Category Archives: Social Media

Does Social Media Work? Is A Dumb Question

In a blog post titled Dumb Marketing Question #1 – Does Social Media Work? the author argues that the question in question is a dumb question because word-of-mouth is a key driver of business and that much of WOM occurs through social media these days:

“The million dollar question that every company wants to know is this: ‘Will my investment pay off?’ ‘Will social media be an effective communication channel for my business?’ Asking the question in itself shows a complete lack of understanding of the communication revolution which we are experiencing.

I have yet to work with any business that has not acknowledged that one of their most important lead sources is Word Of Mouth; in other words, recommendations and referrals from existing customers, or those people who have been ‘touched’ positively by your business in some way. The truth is quite simple: Word of Mouth Went Online.”

My take: The author is correct that asking if social media works is a dumb question, but not for the reasons he gives.

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First off, the author’s “million dollar question” is not only two questions, but they’re two very different questions. It’s quite possible that a social media investment you make won’t pay off. But that wouldn’t necessarily make social media an ineffective communication channel for your business.

Second, nowhere in the article does the author make a credible case for why social media works. The fact that WOM is an important lead generator, and that WOM increasingly occurs online (and through social media, more specifically) doesn’t prove that a company’s investments in social media improves the volume and quality of word-of-mouth recommendations.

In fact, there are some high-profile examples of companies whose social media efforts backfired on them and resulted in a huge amount of negative publicity and word-of-mouth  (I don’t really need to find you these examples, do I?). By the blog post author’s logic, that would prove social media doesn’t work.

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But the author is correct in asserting that the question “Does social media work?” is a dumb question.

It’s dumb because the appropriate question to ask is:

Will social media work better than other approaches for the particular objective we’re trying to achieve?

Marketing investments involve opportunity costs and should be evaluated relative to alternative uses for the funds.

If making a $1 million investment in social media were to produce 1,000 new customers, would you conclude that “social media works” if that same $1 million investment in TV advertising or email marketing produced 50,000 new customers?

The problem with the so-called, self-appointed social media experts’ view on social media ROI is the lack of explicit recognition of different objectives throughout the marketing chain (awareness, preference, purchase) and the lack of understanding how different marketing channels and approaches influence and impact those marketing objectives.

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If you accept my question as the better question, then there’s some not-so-good news for the social media gurus who want to discard social media ROI as a performance criteria.

eConsultancy reported on a study which asked marketers to rate the effectiveness of various marketing channels and approaches.

According to the marketers surveyed, 10% rated social media ROI as excellent and 31% rated its ROI as “good.” That’s basically no different than the respondents’ perspective of the ROI of direct mail, which so many people (not just social media morons) have written off as dead.

So the question “Does social media work?” is a dumb question, but not because it’s a forgone conclusion due to word-of-mouth.

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Although I believe (not surprisingly) that my proposed question is a superior question to the “does SM work?” question, it’s not the only question to ask. The second question to ask is:

Why does one channel or approach work better than another for achieving a particular marketing objective?

Marketers don’t seem too interested in this question. They seem content to find a statistic that demonstrates the superiority of their preferred channel/approach and rely on that stat as proof of their dominance, and the need to direct investment to that channel or approach.

The chart shown above from eConsultancy raises questions in my mind: Why do only 10% of marketers think social media ROI is excellent? and How is the percentage of marketers who think social media (and other channels’) ROI is excellent changing over time?

It’s quite possible that the reason that only 10% of marketers think social media ROI is excellent is that few know how to use the channel effectively. Or it could be that many are using the channel to achieve objectives that would be better addressed by other channels or approaches.

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Bottom line: Like many of the social media gurus, I too am fast coming to the conclusion that the social media ROI debate is a stupid debate. 

But not for the same reasons. 

It’s not because social media ROI is a foregone conclusion. And it’s certainly not because social media investments are somehow excused from being evaluated in the same way other investments are. (The only investments excused from producing a direct ROI are infrastructure investments). 

No, the reason the social media ROI debate is stupid is because the logic and rationale offered by some (many?) to dismiss the debate is just plain stupid.

The Stupidity Of Vigilante Tweeting

Learned a new term the other day: Vigilante tweeting. 

According to an article on PR Daily, vigilante tweeting is:

“Getting revenge by publishing the details of a loudmouth’s ‘private conversations’ to their Twitter feeds and other social networks. Let’s say I’m seated next to a loudmouth attorney on a bus one morning, and he won’t shut up about his latest case. I could punish the attorney’s lack of discretion by sending out a ‘vigilante tweet’ containing the lawyer’s name and the details of the case he revealed on the phone.”

My take: I’ve heard of some stupid things before, but this takes the cake. 

First off, lawyers don’t take buses. This kind of blows the whole example the author gives, but let’s roll with it a little longer. 

Second, how is that the author knows the name of this so-called attorney? By the time you’re clued in to some loudmouth’s pri-blic conversation (there’s a term that won’t stick), you didn’t really catch his name.

Third, the vast majority of these loudmouth conversations are not hush-hush details of the government’s case against Taliban terrorists. It’s conversations from some bozo about his drinking exploits from last night. So he probably wants you to publicize it on Twitter for him.

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In the scheme of things, the three reasons above are the weakest reasons for why vigilante tweeting is a stupid idea. 

Here’s the best reason: Because your followers couldn’t care less about this conversation, and would rather not waste their time reading about it. 

Vigilante tweeting is a symptom of a bigger issue in the social mediasphere. 

The problem? Too many people have nothing better to do than sit on a bus, tweet stupid shi*t they overhear someone else saying, and needlessly call attention to themselves (not the loudmouth).

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It’s sad. 

The old mantra of social media was “join the conversation.” Plenty of folks advised social media newbies to “add value.”

Now it’s “hey! look at me!”

I can only speak for myself, but I’m willing to bet that are a lot of people who will agree with me: I don’t care that your plane is delayed, I don’t care that you’re at [restaurant/SBUX/hotel/whereever], and I really don’t care that there’s an effing moron sitting near you talking loudly. DEAL WITH IT. Don’t annoy me with the little things that annoy you. 

Are you really that starved for attention that you have to engage in vigilante tweeting? Are you really stupid enough to believe that you’re somehow “punishing” the loudmouth? 

The only people you’re “punishing” are your followers. And I can only hope that they punish you by unfollowing you. 

The Wrong Way To Measure The ROI Of Twitter And Vine

In an article titled What Is the Right Way to Measure Your Twitter & Vine Marketing?, HubSpot writes:

“We like to call it closed-loop reporting. Closed-loop reporting on Twitter is the process of tracking the path of a user who clicks on a link in a tweet, visits a page on your website, completes a form on a landing page to become a lead, and, ultimately, converts into a customer — so you can directly attribute customers to your Twitter marketing, and evaluate the effectiveness of Twitter as a marketing channel for your business.”

 My take: Nope. Sorry. Wrong way to measure Twitter/Vine ROI.

Why is this wrong? For one, it ignores how someone came to see the tweet in the first place. Without knowing what other messages/media a prospect has been exposed to, attributing the sale to Twitter is inaccurate.

But there’s something else missing from HubSpot’s methodology. None of the comments on the blog post mentioned this (as of the time I read it), and it’s really too bad that there aren’t more (any!) people calling them out over this. 

The missing element: Cost.

Folks, you cannot — I repeat CANNOT — measure ROI without measuring cost. Cost is the “investment” component of the ROI formula. Sadly, too many social media gurus choose to ignore that.

It’s mind-boggling that the HubSpot makes no mention of capturing the costs involved with using Twitter/Vine as a marketing channel. The cost of sponsored tweets (if used) are easily measured, but allocating the costs of shared (or even dedicated) resources to the channel is no easy matter. 

So what should marketers do? The best answer might be “nothing.”

Accurately measuring the ROI of marketing investments is tricky business. Assume for a moment that you have a $10 million marketing budget, and 40% is in mass media channels, 30% in direct marketing, 25% in various other media/channels, and 4% in social media (excluding Twitter), and 1% in Twitter.

Is your time best spent figuring out the ROI of the 1% or the ROI of the 70% in mass media and direct marketing? Right. 

Back to the ROI drawing board.

The Most Misused Term In Marketing

Compete recently ran article claiming that Mobile Twitter Users Are the Ideal Audience for Advertisers. In it, Compete reports that, compared to other Twitter users,  mobile Twitter users in the U.S. are 86% more likely to be on Twitter several times a day and 57% less likely to use Twitter on a desktop computer.

Compete didn’t stop there. A graphic shows a number of other differences:

My take: The term “more likely” is, in all likelihood (pun intended), inappropriate here. In addition, the term is quite possibly the most misused term in marketing.

It’s possible that my analysis — in THIS case — is wrong, but I know for a fact that it happens in the reporting of many other studies. So, if I’m wrong here, my apologies to Compete. But the explanation will go to show why so many others go wrong.

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How did Compete determine that mobile Twitter users are THREE times more likely to use Twitter when commuting?

In all probability (the puns don’t stop, do they), they asked consumers: “Do you use Twitter when commuting?” If 30% of mobile Twitter users and 10% of other Twitter users said “Yes”, then Compete would have concluded that mobile users are “3X more likely to use when commuting.”

If 20% of non-mobile Twitter users use the service at work or school, and and 52% of mobile users do so, then mobile users are “160% more likely to use Twitter at work or school” (32% is 160% of 20%, so added on to 20% equals 52%).

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The problem with all this is that none of it actually captures likelihood of doing something.

How much “more likely” are mobile Twitter users to use Twitter on a mobile device than other Twitter users? Since 100% of mobile Twitter users use a mobile device and 0% of other users do, the answer isn’t calculable.

These statistics (and the underlying questions) don’t capture “likelihood.”

If the question had been “How likely are you to check Twitter before going to sleep tonight?” and 100% of one group said “100% chance” and 50% of the second group said “100% chance” then maybe you could say the first group is twice as likely as the second.

But it seems doubtful to me that that’s how the questions were asked.

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Regardless of whether or not I’m correct in my interpretation in this instance, there’s no denying that this happens all the  time when marketers report out the results of their studies.

[Hell, I do it myself from time to time, and thankfully I have a colleague who is great at catching it and making me change it.]

Marketers may overuse the terms “disruptive” and “transform” and whatever, but I’m throwing “more likely” into the hat as the most misused term in marketing.

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There is another issue with the Compete that bears mentioning, by the way.

It’s bad enough that the term “more likely” is (most likely) being misused.

But the underlying contention that all these “more likely” statistics add to make mobile Twitter users worth focusing on is missing one key element: How big is this segment?

You actually have to click over to the Twitter blog post on this study to find out. There, Twitter says that “60%of our 200 million active users log in via a mobile device at least once every month.”

Hmmm. Those 200 million users span how many different countries? And you, Mr. or Ms. Marketers, are serving consumers in how many of them? 

The key thing to understand here, as a marketer, is what percentage of your customers and prospects are mobile Twitter users, not how many of Twitter’s users are mobile Twitter users. 

It’s conceivable that your customers and prospects that are mobile Twitter users aren’t representative of the total pool of mobile Twitter users. 

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So go ahead, Compete, and hate me for tearing apart your research. Join the club.

Gen Yers Spend All Their Free Time Social Networking

At least, that’s what I would conclude after seeing the results of a survey which found that people under the age of 35 who use social networks (isn’t that all of them?) spend an average of 3.8 hours a day social networking.

I thought that number was huge, so I tried to estimate how people spend their day:

Activity       Hours spent
Sleeping          8.0
Working           8.0
Eating            1.5
Commuting         1.0
Prepping          1.0
Bathrooming       0.5
               -------
TOTAL            20.0

It’s quite possible your allocation is a bit different. Perhaps you eat your meals a bit more leisurely. Maybe your commute is longer. Maybe you put in more than 8 hours a day working (not readers of this blog). If you spend more time in the bathroom, there are other blogs you should be reading.

With 20 hours of the day accounted for by the listed activities, this leaves the average person with 4 hours of free time.

Of which Gen Yers spend 3.8 hours.

This means — if this is all correct — that Gen Yers spend 12 minutes, per day, of their free time doing something other than social networking.

I guess you can get a workout in in 12 minutes. Not sure you’ll get past the first hole on the golf course, though. With just 12 minutes, though, you’re not even catching half of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.

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The reality, of course, is that social networking is not a separate activity from the activities listed above. Except for maybe sleeping. Sadly, many of you sickos actually sleep with your smartphone so you can text and post to Facebook the second you wake up.

But this reality is disturbing and troubling.

Disturbing: You better not be reading this blog post (a form of social networking) on the can. Or while driving on your way to or from work.

Troubling: How effective/productive can you really be at your job if you’re multi-tasking between your job and social networking?

I know that Gen Yers pride themselves on their so-called ability to multi-task. The bad news for them is that the key to being successful is FOCUS (you should read The Twitter Generation’s Delusions Of Productivity). 

I said, the key to being successful is FOCUS (I repeated myself because I know you were distracted by a tweet announcing that your buddy is now the mayor of some stupid store that no one else ever goes to).

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Some marketers will look at the research results and conclude that, if people spend this much time on social networking, that they should focus their marketing efforts on social networks in order to reach their customers and prospects. 

But they’re mistaken. People on social networks are doing a gazillion other things while they’re social networking. There’s no mental bandwidth left to notice or pay attention to ads. 

I, on the other hand, look at the research results and can only conclude this: Some of you really need to get a life, get your priorities straight, get back to work, and for G*d’s sake, get your hands back on the steering wheel.

And some of you may need to wash your hands after you finish reading this.

Stop The Social Media Metric Madness!

Oh, those social media fanatics are good! They’ll twist any number they can get their hands on to make social media look good, won’t they? 

According to a  Social Media Today article titled Can Financial Services and Social Media Co-Exist and Succeed?:

“Securian Financial Group, a Minnesota-based insurance and financial services company forged ahead with a social media pilot program that generated some compelling results.”

According to the company’s communications manager, “We picked a topic, ‘Long-term goals need a long-term partner,’ that was representative of our brand and comfortable for our compliance department. We hired a small crew, walked to a local park and conducted spontaneous interviews.” 

The interviews became a series of four videos which were posted on Securian’s YouTube channel, and promoted on the corporate Facebook and Twitter pages.

According to the article, the campaign strove to: 1) Increase Facebook “Likes” by 25%; 2) Increase Twitter followers by 15%; 3) Build brand recognition for Securian; and 4) Promote Securian’s commitment to helping people reach their long-term financial goals.

The company’s Facebook page likes rose 27% to 571 and Twitter followers increased by 19% to 191.

My take: Compelling results, my ___.

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The insurer got about 120 new likes (if they started with 451 likes, an increase of 120 = 27%), while Twitter followers grew from about 160 to 191 (a 19% increase). I’m not calling anyone a liar (or maybe I am), but it seems pretty fishy to me that the actual results were 27% and 19%, respectively. How did Securian determine that likes should increase by 25%, and followers by 15%?

I don’t think that Securian had any idea how many likes and followers they would get. If you haven’t done this kind of thing before, how could you possibly predict the results? Do other insurance companies publish the results of their social media experiments to provide a guide for other insurers? Of course not.

I’m also trying to imagine the conversation that went on in this company:

Social media ninja: “Hey, I have a great idea. Let’s interview some average people about insurance, and put the videos on YouTube. I think we can get 100 Facebook page likes and 25 new Twitter followers if we do this. We have $2,500 in our social media marketing budget. We can use that money to hire a camera crew. ”

CMO: “Great idea. Syncapse says that the value of a Facebook like is $136, and Clickz published something saying that the value of a Twitter follower is $2.50. So if we get 100 new likes and 25 new followers, and invest $2,500, the ROI will be about 447%. “

I think we both know that this wasn’t the way it happened — in fact, the Communications Manager at Securian is quoted as saying that they went into this as an experiment. 

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I’m not knocking Securian, here. They have $850 billion of insurance in force, $35 billion of assets under management, and 10 million clients. They can afford to throw $2,500 into creating some YouTube videos without any expectation (or calculation) of a payoff.

But I’m willing to bet that Securian doesn’t know if its efforts have paid off already or not.

After all, exactly who are these people that liked the Facebook page? Are they existing customers? Prospects? Betcha Securian doesn’t know. 

I do hope, for Securian’s sake, that they’re from one of the two categories above, and not something else. Like employees.

A few years back, Washington Mutual beat its chest in press releases that, within 48 hours of launching a Facebook page, it had a couple of hundred fans.

At the time, I snooped around and found that at least three-quarters of those fans were affiliated in one way or another with the ad agency that did the design work for the bank’s Facebook page. So not only were these fans not worth $136 to the bank, but in essence, as a vendor to the bank, they cost the bank money.

(Which reminds me of this: If the ROI of social media is not going out of business, and WaMu invested in social media and still went out of business….oh, never mind).

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What we have here is Social Media Today looking for an example of a financial services firm doing something with social media, and spinning the results to make them look good. So they can say “See? Social media really works. Honest it does.”

But it doesn’t pass the test of scrutiny. Thirty-one new Twitter followers is not a “compelling” result. I get that many new followers each week, not by shooting videos, but by shooting my mouth off. 

The problem here isn’t simply the use of vanity metrics. It’s the lack of a marketing measurement infrastructure.

If Securian’s social media efforts are truly driving brand awareness and affinity, how is it measuring that — regardless of the channel used to drive those objectives?

And how does brand awareness and affinity drive number of qualified leads (after all, insurance isn’t bought, it’s sold, so if you’re not generating leads, you’re wasting your time)?

Maybe Securian is measuring those things. If it is, great.

But the problem I have here isn’t with what Securian is or isn’t doing — it’s with the total BS being spewed by Social Media Today. It’s 2013 — we need social media fanatics to become marketing fanatics. Measuring SM in a vacuum is increasingly a total waste of time and effort. Haven’t we heard enough of this SM puffery already?

Why Social Media Metrics Blog Posts Are A Waste Of Time

According to an HBR blog post titled Why Your Social Media Metrics Are A Waste Of Time:

“Many companies use the wrong metrics to measure their performance, especially when it comes to social media. If you think pageviews, unique visitors, registered members, conversion rates, email-newsletter open rates, number of Twitter followers, or Facebook likes are important by themselves, you probably have no idea what you’re doing.”

Fair enough. No argument from me. But the article goes on to say:

“Here are four of the most important metrics you can follow — notice how little they have to do with popular social-media metrics: 1) Relevant revenue; 2) Sales volume; 3) Customer retention; and 4) Relevant growth. These metrics are valuable because they measure success at your core business. To measure the value of your social-media activities, you have to look at the results the company is getting overall and track how social media was involved in moving the needle. That’s where you’ll find the only relevant social-media metrics.”

And therein lies the problem with the article (and most blog posts on social media metrics, for that matter). Namely: Preaching without prescription.

Re-read the sentence that says “To measure the value of your social-media activities, you have to look at the results the company is getting overall and track how social media was involved in moving the needle.”

Technically, correct. Practically, useless.

Of the many challenges facing marketers, attribution of results to investments is one of the stickiest. Many marketers design tests to see which offer tests better, or which web page design delivers the highest conversion rate. But tying overall revenue, retention, and growth to social media metrics — in the absence of control groups or other structured testing techniques — is, for the most part, impossible.

Not that that won’t stop marketers from using correlative measures. But it doesn’t prove causation.

Unless you only touch a customer through social media, you can’t claim that social media was the cause of any change in the relationship.

So go ahead, HBR, and publish blog posts about how social media metrics are a waste of time. In the absence of solid prescription and advice on how to tie social media efforts to bottom-line results, those blog posts are a waste of time.

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The problem is not that metrics like pageviews, unique visitors, or number of followers are the “wrong metrics” to use. Instead, there are two problems here.

The Metrics Chain

The first is that few (if any) marketers have done the hard work to understand if and how metrics like pageviews, visitors, or followers impact the bottom-line metrics the author of the article wants us to measure.

I know that many of you think the marketing funnel is dead. You’re wrong, and this is not the place or time to tell you why you’re wrong.

We need to think of marketing metrics as following a funnel, from upstream metrics like pageviews and follows to downstream metrics like sales, revenue, and retention.

What about midstream metrics? This is where the concept of customer engagement comes in. What are the things that good customers do — that demonstrate engagement — after they’ve viewed a page, liked your FB page, or visited your site that lead to increased sales and/or retention?

The problem isn’t that upstream metrics are the “wrong” metrics to measure — it’s that they’re an insufficient set of metrics to use to measure performance.

The Cost of Metrics

But that’s just the first of the two issues causing the problem. The second is that it costs money to develop and track a metric.

Some metrics — like pageviews, followers, likes, etc. — are easy and cheap to measure. But developing those midstream metrics, and determining the linkage between upstream, midstream, and downstream metrics are harder to define and measure. And it takes an investment on the part of Marketing to develop and track them.

What’s the ROI on that investment?

There is none. Spending money to develop and track and metric in and of itself will have no impact on the bottom line. You might be able to use that metric to make better decisions that ultimately lead to improved sales or reduced costs, but simply defining and calculating a metric doesn’t produce that result.

So what happens is that Marketing doesn’t invest in a measurement infrastructure. It defaults to tracking the easy-and-cheap-to-measure metrics. The ones the author of the HBR article thinks are the “wrong” metrics.

To Track or Not To Track: That Is The Question

The most important question to address isn’t “what social media metrics should we be tracking?” but “should we even spend time and money developing social media metrics to track?”

Here’s why: Assume that a company’s marketing budget is $100 million, and that 50% of it is spent on TV advertising, 20% on print advertising, 20% on direct mail, 5% on online advertising, 4% on events, and 1% on social media. 

Of the six approaches that marketing invests in, which of the six would you want to have the most accurate marketing ROI metrics?

My top three would be TV, print, and direct mail. Cuz that’s where 90% of the marketing dollars go. 

If the CMO of my fictional company doesn’t have the “right” social media metrics in place, so what? Does it really matter that much? 

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Now, I can already hear the SM gurus claiming that social media has a disproportionate impact on customer relationships. 

Maybe that’s true. 

But that just means the CMO of my fictional company needs to know if s/he should be reallocating the investments between the six categories in some other way than it’s being allocated today. 

It doesn’t mean investing more in a social media measurement infrastructure. It means investing more to develop a marketing measurement infrastructure. And that puts many Marketing departments in a chicken-and-egg situation: Can’t prove the ROI of their investments, but can’t afford to invest in a measurement infrastructure that would improve the measurement of marketing ROI. 

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Bottom line: Blog posts about social media metrics like the one in HBR tick me off. They miss the important points and issues regarding marketing measurement.

Bogus Social Media Metrics Should Be Criminalized

A MarketingProfs article titled The Top 20 Social CMOs of the Fortune 100 [Infographic] caught my attention. I was curious to see how they determined who the top 20 “social” CMOs of the F100 are, and how they managed to put it in a infographic. According to the article:

“BusinessNext Social conducted a study of the CMOs in the Fortune 100 to see which of them were most socially active. To rank the CMOs, the company used a formula created by the BusinessNext Social conference director Mark Fidelman. The study considered such metrics as Twitter followers, retweet frequency, social engagement frequency, social mentions, KRED scores, and Klout scores. Weights were assigned to each factor.”

My take: The methodology is totally bogus, and the infographic is…well, not exactly an infographic.

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My first thought upon reading this article was “Aha! So that’s how you create a social media. Take every publicly available social media metric, randomly assign weights to the score, and — voila! — social media metric created!”

My second reaction was “What was the maximum score, and why are there 27 stars under the so-called leaders’ names?” The most “social” (damn, I can’t write that without putting quotes aren’t it because it’s so damn bogus) CMO earned a score (I not sure “earned” is a very good verb to use here) of 2650, and 26 and a half out of the 27 stars following her name are filled in. Is 2650 good or bad? Is it out of 3,000 or 30,000? And what the hell do the stars mean?

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The number 14th ranked CMO is Jim Wilkinson from Pepsico. Technically, he’s not really the CMO, he’s the EVP of Communications, so the infographic (and article) title is a little misleading.

As of this morning, Jim has 623 followers and has tweeted a total of 168 times. Two of those tweets were retweets that were sent out in the past 24 hours, but before that his last original tweet was October 27. During the month of November,  Jim only retweeted stuff, like @@MoClaiborne tweeting “Game day!” and Interstate 80 Tahoe tweeting “CHAINS: 1 MI EAST OF BAXTER To TRUCKEE (01:16).”

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The article doesn’t actually rank all top 20 CMOs — six of the execs get “honorable mention.” According to the article, “5 of the 6 Honorable Mentions are social, but not consistently.”

One of the six is Tom Noland from Humana. Tom has 29 followers, and has tweeted a total of 20 times, the last of which was October 16th.

Another is Alan Gershonhorn from UPS, who has 269 followers, and has tweeted 10 times, most recently on March 13th. I’m not sure which year, though.

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Bottom line: What a totally bogus metric and article.

Was there any lesson learned here from the social media behavior of CMOs (and senior communications execs) in the Fortune 100?  Is there a benefit to a corporation if the senior marketing executive is active in social media? (I see no proof of that here).  Do companies like Pepsi and Humana suffer if their top marketing execs are not particularly active tweeters? (I don’t think so).

The bottom line here is that this article was written simply to draw attention to MarketingProfs and whoever created the totally bogus ranking.

And we need to do something about these bogus social media metrics.

That’s why I’m proposing we criminalize them.

Look, we need to maintain a balance in our society. With so many states decriminalizing marijuana, our law enforcement personnel are looking to keep busy. I believe that hunting down and incarcerating people who create bogus social media metrics is a good use of law enforcement’s time, and our taxpayer money.

p.s. In no way should anything I wrote here be seen as criticism of Wilkinson, Noland, or Gershonhorn. They can choose to participate in Twitter in any way they choose.

Five Not-So-Best Practices For Banks On Facebook

While researching an upcoming Aite Group report on What Bank Marketers Should Do With Twitter, I stumbled across an article on Mashable titled 5 Best Practices for Financial Institutions on Facebook (no link deserved). After stumbling across it, I fell face down in the pile of cow dung that the article is. The article list five best practices for FIs on Facebook:

1) Don’t just talk about banking; 2) Host contests; 3) Offer career advice; 4) Be cool; and 5) Show off your good work.

My take: To call something a “best practice” implies that it produces a positive, desirable business result. If you can’t prove that it does, you need solid reasoning and logic why it should. Unfortunately, the Mushable (intentional slur) article does neither.

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Let’s examine these so-called best practices one by one:

1. Why shouldn’t you just talk about banking? People have a million places to go online to interact on the millions of things that occupy their time. Why in the world would they go to a bank or credit union Facebook page to watch a soccer video? It’s not that it’s wrong to talk about things other than banking (which I would broadly define as things related to managing one’s financial life). But with the choices available, FIs need to train customers to expect certain kinds of content on their Facebook page. Random content about non-banking things won’t get people to come back often.

2. Hosting a contest can’t be bad, can it? For most FIs, hosting a contest on Facebook is like promising a friend you’re going to take her to a great party, then driving out to some god-forsaken barren, deserted place, dropping her off and leaving. So you’ve lured your customer to your Facebook with the promise of winning a contest (which, if they had a brain in their head, they would know they wouldn’t win), and then after they get there, you do nothing to keep them there, because the content on your Facebook is just a bunch of irrelevant drivel, rehashed from marketing messages dreamed up by some marketing intern. Nix the contests.

3. Bank of America is where I always turn for career advice. No better place to turn for career advice than to companies going through their own RIFs. If you take career advice from a bank, or ask a bank for career advice, I hope I’m never stuck in YOUR line at the cash registers at Frenchy’s Adult Book Store.

4. Be cool. Dear Mashable: Telling a bank to “be cool” is like telling Joe Biden to “be articulate.” And a bank does not qualify as cool just because it used the word “huzzah” on its Facebook page.

5. Show off your good work. I’m actually inclined to agree with this one. People who interact with their banks on Facebook are highly engaged in their financial lives.  They’re not their to chit chat, watch soccer videos, or talk about whether or not they should quit their jobs. They’re looking for a deeper connection with their chosen FI (I know that’s hard to believe, but they are the minority), and want reinforcement that they’ve made the right decision about who to do business with. So go ahead and toot your horn from time to time.

Newsjerking

A HubSpot blog post titled 5 Hurricane Sandy Newsjacks From Marketers contains the following passage:

“Newsjacking is the practice of capitalizing on the popularity of a news story to amplify your sales and marketing efforts. So what are some ways in which marketers have inserted themselves in the conversation about the hurricane? Here are some examples; but proceed with caution. It’s important to ensure you’re not coming across as exploiting a natural disaster in your marketing.”

The article goes on to suggest ways marketers can “newsjack” by using Pinterest, publishing blog posts, emails, and special offers.

My take: This is the stupidest marketing advice I’ve seen all month. And it’s the 30th, so I’ve had plenty of time to see a lot of bad marketing advice.

Smart investors (and managers, for that matter) understand the concept of the risk/return tradeoff. The higher the risk you take, the greater the return you should expect from that investment.

Smart marketers — i.e., those who understand the risk/return concept — will recognize that in a natural disaster situation like a hurricane, the risk of “coming across as exploiting the disaster” is very high. How can you possibly know how people will respond to your message, since you have no chance to test the response? How can you risk someone with a million followers retweeting you and painting you in a negative light?

And for what return? A fleeting moment of mindshare among some unspecified number of consumers? Or maybe some small number of product sales?

Is that return worth the risk? No.

There are only two allowable types of tweets during a natural disaster:

1. Need to know information. Tweets regarding business continuity status, branch or store closings, service numbers to call, etc.

2. Hopes and prayers. A tweet offering your hopes and prayers to people affected by the disaster is allowable, but in my humble opinion, borders on newsjacking.

Any other type of tweet or social media post risks being misinterpreted as taking advantage of the situation.

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Other tweeters (i.e., non-marketers) should think twice about what they tweet. 

During the storm, as my house was getting hit with 50-60 mph winds, as I was thinking about how my brother in downtown NYC and sister on Long Island were doing, there was no shortage of tweets from folks about things like social media marketing best practices. 

Really?

If 90% of your followers are located in an area unaffected by the disaster, then maybe your social media tweets are acceptable. 

But when 50 million people (ok, I’m making that number up, I have no idea how many people there were in the path of the storm) are affected by some natural disaster, do you really think they’re sitting around following the twitter stream to read about your stupid social media marketing advice? 

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Bottom line: Only newsjerks practice newsjacking. It’s a term that did not need to be coined, let alone have a book written about it. 

p.s. If you’re looking for a link to the HubSpot post, you’re not going to find it here. I’m not going to feed traffic to a site that offers crappy marketing advice about newsjacking.