I ran across a blog post by Dave Raffaelle, Executive Director, Customer Data Management at Quaero, who works with my good friend Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek (BB). Dave highlights results from a recent survey of the Marketing Executive Networking Group where respondents picked the Web 2.0 terms they were most sick of hearing about. Web 2.0, Social Networking, and Social Media topped the list. Why is this? Dave shares some great insight, which I’d like to paraphrase here:
-
Marketers already have their hands full trying to get their existing email and direct mail out the door. They may experiment with social tactics, but when they don’t provide a better return, marketers go back to what’s worked before.
-
There are no enterprise or even entry level technology solutions that allow marketers to leverage social media or Web 2.0 efficiently and effectively to deliver targeted messaging and capture response to those messages. (I have more to say about this below.)
-
Return on Investment (ROI) is still king. Until there is model for how a company can explicitly increase response and profitability from their social networking initiatives — as well as complement their existing marketing mix– social media will continue to be on the “nice to have” list.
- Social Media Marketing is daunting. Even though there is a lot of talk regarding the benefits of it and how a marketer can get leverage it, Social Media involves technology and concepts that are far reaching and many times beyond comprehension.
In my research with B2B marketers, I see part of the backlash around the terms “social networking” and ”social media” happen because the phrases are ambiguous. They lump together technologies that are not necessarily social on their own, but *can* be part of an integrated direct program aimed at building prospect/buyer engagement in several steps. Getting marketers to differentiate explicitly between social media and Web 2.0 tools would help, but this requires marketing discipline and consistent usage that only time will produce.
Regarding Dave’s #2, I agree that enterprise and entry level tools are lacking. But truly social media — like wikis, voting, ranking, and idea solicitation — require a different marketing mindset than Web 2.0 tools like video, podcasts and widgets. The later we can treat like communication channels, the former we should not. I don’t see one set of tools addressing both, which complicates adoption further.
Regarding #3 and #4, I see measurement and business case as the big stumbling blocks today. Many social media experts (including a few at Forrester) advise marketers to “just get involved” — because your customers are already involved and, if you are not, then you run the risk of your competitors getting there first. I question this logic. I think it is possible to justify the ROI of social activity, but the value comes from replacing/supplementing traditional brand building activities and for increasing customer (not prospect) engagement. Both are traditionally hard to measure and less interesting to management when the economy is sour and leads are at a premium.
To round things out, I would suggest a 5th issue: marketers don’t know whether or not buyers are engaging socially and, if they are, does this engagement matter in the purchase decision making process. Oliver Young and I surveyed 1200+ B2B buyers recently to try to get a handle on this. Understanding buyer social behavior is not easy because any one audience — technology buyers in our case — may or may not behave similarly to other audiences. Social Technographics provides a model for understanding buyer social participation, but it must be applied to a specific cusotmer group and then it only tells part of the story. More targeted, behavior-based analytics could really help.
Is there a 6th or 7th reason behind the backlash? Let me know your thoughts.
August 3, 2011 at 6:33 PM
[...] Who do need convincing are many B2B marketers. (Not all, just many.) Recently I attending a breakfast/panel discussion for those in the marketing automation field. Social media was brought up for discussion, dutifully, and I was surprised at how quickly it was disregarded as hype/just the latest trend. [...]
December 6, 2009 at 12:43 PM
[...] Who do need convincing are many B2B marketers. (Not all, just many.) Recently I attending a breakfast/panel discussion for those in the marketing automation field. Social media was brought up for discussion, dutifully, and I was surprised at how quickly it was disregarded as hype/just the latest trend. [...]
April 3, 2009 at 1:54 PM
Thank you for commenting on the social media hype in this way. I do agree that social media is an area every organization should at least consider. What I don’t believe it is that it is the “be all and end all” of twenty-first century marketing that some afficionados would have us believe – at least not yet. It is the rare organization that has made significant inroads in the social mediums and we’ve still got a long way to go before its true potential is understood, implemented and measured on a consistent basis.
March 29, 2009 at 12:22 PM
Marketers already have their hands full trying to get their existing email and direct mail out the door.
Is email marketing really so successful?
Maybe marketers just keep on sending email campaigns because it has become a habit.
- Habits need to be tested of effectiveness.
- Habits need to change.
At the same time the measurement of effectiveness for social media is non-existent.
March 11, 2009 at 11:36 AM
I was just at a breakfast panel this morning on social media and B2B and heard the very same justification you express concerns about re: #3 and #4. Just do it, they’re all on, hurry before it’s too late. Wholly unsatisfactory. I think it’s important to experiment in a modest way because it’s the only way to conceptualize how new technologies might be applied strategically to solve business challenges, but that’s entirely distinct from launching a scalable social marketing program with measurable business objectives. It’s going to be hard to give a general answer to the ROI question.
March 9, 2009 at 6:12 AM
Laura,
It’s a great post, thanks – and I would agree that many, if not most, of today’s marketers are unsure about diving into social media. I suspect much of that comes down to the first order users – take Twitter for example – very few execs can name themselves or their peers as avid users of Twitter, and thus investing in it seems absurd.
I think though, that the first-order view (direct users) is the wrong one. I made the argument to our CFO the other day that we ALL use Twitter (see full discussion) because the main users of Twitter are the folks responsible for 90% of the content creation on the Internet. From there, this minority, the content creators, creates the writing and the links that influence Google, which we all use.
When looked at in that light, investment in social media begins to make sense to some folks.
Thanks again for the post Laura, enjoyed the read.
March 8, 2009 at 6:03 AM
Laura,
Good post.
Reason #6 that i had posted in a recent blog is very related to the backlash http://b2bcmo.wordpress.com/
1. ‘Old School’ CEO mentality… While very good CMOs take risks and put themselves out there, CEOs are not rewarding innovation without a clear ROI–and consequently have not placed any value on a newly emerging communications medium. CMOs who work for these ‘old school’ CEOs therefore are not rewarded to take the risk.
Regards,
Jon
March 3, 2009 at 7:11 PM
Whoops, that paranthetical didn’t make much sense. I meant:
I recall a striking example about how, when you give people a choice of different free posters, for instance, those who are asked to explain why they picked the one they picked are later more dissatisfied with their choice than those who didn’t have to explain.
March 3, 2009 at 7:06 PM
I think reason #4 may be the big one. Twitter, for example, isn’t what it looks and sounds like to a business executive. Neither is Facebook. They sound fluffy to a skeptic. Something about the branding.
In Oct ’08 Hubspot published a post titled, Top 5 Excuses for Not Joining Twitter that’s worth a read, too. A person who goes by @usegraymatter wrote there that, “unfortunately, I think so many of these venues are still perceived as personal journal-blogging or just-baked-a-cake tweeting…but the virtual door for businesses to engage is wide open.”
In fact I just spoke with a CEO hours ago who remarked of social media in general: “It just seems really stupid. I don’t care what I had for breakfast, so why would anyone else care what I had for breakfast?”
And he did a hilarious impression of someone who takes Twitter far too seriously. I pretended to take the bait and feverishly defend Twitter as a business tool.
I dare say that, were we to quantify jargon by, say, pounds per square inch, surely inbound marketers, still vastly minority, have been exposed to more outbound marketing jargon in the course of a career.
Search engine optimization may encourage repetition of certain buzz words. I myself struggle to balance a desire to hit on key phrases in published content, with a need to break out of what Peter Kim so aptly calls ‘the echo chamber.’
It would be really interesting to hear a direct marketer speculate about why I’m sick of direct marketing speak. Indeed, I have had my fill of 101-level finger-wagging about segmenting my mailing list, the cleverest way to get past admins to the CxO, taking advantage of bulk rate postage, and other outbound marketing minutiae. “But, really,” he might say, “isn’t it because you’re afraid of what you don’t know?”
I suppose that’s one possibility. If I had to guess about my why I feel sick to death of hearing about direct marketing tips and tricks, I’d posit that it’s because I’ve evolved.
Experimental psychologists have shown how extraordinarily bad we are at introspecting about these sorts of things. I gather that when people are forced to explain their behaviors, their choices are very different than in “real life” circumstances. That is, in their natural environment, the wild and free executive will behave one way, but when you ask questions, all sorts of other ideas come out of them.
(I recall a striking example about how, when you give people a choice of different free posters, for instance, those who are asked to explain why they picked the one they picked, later they will be more dissatisfied with it than the ones who didn’t have to explain.)
Measuring people’s reactions to social media buzz may elicit theories that don’t reflect real behaviors. Depending on how some of this data was gathered, this measurement effect I am talking about might not be so strong.