Digital Street Journal

Francois Gossieaux is pointing out over in Emergence Marketing a new study by the Marketing Executives Networking Group that many marketing executives are done with hearing about “Web 2.0″ and are now turning back to traditional marketing strategies and tactics.  I can’t access the study, but it’s a great read because Francois directly explains why he thinks this is happening.

He states that “Many web 2.0 programs are not connected to core marketing business processes and are not measured the same way as you would measure the impact of any other program on those processes. And when the economy hits the skids, the first things to go are those with soft returns or those that fall outside of the core business needs.”

He’s right.  And he blames this on two factors.  One is “bad advice”.  Meaning half-assed consulting from so-called social media “experts” who aren’t experts at all.  It’s basically fault-laden advice given by traditional agenices that don’t know what they’re talking about.  They’ve created social media capabilities that probably have no voice.  Instead, tradtional marketing tactics are shoved down social media channels.

I wrote a whole series on this a while back.  How Social Media Will Get Screwed. Most marketing execs come out of traditional backgrounds.  They work mostly with traditional agencies that have yet to develop social media capabilities.  Or if the agenies do have capabilities, it is haphazard…hiring someone “young” to handle the shoving of traditional tactics down social media channels.

From my standpoint, these agencies - and their respective marketing execs in companies - are causing great harm to social media.  The agencies don’t know what they’re doing, they lie and say they do, they try to protect ad dollars by keeping the budgets coming to them, they do things wrongly and “on the cheap”, and then they are ineffective.

Ignorance kills business.

At this point, Francois’ second point kicks in.  Fear.  Marketing execs are afraid of the unknown and afraid of admitting that they don’t know what they’re doing.  So the easy thing to do is say you’re frustrated with social media and it’s hype and then take out the scapel in budget cutting time.

Most senior marketers have to use strategies and tactics that they know can produce…or at least know that they’ve produced in the past.  They also don’t want to appear to not understand current trends.  They also don’t want to let go of control.  Fear is forming a perfect storm against social media.

Fear kills business.

Back in 2000, I. along with several others here in the Washington area, started a group called Wired for Business.  It was one of those vibrant business technology groups that came about right around the millenium, one that had members enthusiastically discussing the future of business as we saw it happening.  Our focus was primarily on BtoB and telecom.

By our second event, we had 200+ people attending, potnetial sponsors calling us showing us that they were willing to drop as much as $3000, and speakers with titles such a VP of Importance Division lined up.  We rocked.  We got a prestigious Board of Advisors and also top notch organizations involved.  

Then the dot.bomb era struck in full force.  

We struggled to get sponsors.  Previous ones that spent $2000 or $3000 a few months earlier were no longer in business.  VPs of Important Divisions could no longer travel.  Some had been let go by their companies.  And the attendee number was down around 75, an unenthusiastic crowd worried about their jobs…if they sitll had one.

At a board meeting in 2001, one of our key members was a guy named Bill.  He was with a formerly “hot” company, one that would be a leading light.  At this point, however, they’d been through five rounds of layoffs.  Bill had surived.  But he warily said something that struck me.  In a conversation with a pontential client, he said the guy told him, “Forget about strategy, Bill.  We’re only concerned about ROI.”  In other words, strategy was dead.

Bill was laid off later that afternoon.  A short time later, the company he worked for folded.

That whole scenario struck me then and has stayed with me since.  

Forget about strategy.  It’s now about ROI.

Yesterday I came upon C. B. Wittemore’s post where she interviewed social media stalwart Mack Collier.  Reading it made me think back to my old friend Bill and the no to strategy, yes to ROI mindset of businesses during tough times.  And it wasn’t that I disagreed with anything Mack said.  He was spot on.

What hurt Bill’s company back then was the newness of their business models; their technologies and strategies from those technologies were very promising yet unproven.  Just like social media is today.  Meaning on a large scale.  

Now, to be sure, there are difference between the social media of today and the BtoB technology of seven years ago.  Back then it was mostly software, something that had to be purchases.  Social media is often driven by consumer usage OUTSIDE of a company.  But still I’ve got some pretty serious concerns.

First of all, let me say that I think we are in for a real deep and long recession, one that will be deeper and longer than most.  That means more intense budget battles, more focus on what’s proven, more relying on inside marketing forces or those that have longer term relationships.  For the most part, social media agencies and consultants have yet to estalish those relationships, shown long term ROI over several campaigns, and have earned an automatic place in the mindset of those who are writing and approving budget requests.  

I cover some of this in Part 3 of my series “How Social Media Will Get Screwed”.  Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.  In it I point out how most social media agenices are still subcontractors to traditional agencies when it comes to larger clients.  If there are any cutbacks, it may be on our backs, with social media taking lesser of a role or being absorbed haphazardly by the traditional agencies.  With midsize and smaller clients, those that may feel an even greater cash crunch, we may be on the outs as they try to bring their social media efforts in house.  

Social media types, thus, may get burned in two directions.  We could be one of the first cutbacks because we are unproven over the long term, and what we do may get highjacked by traditional agencies that become territorial and try to usurp what we do.  Getting around that might be tough.

The last Q&A between C. B. and Mack was what got me going on this:

CB: Any other thoughts to share about the effectiveness of social media in forging stronger relations with customers.

Mack: It sounds cliche, but you really do have to care about people. I think a lot of companies right now are excited about social media, because they see it as a cheap (time is often the biggest commitment) way to reach their customers. IOW, they want to find out how they can monetize the interactions they have with customers via social media.

Here’s why this doesn’t work; because people aren’t using social media to be monetized by companies, they are using social media to connect with other people. We use social media to create and share information with each other. We become friends and share our thoughts and feelings. We connect as ‘real people’.

So if a company wants to utilize social media as an effective way to reach their customers, they have to shift their mindset and use the tools in the same ways, and for the same reasons, as their customers do. They have to use these tools as real people trying to connect with their customers (real people). If you approach social media as a new channel to ’sell more stuff’, then your efforts will likely fail miserably.

But instead, if you use social media as a new channel to connect with your customers and create valuable content for them, to give them information that they can use, then you are giving them a reason to connect with you. You are creating value for them. And a byproduct of doing so, will be that these customers will help promote your efforts, which results in the online conversation about your company increasing, and becoming more positive.

Which ultimately, will probably help you ’sell more stuff’. But that only happens when you enter into social media with the mindset of ‘what value will our efforts create for our customers?‘, and not ‘what value can we extract from this space?‘ It’s all about shifting your mindset to using social media as a way to create value for your customers. If you can do that, you win!

The italics are from the interview, the words in bold were done by me.

Companies - escpecially during a recession - are going to look for “cheap ways” to monetize their customers and they see social media as a means to do this.  This, as Mack points out, will ultimately fail because that’s not what social media is about.  Then I go back to the Forrester study that showed 15 of 16 community building efforts on online network faltering because they were too company centric and not enough community member centric.  And that was before we knew we were really in a recession.

Now we are in one and the executive suites aren’t going to be interested in nice sounding, soft, feel good strategies that we espouse.  They want results NOW, dammit.  This, again, may be shortsighted, but it the likely hand we will be dealt with.  Companies, in hard times, become almost selfish in their outlook.  Creating value, oddly, becomes subserviant to monetizing NOW.

In the comments section of C. B.’s post I mentioneed in a much shorter version what I’ve written above, to which C. B. responded:

I’m intrigued with your observation about greater pressure to extract value/demonstrate ROI given a recession. As social media strategists, we need to demonstrate positive ROI - but don’t we also have the opportunity to broaden the definition of ROI? As Mack mentions, most companies consider social media a *cheap* way to reach customers. So, if the investment is low, and we are providing truly valuable content that meets the needs of our customers, we will hear about it from our customers. Which gives us a tangible return on that investment.

I partially disagree with some of this.  Often, it’s not us who get to define what ROI is - it’s the client.  We may try to position exactly what ROI is, but they may not accept it, especially if they’re looking at it through their monetizing eyes.  And that’s if we manage to get an audience with decisionmakers.  

And if they to continue to view social media as a “cheap” way to monetize customers and not listen to us orif if we essentially allow them to feel this way without challenging them, then we’ve lost the battle.  It won’t work.

That’s because, like my old friend Bill, we offer strategy, while they’re often blindly hyper concerned with immediate ROI.

This says to me that we have to carefully work with clients and show them how social media offers a way to strengthen a company during an economic slowdown and all the more powerful to burst out of a recession when it ends.  At that point, we let the client see the value in what we have to offer and so they can redefine the ROI that we believe in.

A couple of years ago I was talking to a friend of mine. She’s the head of a decent sized ad/PR agency here in the DC area. She had someone that had been doing SEO work for her for just a short period move away. It was more project work and he’d no longer be availble. Now no one else at the agency knew SEO or even SEM.

That’s typical of this area. So I mentioned to her that she had a great opportunity to hire someone to provide the service as it is becoming increasingly important in the marketing world. Her agency would stand out.

She responded by saying that she should look to “hire someone young and train them”. Problem is, no one at the agency was knowledgeable enough to teach anyone anything on SEO. It was hire someone young (read cheap) and have them wing it.

Unfortunately, that’s been the attitude of many ad agencies when it’s come to anything related to online marketing. They don’t seek out to learn best practices first. They don’t play a role in any social media. They don’t got to the same conferences. They don’t think they need to. Because they often don’t respect it.

That’s why a lot of ad agencies will build websites full of flash. It looks great but it takes too long to download and search engines can’t find them. Big mistakes but it’s done all the time. It’s part of their portfolio and the client seems pleased, so they consider themselves experts.

That’s why a lot of marketing agencies shove marketing messages down peoples’ throats on social networks. It doesn’t work that well, but the client is on this site and that site and those sites are currently hot.

That’s why a lot of PR firms use less than transparent methods (like flogs) to push forward brands.

With social media, it’s my guess that it will only get worse. A lot of those same ad agencies and PR firms that are currently resisting social media will be finally adopting it in two or three years. Sure, some will still resist and many that go that route will disappear. But those that do take on social media will do so in typical fashion.

Between now and then, they won’t really have attempted to learn much about social media. Sure, they’ll have an agency blog that they’ll post something on every 11 days. Key people may have a Facebook account. But they won’t know the intricacies of the industry because they’ve never paid attention.

So they won’t care about concepts like authenticity and transparency. They’ve never “done” those two things and they won’t understand why they should start now. It will be inconvenient. Just like the 15 out of 16 that Forrester studied are finding out.

But they’ll want to jump in the game. To say they “get it”. So what will they do? They’ll hire someone young (read cheap) and “train” them.

The people they hire may be right out of school. It’s their first job. They’ll be doing what the ego-driven boss says. This new young employee may be pumped that they’ve got this cool new job at the agency downtown. They may not be up to par on the standards that we’ve talked about for years. Or if they are, they may be so desensitized to ethical breaches that they won’t care.

They’ll go along to get along. After all, MOST PEOPLE DO.

I’m saying this because I think that social media is a couple years away from really taking off. Right now it’s big, but it’s not huge. Marketing communications is changing, but often social media types don’t have a set seat at the table. But those PR firms and ad agencies do. And they’ll have the client’s ear just as the client wants to jump into social media.

So this means these marketing communications companies - which should still outnumber social media agencies by far - that are entering the social media space, will be hiring people without extensive backgounds in this field. These new hirees will be carrying out projects designed by their superiors who’ve got the results-driven “shove it down their throats” mentality. It may not seem right, but today we’ve got different level of honesty. Cutting corners is no big deal. Everyone does it. Why challenge the boss?

So incompetently run campaigns will be more common. They’ll be more cleverly hatched than the ones of today. But they’ll still be done poorly. Many won’t get caught. Some will, sullying the industry. Sort of like the way spammers have hurt email. Clients may not know the difference between actual expertise and fluff because they hadn’t been paying attention to online trends. So they’ll go with their current agencies.

This could be commonplace. It could almost become the norm. It could be the way things are done.

I’m just thinking that the standards and guidelines that we talk about today aren’t going to be respected by many practitioners of tomorrow…because they’re too inconvenient to follow.

For some time now, those in social media have talked of authenticity. We’ve talked of transparency. We’ve said that organizations must engage their stakeholders and listen. They can’t just send out forced marketing messages. If they do, it will fail. They can’t be unauthentic or they’ll lose valuable trust.

We’ll say all of this in online discussions. On blog posts. In online magazines. In podcasts. On Twitter. At conferences. At TweetUps. Podcamps. Everywhere.

And you know what? I completely agree.

But we may be in the minority and it may be - at this point - impossible to do much about it.

I go back to two studies. One is in advertising/marketing and the other is related to PR/marketing.

The advertising study was conducted by Forrester. They found that 15 of 16 social media networking marketing efforts didn’t make the grade. The primary reason? Most of the efforts involved very little listening and instead involved shoving marketing messages down peoples’ throats.

The ad agencies and their client companies aren’t listening to us. The bastards. They ignore what we say. Could it be that most of them don’t read our blogs? Our online magazines? They don’t listen to our podcasts? Follow us on Twitter? Go to our conferences? Attend our TweetUps or Podcamps?

You bet.

But what they do have is the attention of our potential clients. So the agencies pitch that they know social media, they get clients, and then they run lousy campaigns. And they get paid to do this. Often big bucks.

But the point to remember is that they don’t give a hoot what we say.

The other study was done by Millward Brown for Manning Selvage & Lee and PRWeek and pointed out that about 1 out of 5 top marketers admit to having bought advertising in publications in return for favorable coverage.

Then is showed that 10% of senior marketers have developed implicit agreements with editors or reporters to get favorable coverage.

And finally, 8% have admitted to having their company give a gift to an editor or a producer to get a favorable story placed in a publication or program.

Those are bribes. Considered to be highly unethical by pretty much any governing body that touches the issue. PRSA, news associations, publishing associations. But it’s done. Why? It gets results. And results matter. Results get the bills paid.

Now, I’m sure most of you would agree that most ad agencies, large and small and most PR firms, large and small, don’t “get” social media. Hence the 15 out of 16 poor showing. These companies resist the new methods. They may say on their websites that they know what they’re doing, but it’s a bit of a fraud.

I look here in the DC area and we’ve got two events coming up that point to this problem.

One is the week long celebration of DC Adweek. A little more than half of the speakers work for publications. Three from the National Geographic. They’ve got Chris Matthews and David Gregory of NBC speaking. Steve Forbes. People from Business Week and the New Yorker. We’ve got sales reps from MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn to talk about social media.

I’ll rant about this on another post, but the point is where are the strategists?? They aren’t to be found here. Why? That’s because the organizers don’t really get it. They’re missing out on the best minds here in the DC area. The key companies too.

The other event is InterAct 2008. Top thinkers and doers in the digital arena. And it has, among their speakers, the DC people who are kicking ass when it comes to digital marketing. The type of people the local ad club overlooks.

But this is typical. And it’s happening all over the place. Those ad agencies and PR firms that don’t get it often are the lead agencies when it comes to business relationships that do incompetent work (as we see in the Forrester study) or have dubious practices (as we see with the Millward Brown study). Most clients are new to social media or haven’t taken a deep look at it quite yet. And quite, often the first one’s they’ll turn to are their traditional ad agencies or PR firms.

Yet these firms, the ones that many digital strategist have little interaction with, will never admit that they don’t “get” social media. They’ll forge ahead and position themselves as “experts”.

So, I’ll explain what I see the upcoming problem in How Social Media Will Get Screwed, Part Three.

Recently I hopped over to Chris Kieff’s blog, 1 Good Reason, and came upon an excellent post that sparked a discussion both online and off. I ended up talking to Chris and five others about what likely is to be a major problem in the upcoming years regarding online marketing and PR, especially through the social media lens. The five were Jen Zingsheim, Bryan Person, Dave Evans, Jake McKee, and Mark Davidson.

I’ll start by saying that I think often that those of use who practice social media are, if not naive, very idealistic in our thinking on the principles we espouse. And I’d say that a confluence of emerging trends, mindsets, events, and business practices could come back and knock a lot of us on our asses.

What caught my attention from Chris’ blog was his interaction with a young woman who had been hired as a blogger by a clothing company:

Yesterday at Social Media Camp NYC hosted by Mashable, and Yoono, there was a very lively discussion started by a young woman who presented herself as a “Persona Blogger.” She was joined in this discussion by a company (who I have decided to not name, yet) who is employing her to blog for them.

She discussed how she assumes the persona of several people; 52 year old woman, 25 year old man, 20-ish woman, and then blogs, twitters, and creates pages on social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and others as these people. She spoke about how this is a 24/7 job that requires her to maintain this work constantly to keep up the facade.

I’ll not mince words, this is simply lying, and as I’ve stated in this blog before, lying is a terrible way to build a relationship.

The audience at SM Camp NYC seemed to divide somewhat along generational lines, with some of the younger people taking the side that it’s understood that people can’t be trusted on the internet. Their arguments followed the logic that everyone on the internet makes things up. They’ve grown up understanding there are different levels of honesty.

I chose to highlight that last sentence because it’s very problematic. It’s both true and bullshit. Honesty, by definition would seem to be an absolute. But people, out of convenience have altered it to fit their needs and circumstances. We all do it. I’ve done it. We rationalize. We justify. That’s life. We’re human. But there’s consequences.

What stuck me is Chris’ point on the outlook of the attendees regarding the concept of the “persona blogger”. It “seemed to divide somewhat along generational lines” My concern here is more through the aspect of looking through the eyes of practitioners as opposed to potential audience members.

How Did This Come About?

Consider the following:

1) We’ve had a President of the United States, someone who often sits atop the “Ten Most Admired Men in the World” surveys, who by his very position is a role model for our nation’s youth, recklessly having an extramarital affair with a woman young enough to be his daughter. He then lies to cover it up and attempts to position the woman as delusional and, if not a stalker, somewhat obsessed. Oops, a blue dress appears with a certain stain on it, and, well, it turns out he did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky. We’re then told that this really doesn’t matter, it’s only an affair, and of course he lied under oath, but so what?

Say what you want about it, but I’ll say it tarnished the Office of the Presidency and it demeaned the institution of marriage. Meaning, it lowered the standards of what we expect out of our leaders and it created different levels of honesty.

2) So let’s fast forward a couple of years. Wall Street. Greed is Good. Irrational exuberance. Brokerage houses telling their brokers to push certain stocks. Outright lies. A couple of companies went under, a couple of people went to jail, but more importantly thousands lost their life savings because a few who were already rich got even more greedy.

In a lot of cases, the amounts measured up to a couple of days profits. Those brokerage houses still exist, still treat themselves as noble entities, still are looked upon by the business media as having thought leaders.

From this, we subtly learn not to trust institutions…but often those same institutions are the only ones out there.

3) If you’re Catholic, like me, you soon found out that the very people who represent God before your very eyes are not only failing to protect the most innocent, they are covering up the grievous sins of their subordinates. On a national scale. For some (no, not me) it was as much as part of the Church as a sacrament. Nothing is sacred.

4) Speaking of presidents, we’re now at war in Iraq because they have weapons of mass destruction they likely have ties to al Queda to spread democracy in the Middle East. We’ll be greeted as liberators and then we’ll be out of there in a few months, where we can say “Mission Accomplished”. The war will pay for itself with Iraqi oil money.

Oops. We don’t need more troops. We don’t torture. We’re in the last throes of the insurgency.

What we’ve seen with all of this - and it’s coming out in memoirs of administration aides - is that there was a huge propaganda campaign coming out of said administration, pushing falsehoods on practically everything. Dissent within the administration was squelched and that attitude seemed to spread around the country. Ask the Dixie Chicks. The media often went along for reasons only they know.

In my conversation with Jake McKee, he pointed out how many of today’s young people don’t question authority. They may not follow it blindly, they may just accept that they are going to be lied to.

So it’s been reinforced that it’s OK to fudge the truth and dissent is often bad.

5) Like sports? Like steroids? This generations’ greatest hitter and greatest pitcher are heavily believed to have been juiced up. As were Olympic hopefuls, past Gold medal winners, and Tour de France winners. Toss in souped up cars in NASCAR and Formula 1 and you’ve got cheaters everywhere. Whatever it takes to win. The end justifies the means. If he’s on our team, that’s cool, as long as he produces. People may fall from grace, but that’s after winning millions of dollars.

What we learn here is that it’s not how you play the game, it’s whether you win or lose.

I’m not writing all this to shove down your throats moral standards or to condemn society or to shame us as role models for our nation’s youth or to point out how young people are going to be less ethical than we are.

I’m writing this instead to shove down your throats that, at the very least, we’re likely going to have to deal with some serious issues in the near future. Those same standards fo authenticity and transparency may not be worth snot. I’ll further explain in How Social Media Will Get Screwed, Part Two.