When

A social media campaign adds thousands of new followers, millions of impressions and fans overnight, apart from mutual congratulations from other social media junkies, glitzy presentations which go to great pains to define something as engagement, and award submission frenzy , what insight does it really tell you ( the brand) ?

  • You have many “engaged” fans?
  • Those “engaged” fans automatically mean that they have bought from you, or will buy from you?
  • Those “engaged” fans are creating more brand equity/value?
  • Those “engaged” fans are sharing your content and getting net new “engaged”fans who can potentially tomorrow become net new buyers?
  • That now you can map your “engaged” fans by name, map it back to your CRM/ Sales DB and find out who bought from you ?
  • That you can target your “engaged” fans  who haven’t yet bought from you, personally on their social network/ email/ doorstep/ with new offerings and they will buy?
  • That you have conclusive evidence based on fans “engagement” metrics which can help you create a new sales/ channel/ distribution/strategy ? 

It does tell you ( the brand) that a bunch of people liked your social media campaign without telling you that they liked it because it was you ( the brand) who was driving it- but that they are happy that you came up with that idea. 

It does tell you that because of all those tweets and retweets, the traditional media wrote about  it ( because you fed a PR story) which was again shared and tweeted and posted and created a lot of awareness and consideration for the brand image.

It does tell you it’s a good way to get some good PR with relatively less effort.

It does tell you that you have a lot of metrics to show but you don’t REALLY know what it ACTUALLY means.

Not Yet.

The Great API bandwagon

The really cool thing to do these days, is to use a social network API to create another social network of the same social database inside your website/ app/. Everyone goes wow, even though no one knows why it was done in the first place. But it looks cool and sounds sexy yet nerdy enough to make you come across an uber cool digital apparatchik. 

It is a happy ending for all.

Marketers are happy cos they have shiny Facebook fans/LinkedIn Lovers and Twitter Stalkers inside their brand new campaign landing page/ web app etc , thereby giving the perception of a closed network with social features. Social media companies smile at this tomfoolery but lease the api to make some money and cash their cheques ( since their ad business is not really booming) and digital gurus soak in the adulation of innovation.

Thing is people like Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, Reid Hoffman created extremely cool products and then created signature api’s to market the content and features of their platforms. That’s why they were the REAL innovators. They understood that when people shared the content and features of THEIR platforms then the word of mouth brand advocacy of their products increased manifold.

When we borrow their APIs today we actually give them free branding and even pay for it and what is even more ironic is that in this entire deal they gain more than we do.

So before joining the API bandwagon, try and see if YOU have content which is worth sharing. Not contacts. People are already hyper-connected, they do not need another platform to do a job which they can anyway do on the social networks they are already in.  Try and see if you can create a functional signature api or lease APIs which can help you share the content which you OWN with your community, wherever they are, in a frictionless manner. Try to track your advocates via an interest graph. You will do a world of good and real innovation by increasing awareness and engagement for your own brand.  You will increase your organic web presence and enable content syndication and distribution, without paying a dime.

You will generate a community who come to you because they value your content.

Oh and by the way API stands for Application Programming Interface- but then you already knew that.

Facebook - The slow death of freemium

How many offer related campaigns have you run on your Facebook page for free?  Remember those quickly cobbled up Facebook landing pages and apps that you used to run by getting the neighborhood coder or by paying 30 dollars to Wildfire? 

Well for this long you got the audience for free and the cost of acquisition ( if it can be defined as such) was pretty low.

Then Facebook launched Facebook Offers letting retailers and other local merchants send deals to their Facebook fans. Users could claim the offers from their News Feeds and redeem the vouchers at stores to get discounts

But freemium ain’t gonna lift the stock price anymore. And Wall Street wants to know how Facebook will make money.

So going forward prepare to send some more money.  Facebook will now require merchants to pay at least $5 on related ads to promote each Facebook Offer to a targeted audience of fans and friends of fans. The cost will vary based on the size of a company’s Facebook pages.

As Retuers Says;

“Facebook Inc said it will start charging businesses to run Offers on its social network, turning a previously free service into a potential revenue generator at a time when Wall Street is demanding new sources of growth and profit from the company.”

Now you can pay just a little more to be a little bit more social than this.

Source: reuters.com

Pay to be a “bit more” social

I get it. The FB news feed is a fantastic news aggregator. If you subscribe to the right people/ channels you can probably get the best news that you need with the visual bells and whistles right on your channel without having to open a thousand browser links. 

So how do you ensure you make your news reach the news feed of your fans/ friends/ bete noirs et al?

Facebook deploys the EDGE RANK algorithm to decide how many of your friends can see a particular news update/ status update that you post. ( there are one million articles that also talk about which time of the day and angle of the moon you should abide, to maximize the engagement of your posts). Given the mad scramble we have for “likes” for every sentimental kitsch, new hair cut, cat gif, drunk party, new job and endless sermons on how to live life that we post on our status updates, it becomes pretty pertinent that it shows on the news feed of the 893 friends that we have on our Facebook profiles.

Earlier it was open. It was simple and it was organic. You posted it. Your friends saw it. But it’s no more that simple because Facebook’s gotta monetize. With share prices tumbling and valuation falling by 40% post IPO, I cannot even blame them for this. 

So when I actually experienced the Promote your Status Update prompt from Facebook it made me smile. True to Facebook’s mission of working to integrate advertisement into the social fabric of Facebook, this one also works on user generated content that can be promoted or advertised better now, provided you have your credit card handy. Similar to sponsored stories which actually integrate ads with user content which talks about the same product thereby creating recommendation and discovery along with advertised content.

Here is how you may come across it, because FB is auto prompting this:

Just 30 cents and you are set. Now your new hair cut, new sermon on living life and new cat photos can have more likes, more engagement and your influence scores will keep skyrocketing to unfounded heights. 

I just wonder about brands. If everyone starts putting 30 cents to promote all their brand related marketing content, how is any of it going to stand out? When everything you see becomes promoted and on the same level playing field as with your competitors, how do you segregate? 

Do you then whip your credit card, or tune out and spend some time in creating awesome content?

The importance of being social

Yes. It’s important. But not so important in the ” I am present of every social network and have a million friends on each” kind of way. Business happens, when both parties get something out of a deal. The seller and the buyer. 

So either you can sell profit or you can sell talent which can make profit. 

Millions of virtual friends don’t necessarily create an access point for selling or buying. Just because they are virtual friends, does not mean that they will buy or sell, since most of them don’t need it or are not thinking about it.

In the real world, people do not obsess about Facebook’s share price. They follow cricket scores and watch soccer. Majority of people have not heard about Dropbox, Square, Glancee, Fancy, Pinterest or anything. Life has not ended for them.

They still happily buy whatever they need( product or talent) and unless you find a way to become social and respond to what they actually want, and be present in person when the need arises,  then, the importance of being social is lost.

The world will live without a blip even if no more social networks are created.

If you have talent, someone, somewhere will notice you. Not because they love you, but because they can gain something from your talent ( a product that can make profit or a service that can make profit). This profit can be either in cash or kind. 

What you need to figure out is how do you become just about enough “that much social” to be there when the recognition comes. And knowing them personally always helps.

Because when they really need you, they will find you. And that is the only time you will make a real sale. ( either your own product or your own talent).

SO be really good in what you do. Make really good products and advertise just about as much as you need to so that  they can reach out to you when needed. You will know that your product or your talent is really good when they start either using you or your product on their own.

The rest is just hype. Good to obsess about but does not  translate into bottom-line.

Of conversations and conversations calendars

When was the last time you had a conversation worth remembering which was calendarised ? 

Would you depend on one to talk to your wife or friend ?

Conversations cannot be drilled into excel sheets. Instead, try investing in time and passion. Try finding that chink , that perfect moment, that perfect entry to pitch your counter idea so that it actually becomes a discussion. Try making it relevant to what’s happening around us in the real world which affects us. Our immediate reality. Write honest, good, original content so that people not just comment on it but curate it and then create on it. That’s when an idea spreads. You cannot create this one week in advance. You have to do it almost hourly at every moment that its relevant. 

So do yourself a favour. Stop making conversation calendars. Just go out and try having an honest conversation while you are at it.

Selling the drama

No the blog that you are ghost writing will not sell one product. Nor will your Facebook page or twitter handle. It won’t sell, because you are playing catch up. Because you have outsourced your news to be published by others who can never match up in authenticity, verve and emotion. Did I forget knowledge? 

The audience is smart. Just as smart as you are when you rubbish one more blog, digital campaign or Facebook page that you come across, since you are the expert.

The problem is you don’t want to do it, and you know its a waste of time and yet you have a predicament. If you do not do it, your audience will belittle you because you don’t do what has become standard practice. So the EXPECTATION is that you will do it. But you cannot really do justice to it, because you never believed in it in the first place. So you play catch up, do a half baked job, silently curse the uselessness of it and actually create a dysfunctional mess. 

Sell a drama; not 500 words of insipid nothingness. DO it so that they can discover you in different ways. DO it remarkably so that they say “oh wow” when they stumble on it. DO it with the same vigour with which you have your everyday breakfast or dinner. DO it because you love doing it, not because you want to sell and they will buy. DO amazing things so that their expectations are reconfigured every time. 

Or DON’T DO it.

Just don’t half do it and crib. No one forced you to do it anyway. 

Shut up. Make up your mind.