Social Media: My Job Just Got A Lot More Complicated (IS Conference ’09)

Preface: I believe in social media. I do not believe it is a fad – I think it will change the way marketers and advertisers think, permanently. This is a summary of my presentation at Houston’s Interactive Strategies Conference (IS Conference ’09).

This video began circulating around our office a couple of weeks ago. If you haven’t seen it, my guess is, you’ve seen one like it.



Excited? I was the first time I saw it.

Now I realize that the credibility of this video has essentially been torn apart over the past couple of weeks, but that isn’t the point of this post. This video is merely representative for my purposes. The conclusion that the creator of this video wants us to get to (a bit forcefully and deceptively) is that we’ve found the next golden egg in our business. Pour your investment into social media and watch your return – low cost, high visibility (incredibly high visibility according to videos like this) – how could you go wrong? Get your Facebook fan page, Twitter account, YouTube channel and LinkedIn profile set up – then sit back and revel in the results. After all, there are hundreds of millions of people accessing these channels right? The message we’re hearing is that it’s just that simple. Is it that simple?

I could go on for pages on this, so I’ll compress it to 2 central arguments and spare you my illustrations (if you’re interested in more detail and missed the conference, dm me on twitter or e-mail me and I’ll be happy to expand):

1. I hate to pull personal experience into this, but I’m going to have to (and I only do so with the confidence that most of the readers of this post can relate). My grandmother refuses to use e-mail. Refuses. She won’t even own a computer. She moved from Houston to Austin a few years ago and we got her a computer so we could keep in touch more often. She sold it within a week. She doesn’t want to have to learn something new. “Just call me if you want to talk,” she’d say.

My dad (babyboomer) not only doesn’t understand Twitter or Facebook, he mocks them. “Why would I want to know what you’re doing all day? That’s stupid”, he’d say. Now I realize that the fastest growing age demographic for Facebook is 55-65 – this is significant, no doubt. But if you want to talk to my grandmother or my dad, you better think about some different channels. Know anyone like this?

2. We all love stats. Having a big chart to back up our argument gives us a little warm and fuzzy. The video above is loaded with them. Let’s assume, for the time being, that the stats are accurate. Here’s the problem: they’re being used manipulatively. If they reinforce what we want to hear, we won’t dig a little deeper to find the usable data behind these stats.

A couple of examples:

MySpace announced 3 years ago that they surpassed 100 million user accounts. That’s a staggering statistic. I have four. I also haven’t accessed any of those accounts in at least 2 years.

Twitter has 30 million+ accounts (I don’t know the exact number, but it’s a lot). If we took the time to not accept this stat at face value, we’d see that 80% of those accounts have tweeted less than 5 times. We’d also see that 75% of tweets come from 5% of Twitter users. There are a lot of people you can reach using Twitter, but do yourself (or your clients) the favor of making sure the stat is usable before adding it to your pitch or presentation.

One of the only usable stats I saw in this video was that 78% of surveyed consumers trust recommendations from online peers while a mere 14% trust ads. Whoa, now we’re onto something! But wait. Razorfish just released their Social Influence Marketing Report (“social influence” marketing is their non-conformist terminology for social media), in which they concluded that “consumers are more likely to trust television ads than online friends when making purchasing decisions.” Scratching my head. I’m not discrediting research or the importance of it – I’m merely noting how far people will go to get us to see their point of view. I’d like to see the profiles of the users surveyed for the video above.

Here’s my conclusion: social media is no golden egg. It doesn’t make our jobs easier – in fact, it makes them far more difficult. When we respond to the pressures of, “where’s our facebook fan page?” or “throw up a Twitter account; it’ll take 5 minutes!”, we’re buying into this manipulative crap (forgive my cynicism – that’s usually not my style). When we build our strategies around social media or reach for the channels before deciding what we’re using them for, we’re metaphorically pulling tools out of the toolbelt before we’ve decided what we’re building and who we’re building it for.

The toolbelt is growing with far more dynamic tools than we’ve ever seen before. This requires us to be creative, smart and thorough. We haven’t found the golden egg (or “magic beans” as Seth Godin refers to it) of this generation. It’s quite the opposite, in fact. We now have more tools…incredible tools that will change our thinking forever. But it shouldn’t change our high-level thinking. Most would agree that social media doesn’t reach everyone. It doesn’t reach a lot of consumers. Therefore, we can’t abandon the fundamentals. (1) Identify your target audience, (2) develop your strategy and messaging and (3) start pulling tools from the tool belt that make the most sense. We can’t help but strategize in light of these new tools – but we can’t strategize around them.

So, is it that simple? Absolutely not. Things just got a lot more complicated.