Social media #FAIL #2 - Social Media is Constantly Changing

Why Marketers and Companies Continue to #FAIL at Social Media Execution

Social media can be defined as communication by people using digital tools to have conversations with one or more known or unknown parties - individuals, groups, companies, brands. These conversations take place on social media sites like Facebook, but also on millions of blogs through comments, on microblogs (like Twitter), through smartphones, through mobile apps or Facebook apps, and even through “old school” tools like discussion boards and forums.

Many marketers who have excelled at traditional advertising – online or offline – have a hard time getting their arms around social media and what it means to them and their business.

Not just because it’s a different channel. And not just because it’s a discussion rather than a one-way push of information.

For many marketers, the difficultly exists because the definition of social media and associated tools are morphing and changing and being used differently on a weekly basis. And they're proliferating.

Getting your arms around the world of social media is a challenge that requires constant attention, constant change and constant learning – very unlike any other form of marketing or advertising.

Advertising has become pretty structured. Take TV, print, radio, outdoor, and even online display. There are agencies, buyers, creatives, producers, ad sellers. They all have their place in a tightly integrated world, delivering their piece of the puzzle and taking a cut along the way. Measurement is straightforward - there are standard metrics, measurement tools and services at the ready with comparisons to well-defined baselines.

Search engine marketing was the first push in a very new direction – where the rules of the game are dynamic, in motion, and can change on a dime. Search engine marketing (both PPC and SEO) needs constant attention by experts to get any sort of decent result. Marketing through search engines isn’t just about producing a creative, buying space, and running the creative for a month or two. It requires designing and developing many creatives (ads and landing pages), dynamic bidding, growing a network of links, and optimizing results based on metrics. Incorporating changes every day. It's a marketing campaign with no end date (except when your PPC budget runs out).

If Google changes their ranking algorithm, page rebuilding ensues.
If a competitor bids double what you’re paying for an effective keyword, new thinking and restructuring is a must.

If you thought search engine marketing caused you grief, social media is will be a monster.

How many social sites are there? Facebook, LinkedIn, Live, MySpace (yes, still there), Orkut, sure. But what about the millions of blogs out there, and microblogs like Twitter? What about new group sites like Gravity that gather people with similar interests? Yelp, where you might be interested in only one listing? YouTube, and the Break Media sites that encourage community feedback and conversation? Yahoo and Google Groups? Specific interest sites like OleOle.com focused on a single, but controversial topic, where multi-media contributions are part of the fun?

How are they different? How many are completely unique? What can be carried across them? What is the new one that just cropped up this week? What device(s) are people using to access them?

Your brand might be discussed on any one of these sites or tools. It might be important to you to get into that discussion, or maybe just monitor it. There are so many different places that people can have a digital conversion, and they are new sites every week, new iPhone apps, new IPTV services.

The first step in getting a grip on social media is to go into learning mode. Learn about the sites you need to understand. Learn how advertising works on those sites, what type of voice you need, how friending or ‘fanning’ works. How people exchange information. Each site is somewhat unique. Learn and read every week. Setup profiles. Make "friends". Know what's going on with each tool. And then keep learning.

Then, once you know how a social media site really works, develop a plan for monitoring, setup KPI's, understand that this list will continue to change, and most likely continue to grow.

Social media’s “unstructured-ness” is why people like it so much. The new sites are the new cool, and the trendsetters are always looking for that “cool” factor they can introduce to their circle of friends. Some sites will catch on, some won’t, but there will always be a new offering out there as entrepreneurs and VC’s look to find the next thing to entice those people looking for the new cool.

Working with social media requires a child’s curiosity to continually explore, learn, challenge, and adapt quickly to the results. Keep reading, keep learning.

PART 2 in a series.

Part 1: Social Media is NOT A Marketing Channel Unto Itself

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Social Media: Why Marketers and Companies Continue to #fail at Social Media Execution

One of the things I’m seeing now as the buzz on social media marketing and measurement is increasing in volume (not quite a vuvuzula levels but close) is that people (marketers in particular) are treating social media as a new distinct marketing channel. Of course we’ve seen some companies run single-channel social media campaigns, but the medium wasn’t “designed” that way, and only a few hip B2C brands can actually pull that off.

I see five primary reasons why social media is so disruptive to marketing departments, and difficult to get a grip on for so many companies - both large and small:

1. Social media is not a distinct marketing channel unto itself (below)
   
2. Social media is constantly changing
3. The marketing department is no longer in charge of messaging
4. Social media requires entire businesses to become more transparent and truly authentic
5. It is both less and more measurable than any broadcast advertising
   

There are plenty of articles out there on the tactics of social media, social media suicide, and the top things that marketers need to not do when trying to leverage social media, but these are symptomatic of these big picture problems.

I’ll cover each of these big picture items in subsequent posts, starting here with #1:

Social Media is NOT A Marketing Channel Unto Itself
It’s an Extension of All Channels and Departments

Social media is a direct conversation with the public. It is an extension of the entire business and it complements every other channel and every other department. This is a huge distinction from traditional media, email, outdoor, print, etc. It’s all about two way communication, not defined one-way messaging.

I just read this MediaPost article recapping a survey that found that most companies that are ‘doing’ social media don’t have a social media strategy. Having a strategy where social media efforts compliment other integrated marketing efforts through direct conversation is just as much of a plan as running a distinct social media campaign. In fact, that is probably better for most companies. But, I’m not that nuance was captured in this survey.

Social media should alert people to things the company is doing, from promotions, to product, to customer support, to partnerships. It’s the voice of the company, and it doesn’t require a ton of money to use effectively. Even worse - it requires internal coordination and communication! It’s much harder for companies to agree on a single voice than it is for them to spend gobs of money to overcome public perception or competitive pressures.

The first thing that marketers should do is educate their company that using social media means that whoever’s in charge of the social media team needs to know what’s going on – company-wide. In that way, it’s very much like PR, but the information has to flow at both the macro (company to customer) and micro level (customer service rep to customer).

Getting this information to the social media group in a timely manner is critical so discussion that compliment print, coupon, banner ad promotions can be timed effectively. Customer service information can be incorporated intelligently into conversations. So that special social media-only promotions can be run in conjunction with campaigns of any sort. So customer raves can be posted. And so that any backlash, criticism or crisis control can be effectively discussed, without backlash or additional controversy.

To set an example for the company on communicating effectively, marketers should plan a social media component into every campaign (no matter how small the campaign or component) until it becomes second nature. The CMO should also ensure that someone in each channel has a direct line of communication to a centralized social media team, again providing a clear example of how he's like this function to work with other departments.

Social Media is changing the landscape of the company, and it starts with the marketing team. More to come...

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The Future of Media

The future of media isn’t about technology or channels, it’s about delivering an experience.

As I was sitting eating a couple of slices of authentically good mushroom pizza in New York, and reflecting on the panel discussion I heard earlier that morning at Ad Week on the “The Future of Media” (thanks for the invite Jon @Mediapost) I realized that content and technology are the wrong things to pay attention to – the future of media isn't technology or advertising, it's bringing exceptional experiences closer to normal people.

It wasn’t just the endorphins released by the pizza, but the things going on at the same time. In my quest for good Italian pizza, I just happened to wander past Grand Central to 3rd Avenue where there was a throng of cops, FBI agents and other protectors of the commonwealth ensuring stability, as the UN and Obama met to hash out the same old things. I wandering into a throng of Iranian demonstrators on the side sidewalk chanting “Hey, Ho, Ahmadinejad has to go!” and a small collection of Tibetans holding polite signs telling China to leave their country. They were eating pizza, too.

But it was actually seeing a picture of Neda, the woman who was shot and killed while peacefully protesting in Tehran, on one of their signs that jolted me – the media, including new technologies and crowd reporting, brought these people around a central topic of interest and made them closer to it - almost part of it. And when I say media, its TV, radio, print, Twitter, YouTube and every other technology and distribution channel.

The disruption that’s happening to ‘big media’ isn’t on content, it’s on speed of delivery. It’s not about print v. video, it's about personal experiences. It's not about any one technology, it's about how technology is becoming immersive and personal and connects people directly. It's still broadcast, but it's not mass market. Monetizing a special experience will continue to drive media, just as it's driven entertainment.

On the prestigious panel were Mark Cuban, Martha Stewart, Reid Hoffman and Judy McGrath the CEO of MTV. McGrath explained how they leveraged technology the MTV video music awards this year to actually increase their audience size as the program went on, due to the now famous Kanye incident. She saw people in the audience like Pink start Tweeting as soon as it happened. Videos were posted to YouTube immediately. New technologies have enabled the speed of the message (experiences happen in real time), and provided the appearance one-to-one personalization (individuals are now empowered to be their own broadcasters every media - text, video and audio).

Separately, Mark Cuban spoke about how the Internet and social media are mature from a platform perspective and there is nothing new going on. While that’s true technically, the adoption of technology across the mass market is different. He's kind of right, the Internet and social media were here a long time ago, but it's not connecting to the masses yet. But what he actually focused on is how cool the new Dallas Cowboys stadium's massive video screen is, and how that is the next platform that media companies should be looking at to deliver their content. That's super for the 10 $40M screens in the next 10 years, but isn't the near future. What he didn’t say explicitly, but described nonetheless, is that the immersive experience that the display creates / provides is a huge differentiator.

People want to be a part of experiences that don’t directly involve or even pertain to them. In another great presentation I saw at the IAB / MIXX conference by MeVIO, its founder Adam Curry, former MTV vee-jay, described the growth and success of MTV as bringing people closer to icons and rock stars (and brands). Commentary and interviews and simply video of stars performing, rather than just audio, was a new experience that fundamentally changed music. This is a diferent spin on the same thing - immersion and connection through media. You could even argue that the Beatles and Elvis on Ed Sullivan was the start of this connection, but MTV brought it to the masses 24 hour as day.

Not to say that the paparazzi and glamorization of celebrities is a ubiquitous goal, but sharing an experience in a way that enables us to have a deeper understanding and deeper comprehension of what it's like to be there is the key. Entertainment understands this, the challenge is for non-entertainment media to provide deep connections while being neutral, and monetizing their unique, special experience.

The more senses we immerse, the more we feel like we know it. It’s escapism just as much as it’s realism. We can’t be everywhere, we can’t be part of everything, but media will continue to get us closer and closer. If media can embrace this and deliver it better than individuals, people will pay for it. Bring them into a conflict, be part of a demonstration, eat lunch with a movie star. And that, delivered in an easy-to-consume format, is worth paying for, regardless of the technology or platform.

The Future of Media?
Maybe the world timeline of media looks like this, where media is both the creation / editing / delivery of content, entertainment, rumors, and news. Taking a look at the world, you can see different groups aspiring to move from one level to the next, and the historic events that shaped each step like the 1st amendment and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

1. No information
2. Word of mouth information
3. Single source “official” information
4. Multiple source “official” information
5. Approved information
6. Multi source, multi-channel information
7. Too much information!
8. Information I want to see only
9. Recommended information
   
10. Becoming part of the events that drive the information

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If the Web is Now Real-Time, Where are the Real-Time Analytics?

If the web is going real-time (seems that way according to all the recent hype) why are marketers and Internet companies still using old, slow data warehouse technology to analyze interactions?

If Web 1.0 means replicating "old" systems online - a push of information from originator to consumer, then Web 2.0 is the next step - a back and forth discussion between originator and recipient.

Web 3.0 is here, and it's subtly different on the outside (which is why there's no fanfare), but it's impact on Internet infrastructure is massive - the conversation goes from originator to user, to groups completely outside of the originator's understanding, intent or control. Conversations are completely decentralized, and rise and fall based on networks, not the source. Twitter, re-tweets, and completely asynchronous, unorganized group messaging is a new paradigm and makes interactions hard to follow, and the data they generate much more difficult to capture and understand at a high level.

Web marketers, online advertisers, and content distributors can't rely on data warehouses to provide analysis of these conversations - they are very complex and unbounded events. Business intelligence systems were designed as back-office applications and meant for data mining well-known data well after the fact. They are completely unsuited for this role. But we're using 'em because "that's what we got and that's what we know."

When you think about it, it's silly that you can have a million users visit your website in a day, but you have no idea what happened until a day later.

Business intelligence is much different from "Internet intelligence" or "social web intelligence" (you heard it here first). On the now social Internet, you need to know what's happening now to make an impact, optimize, or re-target based on activities. The next day, when a data warehouse could deliver that insight, is far too late.

Open-source projects like Hadoop and MapReduce that eschew relational database storage techniques are a different way to tackle the problem. They break data up into manageable chunks that distribute and speed processing. But the basic idea that data must be pulled out of production systems to process and analyze across dozens or hundreds of servers - then re-centralized and shoved back in - still doesn't fit with the need to process data as it's generated. These systems still have significant lag times (hours or days), and are really complicated to manage. Internet intelligence requires analysis within the production environment, in real time - whether or not action is actually taken in real time.

There are a lot of smart people out there, so why hasn't anyone been able to solve this problem? Well, to be fair, it's only gotten to be a real problem in the last few years. Before that, in Web 1.0 and 2.0, the volume of data being generated was manageable and understanding interactions could wait until tomorrow.

Today, many well-funded vendors are trying to solve this problem (getting immediate analysis from massive amounts of data in a cost-effective manner), but it's a very hard problem to solve. Some Internet companies are building their own stuff (Facebook, Google, YouTube, Yahoo!), some are leveraging the fastest third party data warehouse products (Teradata, Netezza, even Oracle). But, whether it's all based on the idea of batch processing, and whether it's being built in-house, or it's one of the super-scale data warehouse vendors, it's REALLY expensive ($2 - $10m just to start off with a Teradata system), and it goes up the more data and the faster you want results.

I found one company, Truviso, that stands out from these other vendors - they are actually able to deliver real-time data analysis in a production environment in a cost-effective manner. They haven't figured out how to make a data warehouse faster, but instead they process data in a different way.Truviso's Continuous Analytics software processes data in real time before it's stored in a database, so it completely eliminates the lag time in batching and loading and indexing, or chunking and distributing data across clusters. Analysis is done on the fly, decisions based on data can be automated, and people can actually see what's happening on their websites - and across conversations - at any time.

Truviso has created a scalable data analytics system for Internet production environments with real-time data analysis problems. Online ad networks, CDN's, social networks, and online video companies are producing massive amounts of data that they need to analyze to deliver better experiences for their users or customers. Their business depends on the analysis of this data for revenue generation - it's vitally important to them. If they can make a change today instead of tomorrow, that could result in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional revenue.

This type of Internet intelligence analysis is going to change the status quo. Once companies realize they don't have to wait for analysis anymore, there will be no going back. They'll expect it. They'll want it all the time. And that's the right way to go, especially since the group-discussion that defines Web 3.0 aren't going to go away.

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