Most Agencies & Publishers Fail To Offer Marketers Real Ways To Embrace Social Media

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If there was one trend that came on strong during this year’s Advertising Week festivities, it was advertising agencies and media companies jumping on the social media bandwagon.

On the agency side, you had an infinite line of digital, creative and planning agencies making social media the latest add-on to their legacy competencies and services menu. In very little time, they’ve become full-fledged “experts” with offerings galore. On the media side, you had a host of traditional and newer publishers with varying degrees of social components, scurrying to monetize by selling inventory in a traditional media-buy campaign framework.

To be sure, there are a lot of promising attempts on both the media and agency sides. But most are short-sided. In fact, most seem disingenuous or uninformed, as evidenced by the advertising community’s excessive and ambiguous use of words and phrases like “conversation,” “viral,” “engage with your customers” and “let the community do the work for you.”

The problem with so many in the advertising community is that the most important, strategic opportunities and liabilities around social media really have nothing to do with outward marketing communications, media or campaigns. Those are bottom-tier tactics.

So what are the real opportunities at this stage of the game? For 99% of companies -small, medium and large – the imperatives lie in deconstructing and rebuilding their cultures and attitudes toward customers and the marketplace. That’s a fundamentally different challenge – and one still sorely lacking viable solutions and services.

I’m now in my second run as a vice president of marketing since social media became so important and began transforming business. I lived through many of the issues and opportunities that keep my fellow marketers up at night. While these issues are often prompted or amplified by social media, social media is rarely the answer. The real solutions are rooted in education, organizational change, market outlook, self-truth and humility.

Here are some of the issues most frequently on my mind as our business scales:

Customer Experience – What is the quality of experience among our customers and prospects? As we’re frequently reminded, customer experience frequently manifests as media. We see customers try us out, then review us on their blogs, in infinite columns, and in semi-private groups and community forums. Customer experience is the new media department, the determinant of customer love or detraction. So we must shape experience accordingly.

Company Values – You can’t talk about customer experience without talking about values. While no product or company is perfect, the values of a company directly impact the good will our customers grant us. Do we set realistic promises and execute against them? Do we acknowledge imperfection, but compensate with relentless drive for improvement? Are we a culture focused on solutions, because that is what we want our customers to associate with us? Company values have wide-ranging consequences – among them, a huge impact on customer experience and your credibility with customers in social media venues.

Listening – Do we actively listen not only to what our customers say, but what they really mean? The act of listening is one of the biggest ways to demonstrate that we care and engage with costumers. But no company should be exclusively concerned with listening to customers in social media venues, if it isn’t prepared to master customer listening overall.

Humanizing Voice & Confidence – With so many corporate barriers separating companies from their customers, it’s actually a very big deal for a company to find its voice (or voices). On one hand, it’s not always easy for company managers to stop speaking in corporate-speak, and, instead, communicate like real humans. On the other, it often takes a lot of work for controlling managers to let go and empower employees, and get used to the idea of more personal and highly exposed communications and interactions. It takes confidence, trust, patience and diligence. Social media venues are often where this tension comes to a head.

Organizational Silos – If social technologies have done anything, they’ve exposed outdated organizational silos. Social media represent open customer expression and interaction, and impact all sorts of different company departments. Consider customer service, product development, quality and testing, legal, HR, sales and marketing. Are disparate company operations coordinating and effectively managing social media interactions? Are they allocating line responsibilities and centralizing intelligence in CRM databases to optimize relationships – and then actually acting?

As you can see, the issues I’m thinking about have very little to do with advertising, media or campaigns. However, these are the real opportunities emanating from social media, and require a different type of solution. They’re important challenges and require big solutions, as well as openness to new ideas. At this stage, help exists not so much in agencies or media companies, but within – through personal experience, experimentation and support from marketing peers who are leading the heavy lifting themselves.

Who are the pioneers leading your organization as it adapts to a world transformed by social media?

The above also was my recent MediaPost column.

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Published by Max Kalehoff

Father, sailor and marketing executive.

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13 Comments

  1. Right on, Max. Your key insight — “the imperatives lie in deconstructing and rebuilding their cultures and attitudes toward customers and the marketplace” — sums up the challenge. It's no longer about spin/push/control but rather listen/pull/participate.

    Simply using a social channel – posting TV spot on YouTube in the hopes that it “go viral” – is not all what social media is about. Instead, it's the re-engineering of the organization to first listen, and then act in unison across operations and marketing to deliver on what was learned from the marketplace collective.

    The agencies that do this will be the long term winners.

  2. Thanks Dave. There are too many “me too” clueless people throwing useless
    tactics around! With that, key disclosure: I don't know that much, but I
    know what keeps me up at night. And I know this: I'm a humble student.

  3. Great stuff here Max. It is so much beyond having a campaign based mentality that you see from most marketing folks. This fundamentally is about how a company becomes transparent to their clients. Zappos is a great example of how to embrace this and grow to grow significantly in revenue in 4 short years.

  4. So spot on Max. This is precisely the way we should be thinking about the social media space. We also need to be more diligent on the consistency front. Too many brands don't know what the other hand is doing, and it's creating a major credibility gap. Major fast food brands, for instance, are talking up a storm about social media — even blogging — but shunning consumers when they try to provide feedback or suggestions on the brand website. We need to drive more consistency.

  5. These “me too” crowd consists of SEOs and internet marketers. They don't understand the social media angel. They only wonder about the links.

  6. What would help is if these people were active bloggers and social media users. In many cases they are not, they merely READ about bloggers and social media in trade pubs or see a conference. That's not enough.

    You have to live and breathe it!

  7. All, thanks for your comments.
    – Pete Blackshaw: Consistency makes sense. Organizations can't talk out of two sides of their mouths at the same time.
    – Jay: right on! Relationships with customers can't be campaigns.
    – Adam: Yes, during Advertising Week most agencies were not doers, they were talkers.
    – Pete Kim: Social Media Advertising Council sounds kind of….no comment.

  8. Thanks. The barrier to entrance to social media marketing is almost
    non-existent. Good communications skills help, but there's no major secret
    sauce. In fact, most individuals today market their own personal brands to
    some degree, and therefore have very hands-on personal experience. The
    barrier for agencies, particularly advertising agencies, is they start from
    the wrong place. Instead of marketing to people, they market to “audiences”,
    or worse. They are less interested in delivering value, and more interested
    in delivering interruptions and impressions. They are less interested in
    long-term relationships, and more interested in short-term campaigns. And so
    on and so fourth.

  9. Thanks. The barrier to entrance to social media marketing is almost
    non-existent. Good communications skills help, but there's no major secret
    sauce. In fact, most individuals today market their own personal brands to
    some degree, and therefore have very hands-on personal experience. The
    barrier for agencies, particularly advertising agencies, is they start from
    the wrong place. Instead of marketing to people, they market to “audiences”,
    or worse. They are less interested in delivering value, and more interested
    in delivering interruptions and impressions. They are less interested in
    long-term relationships, and more interested in short-term campaigns. And so
    on and so fourth.

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