SMM? Thanks but no thanks
If you look at the notes on SMM and generally online marketing on Habré, and on the absolute majority of other resources, they will be reduced mainly to optimistic stories, how you should do to attract many, many clients and live with them happily. Negative notes, if they skip, then in the key “you don’t have to do this, but it’s okay to be good.” All this so far - although the SMM fashion boom seems to have passed a bit - it seems that everyone needs SMM, this is the key to success, the main thing is to apply it correctly. Much, as usual, is explained by the fact that at least half of the authors of texts on SMM are not against selling SMM services to you, but - I want to go further stating this fact and talk about why it is not so rarely not to “develop a winning strategy”, just say no. For clarity, on a specific example of SMM.
Usually, the client’s drive to the site and further promotion there, indicating some virtual action performed by him — registering, subscribing to the newsletter, and immediately buying something online with some discount — is indicated as the goal in all these positive texts. This is a criterion for success.
Unfortunately, so far not everyone is selling something online.
')
The previous three years I spent on work in a company that sells very even offline things - electronics, mostly relatively expensive. I worked in the business unit, but at the same time I dealt with issues related to all sorts of communication with partners and consumers - so I was keenly interested in the effectiveness of this communication, whether it was large research, small focus groups or observations of wildlife. In addition, the division of responsibilities between the marketing department and the business unit suggests that marketing is enthusiastic, and the business unit is skeptical. Skeptical look quite consistent with my character. And, by the way, the criterion of success in this business is the sale of goods from the store shelf, and not the visitors who registered on the site.
So, I no longer work there, I have a lot of free time and I want to talk about it - about SMM as applied to a business that sells material things. And to show with examples when this trendy trend does not work at all simply because of the peculiarities of its nature.
I'll start from afar - with the idea that we still need SMM. It is natural, because if you just come to the high leadership and say that we do not deal with social networks, then there is a high probability of a small scandal and cries about those who prefer “to sit down and do nothing”. Sitting, sleeping, doing nothing.
Therefore, let's do it. How?
“What nonsense are you writing on our page, eh, Emma ?!” 1 - the emotional text that has gained popularity in runet six months ago that in a certain large corporation a certain Emma always writes to anybody in official social media accounts not interesting nonsense, while I could write interesting things: for example, about the technical aspects of building a communication channel through the English Channel, in which there are so many interesting and unusual things. The popularity and approval he received primarily from techies, which is why I want to start with him.
In principle, this list is already causing people who are personally familiar with the topic of public communications some tension: a bad idea is, for example, as telling the iPhone owner that he is wasting money (and people familiar with how market analytics are doing already This thesis alone sees so many objective pitfalls - for example, the obvious difference in the average price of iPhone and Nokia - that they will crush the advanced thesis with questions immediately and forever) and an honest story that it is profitable for the cellular company to sell smartphones that encourage people to spend more money. Firstly, it is not always more profitable, there are various nuances, and secondly, although this thesis is worthy of Captain Obvious himself, you will be surprised how negatively the public can sometimes react to facts that seem obvious to someone.
No, well, really, you want to tell the public why you actually change the tariffs? Or arrange a holy war of Nokievods with Yablochnik, famously having bombed out of the stratosphere in the territories of both camps?
In addition, for example, I am not at all sure that any significant part of the public would be interested in details of the construction of communication channels or the formation of a tariff line. Such texts can collect a stable core of the audience, but whether it will be big ... However, let us leave for now, the point is not even in this.
In fact, Emma should face the following tasks:
Generally speaking, this is a lot of work. This is the task of a very good journalist or a very good PR man. Moreover, both the company’s management and employees must trust Emma as their own — all internal information about the company’s work will be available at the entrance, and the output should be only that which does not reveal the secret, does not cause harm, does not hurt the competitors too much Further. This is a separate problem, and a big problem, due to which, in most companies, PR departments actually turn into apparatuses for issuing press releases, because the authorities simply don’t want to trust them with any important inside information, and without inside information nothing but stamping bravura press releases, no one PR can not do.
That is, to perform all of this with some significant efficiency, Emma should be a good, highly paid professional, a PR manager or a journalist.
Good, beautiful, good purpose. Attention, only one question: will it pay off?
Social Media Is Bullshit 2 is a book of a person who has actually become disenchanted with social networks - and, in fact, in most of the text, this disappointment shines between the lines. In this regard, it is not very interesting to read the whole book, for a person related to the topic, there are many platitudes and obviousness, but it is still indicative. The most vivid example is the author's story about how he tweeted an advertising campaign to raise funds for charity. There he got into the Suggested Users List, scored a huge number of subscribers, announced his charity fundraising trips around the country ... and failed the campaign. People subscribed to it - that's all. It did not develop into any action. That is, in general, in any. These people did not come to the announced meetings in different cities, did not donate $ 5 for charity, did not, it seems, nothing at all, except for pressing a button on Twitter.
He also has numerous examples of advertising campaigns conducted by major players and seemingly successful - many of them you will find in the form of "cases" (I hate this tracing paper), demonstrated by those who want to sell you SMM services. Yes, it was beautiful, large-scale campaigns, a lot of money was invested in them, some of them went in sync with ATL or BTL campaigns, they brought sales for millions of dollars ... that's just a million dollars for a company that has a budget for such a campaign - random fluctuation, fractions of percent of normal turnover. And last year, Coca-Cola shocked the industry with a shocking statement: it suddenly turned out 3 that the scale of discussing its products in social networks (the same buzz they pray for and promise in SMM) does not have any statistically significant effect on current sales.
The fact is that, with some exceptions, social networks are generally not suitable for advertising most products.
First, the social networks are extremely fleeting . A typical active Facebook user scrolls dozens a day, well if not hundreds, posts - naturally, he does not read them carefully, most of which he scrolls through. With a very high probability, all the promotions will fall into the category of quickly scrolling, since in 99 cases out of 100 the information in them is unimportant and uninteresting for a particular person.
Secondly, the threshold for the demonstration of interest is not just low, it is zero. Pressing Like in Facebook does not cost anything, in instagrame you don’t even need to search for the corresponding button: social networks do everything for you to like and retweet as easily as possible and therefore as often as possible. As a result, even if a person, after seeing your post, has committed some action on him - do not think that he did it out of a great love for your brand and a great desire to know everything about it. Most likely, he clicked "Like" first of all because it cost him nothing.
Thirdly, social networks are not indexed or extremely poorly indexed by search engines , and people themselves do not save posts from them to the bookmarks. At the same time, people are not inclined, for example, having seen on Facebook an advertisement for a new refrigerator, to grab a wallet and run to the store - as shown by studies of consumer behavior, buying something expensive usually takes several months (from the thought that it is needed to purchases; the active phase, that is, the actual choice of a particular product — a few weeks), during which a person evaluates his budgets, becomes acquainted with this category of goods in general and pretends whether it makes sense to change the old to the new, then becomes acquainted with reviews and reviews on specific products, visits two or three stores to view live ... If you were not so incredibly lucky that your post on social networks got him exactly in this period - then he had no significant influence on his actions because even if a person consciously searched for information about a product, your post is the last thing he finds, due to the aforementioned features of social networks.
Yes, there is such (often the main and even the only, by the way) function of advertising, like maintaining brand awareness: every day meeting a beautiful photo of your refrigerator in a prominent place, people get used to the idea that you are making beautiful refrigerators, and when it comes time to buy a new refrigerator remember you. There are even metrics that describe how a brand is associated with a particular product category - MPSA (Most Preferred Single Answer) and UA Top 3 (Unaided Awareness Top 3), for example. Keywords: "every day" and "in a prominent place." Social networks do not correspond to this: a single message in them almost instantly runs down, and regular repetitions are beginning to annoy readers who naturally expect to see new posts when updating their feed, and not old advertising.
Fourthly, those of your subscribers, who nevertheless signed up consciously and meaningfully - these are people who were your loyal customers before . Just because a Coca-Cola fan will not subscribe to Pepsi Facebook, as well as vice versa - he does not need it, on the contrary, the human psyche is designed to filter out as much as possible all information that does not fit into the pre-selected canvas. I do not say that among their propaganda it is not necessary to conduct - it is necessary, but the value of such propaganda is an order of magnitude lower than that conducted among strangers.
In the beginning, I mentioned research and focus groups. Now, for example, I will show a couple of pictures to briefly emphasize what was said (there will be no links, these studies have not been published openly, and therefore I give only a tiny excerpt from them).
The impact of information from different sources on the choice of a smartphone (only Apple and Samsung, Western Europe, 2014):
Sources of information used when choosing a laptop (all manufacturers, Russia, 2012):
It cannot be said that social networks are an unequivocal outsider - after all, there are still sponsored events. True, the latter at least affect the overall brand awareness, so that the issue of outsider can be considered debatable. Separately, of course, cynically divided in the second study - into the pages of users and manufacturers. Beat lying down.
However, no - in the first study there is still more cynical. I show you one picture, but in general it is more than 50-page presentation, in which a significant part of the data is given with splits by age, sex, as well as loyalty to a particular brand (because research about a recently completed or planned purchase, loyalty is defined as the acquisition or planning of the acquisition of a product of the same brand that the user had previously). And this is how the column about the influence of social networks on the choice of a smartphone looks like, if users are divided into loyal and switched:
Here, of course, cynically absolutely everything - and the same performance for non-SMM Apple with the leading active SMM Samsung, and confirmation of what I said above about the fact that the main subscribers of your social networks are already loyal to you, and the absolute figures are on the verge of statistical error.
Speaking briefly, with social networks, we get the very case when the tool defines a message: because of their inherent characteristics, you can actually do nothing to get an effective advertising tool from social networks.
So does it make sense to dismiss Emma and hire a highly professional (and highly paid) PR journalist who will spend a lot of time filling the corporate Facebook with unique stories about laying underwater cables?
Sorry, I love rhetorical questions.
So why is SMM so popular - although the main wave of the boom seems to have subsided, anyway, everyone is doing it? In my opinion, there are two main reasons - of course, if you do not touch the industry, where SMM can be effective (more on this below).
First of all, it is the ease of selling SMM, and I’m talking not only about third-party companies who want to sell these services to you, but also about domestic sales (the marketing communications department should justify the need to pay a quarterly bonus to the company, and the lack of need to disperse everyone to devilish dog), and even about selling yourself: after all, it is also important to convince yourself that you are doing the right and useful thing.
SMM in quantitative terms are many beautiful and large numbers: tens and hundreds of thousands of subscribers, millions of their friends, who will see all their likes, sheirs and retweets, thousands of transitions to the company website ... Have you ever seen a company manager who would not be interested the idea that the news about his business will read millions - and this can be done easily and practically for free (at least compared to the effort required to get into the real news, be it RBC or Channel One)?
Moreover, these numbers are not really so hard to reach. You can post a lot of cats (although, of course, a corporate account filled with cats, quotes from great people and interesting links is the round seal of the registry on the impotence of the PR department), you can remove the "viral video" (usually, very dull, but justification of the budget, you can refer to examples of Nike or Volvo) and then give money to the agency for its “sowing”, which will bring five or, if lucky, six-figure views, you can simply buy a lot of dead souls ... in general, ways to show the performance of there are quite a few KPIs supplied by it.
All of this, of course, is falling apart if you dig a little deeper: dead souls do not put likes and do not write comments, under the video with a million views will be a couple of thousand ratings, half of which - with your thumb down, the dynamics of changes in the number of readers will have a pronounced peak and rather short dress after it well coincides with the period of the contract with promoagentstvom finally, all this will not in any way be poured into any real market indicators - and I remind you that for a company that sells tangible goods, selling them is I have only the KPI, having a value in the objective reality, not in the country of pink unicorns.
The problem is that top management rarely understands where and how to dig deeper - for him the topic of all these social networks is, firstly, unimportant against the background of real current problems and issues, and secondly, to dig deeper, it’s just hired a marketing communications department. The lack of positive influence of all the boisterous activities on sales is also explained fairly easily - marketing did everything that was in its power, but the sales department could not take advantage of the chance provided, and who knows what would have happened with sales if marketing had not been so distracted of the last strength, maintaining the reputation of the business among millions of people.
In addition, the same leadership in many companies is confident that a conscious refusal to work in any direction is on the list of seven deadly sins and means that someone prefers to sit and do nothing, but only get paid. With this, of course, easier - about ROI (Return On Investments, that is, the cash exhaust from the stock minus the cost of this share), the management is usually also aware of; another thing is that in the context of the internal sale of their activities to marketing, it may, of course, be more profitable to demonstrate vigorous work in social networks (see above) than to clearly show management that it is not needed.
And here we come to the main question - so what, and really sit down and do nothing? Generally speaking, of course, depends primarily on the nature of your activity - several directions can be made very effective in social networks.
Perhaps you can come up with some other options, but these three are seen by me as the main ones.
What to do the rest? Above, I said that the main [live] readers of a corporate blog are already loyal to this company, but this does not mean that you can close your eyes to them. To advertise among them every new product is meaningless enough - the process of buying new products from them is the same as that of all other people, and you are unlikely to get into it, and hope that they are interested in the color gamut of your line of vacuum cleaners just because they like your company is, in principle, extremely naive, to put it mildly. However, it makes sense to regularly iron a coat: these are people who mostly think that your company is a leader, so let them confirm this. Tell about interesting successes, interesting achievements and interesting new products. But I beg of you - really interesting , and not according to the plan "at least three publications per week." “According to the plan” by the end of the month these people will browse you on Facebook just like the rest of the advertising stuff - except for very hard-nosed ones.
In principle, to estimate the degree of interest is not so difficult. Imagine the recipient of your materials as a fan of your company, who argues in a bar over a beer with your friend, a fan of your competitor. The goal of your blog is to give it arguments for this argument . No, “but you know that X just released a new premium solution for a mass user” is not an argument, because a mentally healthy person doesn’t talk like that over a beer, and for some other sample phrases from your press releases in the face to get. This is basically similar to Emma's advice from the above article, only between “call your friends and tell them something interesting” and “argue over a beer with a supporter of another brand” in practice there is a lot of difference.
Another line of work is two-way communication with readers. Your loyal users naturally think that your blog is a sensible place to ask you questions, and disloyal ones think that you’ll pour shit on you. And to that, and to another it is necessary to be able to answer quickly, distinctly and correctly. Otherwise, just another item will appear in which you will not meet the expectations of the readers of your blog, and not to meet the expectations - this is one of the worst things that happen in communicating with the consumer. Unfortunately, in many companies, blogging is given to PR-agencies that either do not respond at all, or get rid of common phrases - and for some reason believe that those asking for common phrases will swallow. For some reason, in general, many of those involved in marketing communications believe that a consumer is some kind of alien with a very special, different from their own thinking, thanks to which he does not feel when they try to just get rid of him, and if he does, he is even happy to this. Believe me, he feels great and he is not happy about it, and over a beer, your answers would be regarded as a clumsy attempt to move out of the topic - with corresponding consequences.
In some cases, it is quite funny. For example, a simple robot from Megaphone is trying to talk with Eldar Murtazin. In principle, if he would have talked to anyone like that, he would rather quickly lose the interlocutor, but the conversation would become an anecdote with the editor-in-chief of one of the largest TV runet publications.
In principle, you can not go far: people who read blogs of companies on Habré are familiar with the mechanical work of robots from PR departments: a fair amount of them, especially those that are larger from corporations, are filled with copies of press releases originally written in an incredibly bad language even from the point of view of the official press release, and even from the point of view of the blog, it’s absolutely horrible. I'll tell you a secret: inside themselves they consider the distribution of a press release as an absolute value (“informing consumers about new products and services of the Company”), and ROI can be considered as, for example, the cost of paying for the same release in a publication with a similar attendance (no, no joke, I saw with my own eyes the methodology for calculating the ROI of press conferences as the total cost of the official placement of advertising material in publications that wrote something about the product or service presented).
At the same time, the actual ROI of such a placement is negative, although it would seem that the costs for it are extremely close to zero. Regular readers see that the company, in communicating with them, stamps boring materials written in bad language and simply does not respond to comments, even from quite positively-minded readers. People who came from outside (from search engines, for example) see negative comments to which the company also does not react - and they conclude that people in general do not always like these products (and negative feedback from other people about products plays a very significant role in refusals from the purchase, especially for expensive goods).
What to do if you consider normal work with social networks - ironing on loyal consumers, working with feedback - requiring too much of your attention? Well, in general, the answer is simple: if ROI is negative, then the corresponding activity is not necessary. At all. Totally.
That is, there are exceptions - for example, image advertising, designed to raise the overall brand awareness, and not to sell a particular product (the same banners in most cases it makes sense to consider only in this context), but they should be regarded as exceptions, individually. And if we are talking specifically about image advertising, then the rule of the medium is the message applied to it by definition and in full growth - brand awareness does not rise on Facebook on free press releases.
And in general, in marketing there is an excellent rule: an investment of 50% of the required yields a result of 0% of the necessary.
Throughout this sheet I wanted to make two simple, but at the same time wise thoughts:
Against the background of the dominance of stories about how the mighty SMM will throw millions of readers to Landings, where they will immediately suck into the funnel and makeslaves subscribers, an understanding of this somehow fades away - and as a result, the texts about “mistakes that I made when opening my fifth business "with stories about how the author invested in all the fashionable, until it burned out.
PS Links to various of the above:
1. www.cossa.ru/articles/234/71510
2. www.amazon.com/Social-Media-Bullshit-BJ-Mendelson/dp/1250002958
3. www.mediabistro.com/prnewser/ coca-cola-says-social-media-buzz-does-not-boost-sales_b60389
Usually, the client’s drive to the site and further promotion there, indicating some virtual action performed by him — registering, subscribing to the newsletter, and immediately buying something online with some discount — is indicated as the goal in all these positive texts. This is a criterion for success.
Unfortunately, so far not everyone is selling something online.
')
The previous three years I spent on work in a company that sells very even offline things - electronics, mostly relatively expensive. I worked in the business unit, but at the same time I dealt with issues related to all sorts of communication with partners and consumers - so I was keenly interested in the effectiveness of this communication, whether it was large research, small focus groups or observations of wildlife. In addition, the division of responsibilities between the marketing department and the business unit suggests that marketing is enthusiastic, and the business unit is skeptical. Skeptical look quite consistent with my character. And, by the way, the criterion of success in this business is the sale of goods from the store shelf, and not the visitors who registered on the site.
So, I no longer work there, I have a lot of free time and I want to talk about it - about SMM as applied to a business that sells material things. And to show with examples when this trendy trend does not work at all simply because of the peculiarities of its nature.
I'll start from afar - with the idea that we still need SMM. It is natural, because if you just come to the high leadership and say that we do not deal with social networks, then there is a high probability of a small scandal and cries about those who prefer “to sit down and do nothing”. Sitting, sleeping, doing nothing.
Therefore, let's do it. How?
An open letter to Emma
“What nonsense are you writing on our page, eh, Emma ?!” 1 - the emotional text that has gained popularity in runet six months ago that in a certain large corporation a certain Emma always writes to anybody in official social media accounts not interesting nonsense, while I could write interesting things: for example, about the technical aspects of building a communication channel through the English Channel, in which there are so many interesting and unusual things. The popularity and approval he received primarily from techies, which is why I want to start with him.
I never thought about how difficult it is to stretch a cable along the bottom of the ocean. My friend from the subscriber terminals department told me in simple words what is happening on the market now and what people are buying. About the fact that the owner of the "iPhone" spends on communication twice as much as the owner of Nokia, so they are promoting "iPhones", even if at a loss. Another friend told me how they come up with new tariffs, why they should find a response from subscribers and all that jazz.
In principle, this list is already causing people who are personally familiar with the topic of public communications some tension: a bad idea is, for example, as telling the iPhone owner that he is wasting money (and people familiar with how market analytics are doing already This thesis alone sees so many objective pitfalls - for example, the obvious difference in the average price of iPhone and Nokia - that they will crush the advanced thesis with questions immediately and forever) and an honest story that it is profitable for the cellular company to sell smartphones that encourage people to spend more money. Firstly, it is not always more profitable, there are various nuances, and secondly, although this thesis is worthy of Captain Obvious himself, you will be surprised how negatively the public can sometimes react to facts that seem obvious to someone.
No, well, really, you want to tell the public why you actually change the tariffs? Or arrange a holy war of Nokievods with Yablochnik, famously having bombed out of the stratosphere in the territories of both camps?
In addition, for example, I am not at all sure that any significant part of the public would be interested in details of the construction of communication channels or the formation of a tariff line. Such texts can collect a stable core of the audience, but whether it will be big ... However, let us leave for now, the point is not even in this.
In fact, Emma should face the following tasks:
- Collect information from different people in the company. With very different, from different departments. These people may not understand why they should talk to Emma.
- To understand that from this information you can speak publicly so as not to harm the company (I will say secretly that with the right sauce, at least 9 out of 10 information channels can be deployed to your advantage, but choosing the sauce is also a separate skill, isn't it?)
- To understand that from this information to the general public is generally interesting.
- Process and submit it so that the result is easy to read.
Generally speaking, this is a lot of work. This is the task of a very good journalist or a very good PR man. Moreover, both the company’s management and employees must trust Emma as their own — all internal information about the company’s work will be available at the entrance, and the output should be only that which does not reveal the secret, does not cause harm, does not hurt the competitors too much Further. This is a separate problem, and a big problem, due to which, in most companies, PR departments actually turn into apparatuses for issuing press releases, because the authorities simply don’t want to trust them with any important inside information, and without inside information nothing but stamping bravura press releases, no one PR can not do.
That is, to perform all of this with some significant efficiency, Emma should be a good, highly paid professional, a PR manager or a journalist.
Good, beautiful, good purpose. Attention, only one question: will it pay off?
The medium is the message
Social Media Is Bullshit 2 is a book of a person who has actually become disenchanted with social networks - and, in fact, in most of the text, this disappointment shines between the lines. In this regard, it is not very interesting to read the whole book, for a person related to the topic, there are many platitudes and obviousness, but it is still indicative. The most vivid example is the author's story about how he tweeted an advertising campaign to raise funds for charity. There he got into the Suggested Users List, scored a huge number of subscribers, announced his charity fundraising trips around the country ... and failed the campaign. People subscribed to it - that's all. It did not develop into any action. That is, in general, in any. These people did not come to the announced meetings in different cities, did not donate $ 5 for charity, did not, it seems, nothing at all, except for pressing a button on Twitter.
He also has numerous examples of advertising campaigns conducted by major players and seemingly successful - many of them you will find in the form of "cases" (I hate this tracing paper), demonstrated by those who want to sell you SMM services. Yes, it was beautiful, large-scale campaigns, a lot of money was invested in them, some of them went in sync with ATL or BTL campaigns, they brought sales for millions of dollars ... that's just a million dollars for a company that has a budget for such a campaign - random fluctuation, fractions of percent of normal turnover. And last year, Coca-Cola shocked the industry with a shocking statement: it suddenly turned out 3 that the scale of discussing its products in social networks (the same buzz they pray for and promise in SMM) does not have any statistically significant effect on current sales.
The fact is that, with some exceptions, social networks are generally not suitable for advertising most products.
First, the social networks are extremely fleeting . A typical active Facebook user scrolls dozens a day, well if not hundreds, posts - naturally, he does not read them carefully, most of which he scrolls through. With a very high probability, all the promotions will fall into the category of quickly scrolling, since in 99 cases out of 100 the information in them is unimportant and uninteresting for a particular person.
Secondly, the threshold for the demonstration of interest is not just low, it is zero. Pressing Like in Facebook does not cost anything, in instagrame you don’t even need to search for the corresponding button: social networks do everything for you to like and retweet as easily as possible and therefore as often as possible. As a result, even if a person, after seeing your post, has committed some action on him - do not think that he did it out of a great love for your brand and a great desire to know everything about it. Most likely, he clicked "Like" first of all because it cost him nothing.
Thirdly, social networks are not indexed or extremely poorly indexed by search engines , and people themselves do not save posts from them to the bookmarks. At the same time, people are not inclined, for example, having seen on Facebook an advertisement for a new refrigerator, to grab a wallet and run to the store - as shown by studies of consumer behavior, buying something expensive usually takes several months (from the thought that it is needed to purchases; the active phase, that is, the actual choice of a particular product — a few weeks), during which a person evaluates his budgets, becomes acquainted with this category of goods in general and pretends whether it makes sense to change the old to the new, then becomes acquainted with reviews and reviews on specific products, visits two or three stores to view live ... If you were not so incredibly lucky that your post on social networks got him exactly in this period - then he had no significant influence on his actions because even if a person consciously searched for information about a product, your post is the last thing he finds, due to the aforementioned features of social networks.
Yes, there is such (often the main and even the only, by the way) function of advertising, like maintaining brand awareness: every day meeting a beautiful photo of your refrigerator in a prominent place, people get used to the idea that you are making beautiful refrigerators, and when it comes time to buy a new refrigerator remember you. There are even metrics that describe how a brand is associated with a particular product category - MPSA (Most Preferred Single Answer) and UA Top 3 (Unaided Awareness Top 3), for example. Keywords: "every day" and "in a prominent place." Social networks do not correspond to this: a single message in them almost instantly runs down, and regular repetitions are beginning to annoy readers who naturally expect to see new posts when updating their feed, and not old advertising.
Fourthly, those of your subscribers, who nevertheless signed up consciously and meaningfully - these are people who were your loyal customers before . Just because a Coca-Cola fan will not subscribe to Pepsi Facebook, as well as vice versa - he does not need it, on the contrary, the human psyche is designed to filter out as much as possible all information that does not fit into the pre-selected canvas. I do not say that among their propaganda it is not necessary to conduct - it is necessary, but the value of such propaganda is an order of magnitude lower than that conducted among strangers.
In the beginning, I mentioned research and focus groups. Now, for example, I will show a couple of pictures to briefly emphasize what was said (there will be no links, these studies have not been published openly, and therefore I give only a tiny excerpt from them).
The impact of information from different sources on the choice of a smartphone (only Apple and Samsung, Western Europe, 2014):
Sources of information used when choosing a laptop (all manufacturers, Russia, 2012):
It cannot be said that social networks are an unequivocal outsider - after all, there are still sponsored events. True, the latter at least affect the overall brand awareness, so that the issue of outsider can be considered debatable. Separately, of course, cynically divided in the second study - into the pages of users and manufacturers. Beat lying down.
However, no - in the first study there is still more cynical. I show you one picture, but in general it is more than 50-page presentation, in which a significant part of the data is given with splits by age, sex, as well as loyalty to a particular brand (because research about a recently completed or planned purchase, loyalty is defined as the acquisition or planning of the acquisition of a product of the same brand that the user had previously). And this is how the column about the influence of social networks on the choice of a smartphone looks like, if users are divided into loyal and switched:
Here, of course, cynically absolutely everything - and the same performance for non-SMM Apple with the leading active SMM Samsung, and confirmation of what I said above about the fact that the main subscribers of your social networks are already loyal to you, and the absolute figures are on the verge of statistical error.
Speaking briefly, with social networks, we get the very case when the tool defines a message: because of their inherent characteristics, you can actually do nothing to get an effective advertising tool from social networks.
So does it make sense to dismiss Emma and hire a highly professional (and highly paid) PR journalist who will spend a lot of time filling the corporate Facebook with unique stories about laying underwater cables?
Sorry, I love rhetorical questions.
Thirty-five thousand couriers alone!
So why is SMM so popular - although the main wave of the boom seems to have subsided, anyway, everyone is doing it? In my opinion, there are two main reasons - of course, if you do not touch the industry, where SMM can be effective (more on this below).
First of all, it is the ease of selling SMM, and I’m talking not only about third-party companies who want to sell these services to you, but also about domestic sales (the marketing communications department should justify the need to pay a quarterly bonus to the company, and the lack of need to disperse everyone to devilish dog), and even about selling yourself: after all, it is also important to convince yourself that you are doing the right and useful thing.
SMM in quantitative terms are many beautiful and large numbers: tens and hundreds of thousands of subscribers, millions of their friends, who will see all their likes, sheirs and retweets, thousands of transitions to the company website ... Have you ever seen a company manager who would not be interested the idea that the news about his business will read millions - and this can be done easily and practically for free (at least compared to the effort required to get into the real news, be it RBC or Channel One)?
Moreover, these numbers are not really so hard to reach. You can post a lot of cats (although, of course, a corporate account filled with cats, quotes from great people and interesting links is the round seal of the registry on the impotence of the PR department), you can remove the "viral video" (usually, very dull, but justification of the budget, you can refer to examples of Nike or Volvo) and then give money to the agency for its “sowing”, which will bring five or, if lucky, six-figure views, you can simply buy a lot of dead souls ... in general, ways to show the performance of there are quite a few KPIs supplied by it.
All of this, of course, is falling apart if you dig a little deeper: dead souls do not put likes and do not write comments, under the video with a million views will be a couple of thousand ratings, half of which - with your thumb down, the dynamics of changes in the number of readers will have a pronounced peak and rather short dress after it well coincides with the period of the contract with promoagentstvom finally, all this will not in any way be poured into any real market indicators - and I remind you that for a company that sells tangible goods, selling them is I have only the KPI, having a value in the objective reality, not in the country of pink unicorns.
The problem is that top management rarely understands where and how to dig deeper - for him the topic of all these social networks is, firstly, unimportant against the background of real current problems and issues, and secondly, to dig deeper, it’s just hired a marketing communications department. The lack of positive influence of all the boisterous activities on sales is also explained fairly easily - marketing did everything that was in its power, but the sales department could not take advantage of the chance provided, and who knows what would have happened with sales if marketing had not been so distracted of the last strength, maintaining the reputation of the business among millions of people.
In addition, the same leadership in many companies is confident that a conscious refusal to work in any direction is on the list of seven deadly sins and means that someone prefers to sit and do nothing, but only get paid. With this, of course, easier - about ROI (Return On Investments, that is, the cash exhaust from the stock minus the cost of this share), the management is usually also aware of; another thing is that in the context of the internal sale of their activities to marketing, it may, of course, be more profitable to demonstrate vigorous work in social networks (see above) than to clearly show management that it is not needed.
Sit down and do nothing
And here we come to the main question - so what, and really sit down and do nothing? Generally speaking, of course, depends primarily on the nature of your activity - several directions can be made very effective in social networks.
- Small business, built on the basis of any hobby, from beadwork to love for some specific cosmetics - around a well-built account there will be a community of people with the same aspirations, they will also be clients
- Online business, suggesting a fast path to purchase - it does not interfere with the transience of social networks, it works according to the "saw-bought" scheme
- Political, sorry, PR. Especially black. Do without examples.
Perhaps you can come up with some other options, but these three are seen by me as the main ones.
What to do the rest? Above, I said that the main [live] readers of a corporate blog are already loyal to this company, but this does not mean that you can close your eyes to them. To advertise among them every new product is meaningless enough - the process of buying new products from them is the same as that of all other people, and you are unlikely to get into it, and hope that they are interested in the color gamut of your line of vacuum cleaners just because they like your company is, in principle, extremely naive, to put it mildly. However, it makes sense to regularly iron a coat: these are people who mostly think that your company is a leader, so let them confirm this. Tell about interesting successes, interesting achievements and interesting new products. But I beg of you - really interesting , and not according to the plan "at least three publications per week." “According to the plan” by the end of the month these people will browse you on Facebook just like the rest of the advertising stuff - except for very hard-nosed ones.
In principle, to estimate the degree of interest is not so difficult. Imagine the recipient of your materials as a fan of your company, who argues in a bar over a beer with your friend, a fan of your competitor. The goal of your blog is to give it arguments for this argument . No, “but you know that X just released a new premium solution for a mass user” is not an argument, because a mentally healthy person doesn’t talk like that over a beer, and for some other sample phrases from your press releases in the face to get. This is basically similar to Emma's advice from the above article, only between “call your friends and tell them something interesting” and “argue over a beer with a supporter of another brand” in practice there is a lot of difference.
Another line of work is two-way communication with readers. Your loyal users naturally think that your blog is a sensible place to ask you questions, and disloyal ones think that you’ll pour shit on you. And to that, and to another it is necessary to be able to answer quickly, distinctly and correctly. Otherwise, just another item will appear in which you will not meet the expectations of the readers of your blog, and not to meet the expectations - this is one of the worst things that happen in communicating with the consumer. Unfortunately, in many companies, blogging is given to PR-agencies that either do not respond at all, or get rid of common phrases - and for some reason believe that those asking for common phrases will swallow. For some reason, in general, many of those involved in marketing communications believe that a consumer is some kind of alien with a very special, different from their own thinking, thanks to which he does not feel when they try to just get rid of him, and if he does, he is even happy to this. Believe me, he feels great and he is not happy about it, and over a beer, your answers would be regarded as a clumsy attempt to move out of the topic - with corresponding consequences.
In some cases, it is quite funny. For example, a simple robot from Megaphone is trying to talk with Eldar Murtazin. In principle, if he would have talked to anyone like that, he would rather quickly lose the interlocutor, but the conversation would become an anecdote with the editor-in-chief of one of the largest TV runet publications.
In principle, you can not go far: people who read blogs of companies on Habré are familiar with the mechanical work of robots from PR departments: a fair amount of them, especially those that are larger from corporations, are filled with copies of press releases originally written in an incredibly bad language even from the point of view of the official press release, and even from the point of view of the blog, it’s absolutely horrible. I'll tell you a secret: inside themselves they consider the distribution of a press release as an absolute value (“informing consumers about new products and services of the Company”), and ROI can be considered as, for example, the cost of paying for the same release in a publication with a similar attendance (no, no joke, I saw with my own eyes the methodology for calculating the ROI of press conferences as the total cost of the official placement of advertising material in publications that wrote something about the product or service presented).
At the same time, the actual ROI of such a placement is negative, although it would seem that the costs for it are extremely close to zero. Regular readers see that the company, in communicating with them, stamps boring materials written in bad language and simply does not respond to comments, even from quite positively-minded readers. People who came from outside (from search engines, for example) see negative comments to which the company also does not react - and they conclude that people in general do not always like these products (and negative feedback from other people about products plays a very significant role in refusals from the purchase, especially for expensive goods).
What to do if you consider normal work with social networks - ironing on loyal consumers, working with feedback - requiring too much of your attention? Well, in general, the answer is simple: if ROI is negative, then the corresponding activity is not necessary. At all. Totally.
That is, there are exceptions - for example, image advertising, designed to raise the overall brand awareness, and not to sell a particular product (the same banners in most cases it makes sense to consider only in this context), but they should be regarded as exceptions, individually. And if we are talking specifically about image advertising, then the rule of the medium is the message applied to it by definition and in full growth - brand awareness does not rise on Facebook on free press releases.
And in general, in marketing there is an excellent rule: an investment of 50% of the required yields a result of 0% of the necessary.
TL; DR
Throughout this sheet I wanted to make two simple, but at the same time wise thoughts:
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Against the background of the dominance of stories about how the mighty SMM will throw millions of readers to Landings, where they will immediately suck into the funnel and make
PS Links to various of the above:
1. www.cossa.ru/articles/234/71510
2. www.amazon.com/Social-Media-Bullshit-BJ-Mendelson/dp/1250002958
3. www.mediabistro.com/prnewser/ coca-cola-says-social-media-buzz-does-not-boost-sales_b60389
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/243191/
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