned upon, and if we can agree that social media marketing ultimately needs to drive sales, how are we defining social media marketing?
Or am I just crunching my brains over a peanut?
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/intersectionconsulting/3542116767/ via Creative Commons
Don’t forget why you got in the game. You can be and should be “social”, but it must be done in the context of promoting some value you or the company offer.
@ToyotaEquipment So you’re saying that all social media conversations should be “because” of the company you represent and not the person you are?
@RababKhan @ToyotaEquipment I think what Kyle is hitting on here is the confusion that the phrase “human brand” created. The idea that a person can be affiliated with a brand, or that a person can sort of become the face of a brand, morphed into a world where the person IS the brand. I think a lot of the current confusion stems from that early train of thought that got a bit twisted and misunderstood.
Hi Margie,
Great topic for discussion. My thoughts took on a life of their own, so I posted them on my blog:
http://marketinginteractions.typepad.com/marketing_interactions/2012/04/marketing-beyond-the-chit-chat-in-social-media.html
@ardath421 Awesome! I’ll be sure to check it out. Thank you! 🙂
Fabulous post Margie and one I’ve been struggling with too. I have been wondering about the value to brands for me to review and post about their products. I have my social media friends – when they post product stuff I tend to ignore it (maybe am influenced 10%) but mostly I’m waiting to hear their personal stuff or their thought provoking stuff (like this) or their funny stuff.
Hmmm.
@MomInManagement Then there’s the fact that I really don’t know what most of my online friends do for a living, not to mention where they work. So the argument that networking can pave the way to a sale kind of loses juice for me.
You’re right on how social media has and is changing. The problem and beauty of social media is we’re all individuals, some over share, some under share. So saying SM is just another marketing channel is incorrect, what would be great and indeed something you’ve done many times is a post, hell a series on how to engage.I don’t really want to know about family illness. If I’m a business I want to go down the route of proving my expertise. This enhances my standing and leads to opportunities for work or link ups. Hopefully. At the same time I don’t want a business’s feed to be entirely business. A feed that is entirely business will turn into a marketing channel.This leads to a very difficult balancing act, which goes back to engagement issues.The car example you give seems to be more of a sales situation than marketing. However, if you believe that social media is in effect marketing ourselves and/or our business, you could argue it’s marketing too.Journalists have agonised over social media. Some because of the technical issues, many more because of the ethics of it. Having always been observers, people that write up events from an allegedly non-partizan point of view, we’ve seen media change to embracing polemic views. Add in the ability to self-publish, something that has still only been with us for little more than a decade and journalism has fundamentally changed in that time. Add in 60,000 journalists losing their jobs since 2005 and that’s only in the US and you see an industry in crisis.
The funny thing is that we’ve always marketed ourselves, otherwise we’d be sat at home watching daytime TV as a career. It’s just a little easier and a little more obvious now.I stand by my “lying” but that’s because I have an insatiable demand for ‘the truth”. I’m less the Fonz, more Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men. Marketeers and PR professionals are the Jack Nicholsons to my Cruise. It’s that desire to post a veneer over reality that grates. The funny thing is we’re all in the storytelling business, we just have different interpretations of that story.
Dan’s rants generally hit the nail on the head. The problem of a new platform, as I see it, is that people want somewhere to hang out and not be sold something. Marketing requires finding places where people that hang out and err sell them something.
“I want to be left alone,” versus “Buy this!” Is not going to be a match made in heaven.
Marketing is not all evil. Social media is not all marketing. Because social media was taken over by many marketing departments, the two have become inextricably linked. Besides the fact I don’t want marketing in charge of social media,
There’s a backlash against social media marketing because people don’t want their space invaded. So either social media marketing is more subtle than most efforts, it’s “passive” marketing by creating relationships without selling anything to them. Or it’s in your face, “Buy This NOW!”
Or you leave social media and marketing as entirely separate categories and say that SMM is the art of relationship building that may lead to positive benefits for your company.
Rather than trying to convert connections to sales, we’re talking on a global scale now so take every connection as having the potential to improve your business. It’s slightly more random.
@NicWirtz And here is the comment for today that is better than my post. Darn it people!
There definitely are a lot of grey areas. People who border on what I consider extremely unprofessional always make me wonder. You really want to post about how drunk you’ve been for the last 3 weeks, huh? OK. Then you want me to watch your webinar and respect your professional expertise. Hmmmmmm. Tough one.
There’s a lot of talk about whether you can share personal stuff online without hurting your professional self. I think you can, but I think you need to have some limits. As a marketer, you need to have limits. Spamming thousands of people will never be a good idea. Talking about nothing but kitties is also not a good idea. Just jumping in without a plan will never be a good idea.
So, then, what are we left with? A lot of confusion, apparently 🙂
Definitely a dichotomy in social media, but I’m not convinced it is actually as big of a disconnect. The biggest problem I see is that “conversation” isn’t connected. Conversation or engagement is generally good advice as part of an overall plan, but it has been adopted standalone, without connecting that engagement to the process of educating prospective buyers and uncovering new sales opportunities.
@Wittlake I think that’s a great point. People were told to converse but they didn’t ask the pivotal question. “Then what?”
That’s what’s missing, in my humble opinion. The then what factor.
The other day I was wasting more time on Facebook and a little ad showed up on the right column with these beautiful colored glass outdoor lanterns. I clicked on it and discovered https://www.jossandmain.com/ . I hate shopping in Real Life, but I LOVED this company’s products. I would not have discovered them without their pretty little picture seducing me. THAT is Social Media Marketing in my book.
Great post Margie!
Hmm I think it is possible to split ‘social media marketing’ into two parts: marketing / sales and communication / talking. While it sounds the same, it can really be a little different.The marketing bit is where brands go on campaigns and promotions to make themselves known using whatever medium there is available. This is the same as putting up a TVC, flyer distribution campaign or advertising on the billboard where the brand tries to standout from the rest by being different, even online.Now the communication bit is where social media networks really shine. It now acts as a follow-up from the marketing campaign to address any issues, concerns, feedbacks and etc, an avenue to show that the brand takes time to service its customers, and to show that the brand is alive and well by the daily updates.I believe the confusion starts when brands try to over-strategize the content of their communications for example, “to say hello and ask what are the fans doing today” and attempts to insert a sales element to it. If the brand genuinely wants to say “hello”, there shouldn’t be a “what’s next?” after that.