Furrier.org – John Furrier's Personal Blog

In a post by Paul Daigle called the Net Effect. He talks about how advertising doesn’t work in social media because traditional advertising doesn’t listen it only talks.

I think that this is a wake up call for all the Social Media executive out there and C-level executives trying to understand social media. Social media a half ‘Groundswell” (book written by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff) and half “Book to be announced” (not yet published – Peter Drucker like book). The business process improvement aspect of social media – the impact to organizations in how they organize, talk to prospects, and customers. More importantly how companies compete.. words like ROI, finacial impact, leverage, revenue per employee, benchmarking, customer service, and business intelligence will trump words like engagement, conversations, storytelling, blogs, podcasting, viral branding.

Rather than me going on again and banging the drum about my view I’ll let Paul say it and he puts it in a business light.

Paul writes..

“Every week a new article seems to redefine what social media means for brand advertisers. This communicates, accurately I think, that the advertising and media industries are still working to understand how they can best help their clients capitalize on the new social media opportunity.” …

“Advertising doesn’t know how to listen. It only knows how to talk. So talking with advertising people about social communities is like telling an accounting department how you can increase sales. Sure, you can run traditional ad campaigns within social settings, but the real opportunities being advanced are not advertising… but communication opportunities. This misalignment between the goals of marketing decision makers and opportunities being offered is why many companies are moving so slowing, and acting so suspiciously of social media.”….

“Advertising isn’t going to go away, and it isn’t going to change. Nor should it. Advertising, as we know it, will remain an important way to build brand and drive sales. But developing social strategies and advertising strategies are completely different vocations. I don’t believe marketing or advertising departments are where tomorrow’s corporate social initiative will reside.”

“In order for companies to succeed socially, they will have to restructure to become social entities. It will happen, but it will take time. Helping companies understand where their social assets lie and how to synthesize these assets to create modern CRM departments maybe the answer. These new departments would strive to manage the ear, face and personality of the business, and help the company engage socially to win. In the real world, when we represent our companies at social events we do so knowing who we are, why we are there, who we are speaking with, and what we’d like to accomplish. We know that our success requires that we engage the room in conversation and that we listen.”

Jason Heller writes a great post on Social Media. Jason starts his post with the following.. “Are you a traditional marketer or agency person, or even a digital agency person who is frustrated at the new crop of “social media elite” who claim that they know all the answers? Or…are you a social media marketing maven who is frustrated that the rest of the industry just doesn’t get it?”
There is so much bullshit being thrown around in Social Media these days you wonder what’s up or what’s down?

Readers here know that I’m bullish on Social Media, Social Advertising, and Social Everything when it comes to online marketing. I’ve been there from the beginning so I can say that Jason’s line about people knowing all the answers. No one knows. I’ve been doing R&D for three years in social media and even today it’s still wide open. No one has the answers. It’s evolving.

The only constant is the Internet – it is working and it is providing the utility in social media. The problem is that most successes happen by accident – that is experiments that have performed positively – aka “lucky strike”.

Social Media is like making a sauce – everyone can try but only talented marketers with the right ingredients can make it work. Additionally the infrastructure is changing at a platform level so the ROI answer is elusive but available.

I have been documenting many of my experiments of what works but there is no silver bullet. How to crack the code in Social Media. For insight into how to crack the code in Social Media Marketing check out this post that I wrote last week.

Social Media for marketers requires a certain understanding of the key dynamics of Web 2.0. For the dynamics in the Web 2.0 world check out this post that I wrote.

Of course Microcontent will be a big trend ….etc

There are some great people working on Social Media and Social Advertising models and soon we’ll see great results. I’m in agreement with Jason if you hear someone say that they have the answers start running for the hills.

For information on my research (which isn’t published) just sponsor this blog

Update: Jeremiah Owyang has a great post of the folks doing social media work in the corporate world. This list is very comprehensive. This is the list of folks doing the research or Marketing Engineering. It lists the companies doing the work (corporate companies). I like this list because I’ve worked with most of the folks on there and all are doing great work. The discovery of the secret sauce in social media is around the corner.

I’ve been tracking social media, social networks, RSS, Internet infrastructure, and online advertising for over 10 years. One thing that I notice is that hype can dilute reality.

There is so much “bull” being thrown around out there regarding social media it makes my head spin – blogging tools here, wikis there, engagement this, conversations that, metrics this, ROI need,..on and on.

The elephant in the room is that it’s early and no one has cracked the code on social media – how to define it, program it, deploy it, measure it, and scale it across their company.

Here is a good post from Mediapost Online Spin blog by Joe Marchese. He is hosting a panel to talk about this. His guest are Augustine Fou, SVP, digital strategist, MRM Worldwide, Greg Verdino, Chief Strategy Officer, Crayon, David Berkowitz, director of emerging media and client strategy, 360i, Rich Gagnon, Chief Media Officer, Draft FCB, Adam J. Broitman, director of emerging and creative strategy, Morpheus Media. Should be a good panel. These guys on Joe’s panel are at the cutting edge so I’m looking forward to hearing the discussion on Joe’s panel.

What’s relevant about Joe’s post is that he nails the market: summed up in a word – experimental.

He also goes on to note..”The even funnier thing is that this is both shocking and not surprising. It’s shocking, given the reach and depth of connection social media offers, yet not surprising because no one has unlocked social media in a way that demonstrates return on marketing objectives, such as reasonable expected range of outcome at for set amount of resource allocation. If you are a brand or an agency, there is not much more you can do but test various methods and watch longingly as your potential brand advocates and customers participate in a media category without you. But it’s not the end of the world, as long as your competitors don’t figure out how to benefit from social media in a scalable manner before you.”

I like this post because I’ve been doing research on cracking the code on social media specifically for over 3 years. I’ve run dozens of experiments before I started PodTech, while at PodTech, and now for the past 10 months after I left PodTech. The findings are interesting.

What does it take to crack the code on social media and social advertising? The answer might just be staring you in the face. It starts with getting the right people on the staff (expertise), running many experiments, having an realtime analytical audit, analytic audit analysis, and finally mindset based in reality.

The hardest part is finding the right people. It needs to be figured out by the right mix of personnel. It isn’t just PR or just marketing. On the personnel side it’s more like infrastructure engineering expertise. Social media is a based on web services so it takes “marketing engineering”. Marketing engineering isn’t the primary skill of PR executives. Instead it’s the business and technical programmers that have the expertise and knowhow. Successful social media teams have engineering backgrounds on the team.

The great thing about the web is it’s biggest problem for marketers in social media – Everything is Measurable. Does that suggest that the ROI problem doesn’t exist? The biggest challenge is to define what to measure.

How to crack the code in social media: put the right team together, run tons of experiments, know what to measure, and measure. The solution might just be staring you in the face.