Mediaboss Marketing

It was going to be a glorious age. A pristine age. An age without advertising. Social media was going to kill everything from TV commercials to display advertisements. People were going to 'engage' and have 'conversations' with brands instead.

Too bad it was completely wrong.

Someone might want to tell that to Adidas chief executive Kasper Rorsted, who recently suggested that the company is dropping television ads in favour of pursuing digital "engagement".

Who do people follow on social media?

According to Socialbakers, here are the top US-based Facebook pages:

Count the brands.

The top UK-based Facebook pages:

Count the brands.

According to Twitaholic, here are the top Twitter accounts in the United States based on the number of followers specifically there:

Count the brands.

The top Twitter accounts in the United Kingdom based on the number of followers specifically there:

Who do people follow on social media? Celebrities, sports teams, politicians and political causes, and news sources. Not brands. For most companies, only a small percentage of current and potential customers will want to follow them on social media.

With whom do people interact on social media?

Here are two mental exercises. First, go and look at your past 20 actions on your personal Facebook and Twitter accounts. Better still, look at 50 or 100. What percentage involved the pages of brands, and what percentage involved friends, family members, that person you secretly like and other flesh-and-blood human beings?

Second, imagine yourself entering a supermarket. Ask random people normal people, not marketers if they want to have a relationship with any of the products in their shopping carts. Theyll probably punch you in the face for being a pervert. (Due credit: Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffmans Refrigerator Test was the inspiration for this example.)

People use social media to catch up on the news, connect with friends and family and get updates on the things with which they have intense, personal connections such as their favorite celebrities and sports teams. The last thing that they think about is interacting with brands.

What is the reach and engagement rate of social media?

As of February 2016, the average organic post by a Facebook page is seen by only 11% of the companys followers. According to a late 2015 Forrester report, only 0.22% of the Facebook followers of major brands engage with organic company posts. In other words, only 1 out of every 455 followers will see as well as 'engage' with an organic post by a major brands Facebook page.

(I put engage in quotes because no one really knows the value of online 'engagement'. If I am watching the latest episode of Westworld, then my undivided attention is on the programme. I am truly engaged. But if I scroll through my Facebook news feed and like random posts that I will forget seconds later, what is the real value of each 'engagement'?)

Remember: Those organic reach and engagement numbers also take into account only the small number of consumers who have already chosen to follow a brand. The numbers are even lower in the context of the entire market.

In the United Kingdom, one has to go to number 30 in Socialbakers' list of the Facebook pages with the most followers in the UK to reach the first brand: Coca-Cola.

While a Coca-Cola Great Britain spokesperson would not divulge the number of Britons who regularly drink Coke specifically, the official told me over email that 46 million people in the UK have a soft drink every day. Coca-Cola has been estimated to have a 50% market share in the global soft-drink market, so I will use that percentage in the following calculations

A similar calculation found that Oreos famous Super Bowl tweet reached less than one percent of that products market.

The common response to these points is that it is valuable to target people who have actively chosen to follow a brand because they 'love' it. But most of the revenue of many brands comes from light, occasional users. I buy a small bottle of Coca-Cola Zero every day or two just like countless other people but Im not going to follow the companys Facebook page. I want no more engagement than simply to buy a bottle at the local kiosk every so often.

Seven years ago, Matt Dixon and Lara Ponomareff wrote almost exactly that in a Harvard Business Review article on the rise of self-service aptly entitled 'Why Your Customers Dont Want to Talk to You':

Maybe customers are shifting toward self service because they dont want a relationship with companies. While this secular trend could be explained away as just a change in consumers channel preferences, skeptics might argue that customers never wanted the kind of relationship that companies have always hoped for, and that self service now allows customers the 'out' theyve been looking for all along.

How social media can actually be helpful

Social media will never 'create relationships' between brands and consumers. But there is another problem that is worse than marketers falling for that grand delusion. Bad marketers have been spamming the world with crap marketing.

Digital marketers often talk about social networks in the context of the hack-infested world of 'inbound marketing' in which people do whatever it takes such as putting clickbait headlines on useless pieces of garbage 'content' to maximise direct response social shares and website clicks, no matter what the long-term brand damage will be inflicted.

But social media has the potential to be so much more if only marketers would think about it in the correct way.

People are never going to 'organically engage' with most brands. The solution is simply to treat social media platforms merely as new, additional channels over which marketers can choose to do traditional marketing activities. After all, no one ever said 'television marketing' or 'print marketing', so no one should say 'social media marketing'. Its not a 'thing'. One does not 'do social media'.

Its time to fix the promotion mix by recognising and then viewing social platforms for what they really are additional mediums that can be used in brand advertising, direct response marketing, public relations, personal selling and sales promotions.

Using social media in the promotion mix

Brand advertising

Remember 'Back to the Future Day' in 2015? Lexus released an ad campaign on Facebook that featured its prototype hoverboard a working hoverboard! and received 14m views. That is not 'social media marketing' it is doing brand advertising over social media channels.

Direct marketing

You know those ads that you see in on almost all social media networks those 'suggested posts', sign-up forms, product advertisements and 'click to learn more' calls to action? That is not 'social media marketing' it is doing direct-response marketing over social media channels.

Sales promotion

Pizza Hut Israel is one of the few brands that I do follow on Facebook but only for the coupon that I see in my news feed every week. Ill usually order Pizza Hut once every weekend. (I have a problem.) That is not 'social media marketing' it is doing sales promotions over social media channels.

Personal selling

Salespeople love the telephone. But many of those conversations start elsewhere and sometimes they begin on social media. That communication is not 'social media marketing' it is doing personal selling over social media channels. (Note that I am talking about a flesh-and-blood person on social media. See the next point.)

Public relations

People hate when brands 'insert themselves into conversations' on social media. But people do talk to the real people who work for brands. Marketers can use social media when doing media relations, community relations and other PR work. That is not 'social media marketing' it is doing public relations over social media channels.

In the future, there will be no 'social media jobs'

Traditional marketers often approach strategies in this manner:

1. Determine and prioritise the different activities within the promotion mix mentioned above based on the companys goals and objectives.

2. Research the targeted audience segments and develop a specific media mix of channels over which to execute the campaigns.

Today, however, too many (digital-first or digital-only) marketers jump to 'social media' or even to specific platforms such as Facebook or Twitter without even bothering to determine if those channels should be used. If you ask, What are we doing on social media? before you even ask, Should we be on social media? then youve got a problem.

Its called being channel-neutral. Anyone who says that a specific marketing channel is always important is selling something.

And thats why there will be no 'social media jobs' in five years. Advertisers will do advertising over social media. Community relations people will do community relations over social media such as when they host Twitter chats. Publicists will do publicity campaigns over social media channels. Customer service representatives will do customer support over social media.

We need to separate marketing activities from marketing channels. Activities are done over channels. In five years, people will integrate social media channels into their existing activities at work just as print advertisers later had to learn how to do advertising over television.

Why? Imagine that a PR team wants to grow a community on Twitter. Which is easier to do:

Add it up, it all spells #duh.

Want proof that so-called 'social media marketing' will disappear? Earlier this year, MediaPost named BBDO as the 'social media agency of the year' for 2016. After you parse the overly complex language of the announcement as Hoffman noted at the time it turns out that the agency won for simply running ad campaigns on Facebook.

MediaPost summarised with this statement: The solution: Utilise Facebook not as a social network, but a media channel.

In other words, an agency won a 'social media agency award' for simply doing advertising over that particular channel. The company got applause for treating a social media platform just like how a brand would consider television.

Still think that 'social media marketing' is a separate and distinctive 'thing' unto itself?

The Promotion Fix is a new, exclusive biweekly column for The Drum contributed by Samuel Scott, director of marketing and communications for AI-powered log analysis software platform Logz.io and a global marketing speaker on integrated traditional and digital marketing. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Scott is based out of Tel Aviv, Israel.

Continued here:
'Social media marketing' is completely useless but it could be a lot better - The Drum

April 05, 2017 10:49 ET | Source: Sysomos

Brands and Agencies can Search, Discover, Listen, Publish, Engage and Analyze across earned, owned and paid social media

RALEIGH, NC--(Marketwired - Apr 5, 2017) - Leading social marketing software company Sysomos today announced the industry's most comprehensive and flexible social marketing and analytics platform that not only unifies all social management functions and capabilities, but also gets smarter as it shares content and insights across all Sysomos applications. The Sysomos Platform provides more prescriptive insights for marketers by consolidating and cross-informing campaign initiatives.

Social media spending as a percentage of the overall marketing budget has tripled in recent years, paving the way for the social analytics market to grow to $5.4 billion by 2020, representing a 27.6 percent compound annual growth rate. However, the industry has struggled to unify social media marketing and analytics for building campaigns. Customers have wrestled with disparate data silos, service that doesn't meet their needs and high costs of licensing multiple tools.

By intelligently linking applications to Search, Discover, Listen, Publish, Engage and Analyze on social media, the Sysomos Platform now gives marketers access to all the paid, owned and earned data needed to create strategic campaigns, take action in real time and measure those actions in one upgraded user interface. Furthermore, with role-based customization, users can design their own workspaces to access the insights that matter most to them.

"Identifying insights, creating campaigns and measuring the effectiveness of those efforts -- all with increasingly strained resources -- have become challenging for marketers," said Peter Heffring, CEO of Sysomos. "We built the Sysomos Platform to meet these challenges head on, by providing a single technology platform that guides marketers to the exact insights needed to increase commercial opportunities for our customers."

The Sysomos Platform also is one of the first to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) that discovers and automates unseen insights, showing marketers how to instantly take intelligent action. The algorithms uncover correlations, anomalies and associations by using machine learning to process trillions of data points every second. With the Sysomos Platform now integrating and aggregating millions of digital data streams, the company plans to accelerate development of more advanced AI for the social analytics industry.

In addition to the Platform's ability to instinctively inform and share data insights across applications, Sysomos -- which counts brands like Mondelez, Coca-Cola, Marriott and Yamaha among its customers -- distinguishes itself from the competition with unique strengths, including:

Apply listening insights to paid, owned and earned content within a single workflow: The Sysomos Platform integrates listening with publishing and engagement capabilities, allowing users to discover trends in real time and curate content that can be applied immediately to cross-channel campaigns. For instance, if a company discovers its brand virally trending on Instagram, it can engage with users and leverage their content all within the same platform.

Improve the effectiveness of paid media campaigns: Sysomos can measure campaign efficiency as well as evaluate the earned media impact within the same platform. Using Sysomos' market-leading listening and search technologies, marketers can assess the effectiveness of their ad messaging based on the text and visual content their audiences share, and whether it had an impact on the overall conversation for the brand.

"Having access to all of the tools that Sysomos has to offer under this new integrated platform will deliver valuable insights for building accurate customer profiles," said Fabiola Romero of Yamaha Motor Corporation. "The platform succinctly marries data, allowing us to understand and act upon essential information when timing is of the essence."

While the complete Sysomos Platform encompasses all the Search, Discover, Listen, Publish, Engage and Analyze applications, companies that have one of the applications easily can activate the others. The Sysomos applications previously were named Map, Gaze (acquired in 2015), Heartbeat and Expion (acquired in 2015); now Map is part of Search, Gaze is part of Discover, Heartbeat is part of Listen, and Expion is part of Publish, Engage and Analyze.

About Sysomos Sysomos is the global leader in social marketing and analytics empowering brands and agencies to turn data-driven insights into actionable customer engagement opportunities. Our unified, insights-driven social platform gives marketers the easiest way to Search, Discover, Listen, Publish, Engage and Analyze at scale across earned, owned and paid media. Sysomos serves more than 1,200 customers including 80% of the world's top agencies and global brands. The company has offices around the world including Toronto, Raleigh, New York, San Francisco, London, Singapore and China. For more information, visit sysomos.com or connect with us at @sysomos.

Alexandra Vaughn avaughn@wcgworld.com 512-298-1166

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Social media marketing isbig business. In addition to the intangible value offered by earned and owned media, advertising revenue across social networks worldwide amounted to $25.14 billion in 2015 and is projected to grow to $41 billion this year.

But bringing everything together into one social media management has always been a challenge.

Today Sysomos has announcedthe Sysomos Platform, which combines its full suite of social marketing and analytics capabilities, along with artificial intelligence to help marketers make the right moves.

The new platform unifies the companys tools for search, discovery, listening, publishing, engagement, and analysis. Using AI, it lets marketers take action in real time and measure the effect of those actions in a single user interface. Think of it as a social cloud, if you will. The platform also offers role-based customization so that users can design an experience to match their needs.

So what is Sysomos proposing to do with AI that isnt already handled by regular analytics and statistics?

SysomosAI uses intelligence toproactively deliver actionable insights, Peter Heffring, CEO of Sysomos, told VentureBeat. Instead of marketerscreating rules tofind what they want and get results, SysomosAI willspot any anomaly, affinity, or association in the data, but then put in the proper context for the marketer.

Thats important because it helps the marketer or social media managerseemessages and interactions they might otherwise miss. And thats just the beginning for Sysomos as it looks to enhance the platform further with additional AI capabilities.

In the future, ourAI will integrate and processmultiple data sources beyond social and campaign data and use that to help identify cause-and-effect relationships that deliver automated actions based on a companys business objectives, Heffring said.

Ive seen the application at work. In addition to using AI to identify engagements, it has image recognition that can help you determine secondary trends. For example, it might be that users are generating content that includes fashion, which theyre pairing with photos of your products or services. That helps you to identify affinitiesand assists with future campaigns.

The system isnt perfect yet, like most image identification technologies Ive seen. So how does Sysomos deal with the currently inevitable identification issues?

This is Sysomosproprietary technology, and weconstantly tune the model, Heffring said. When we have a specific request from a client, such as to focus on cars or shoes, we will train [the system] with more objects, and more varieties of those objects. For logo recognition, we are typically able to achieve an accuracy of up to 85 percent. For object recognition, depending on the object, accuracy typically is in the 60-80 percent range. The accuracy can be improved through further training by boxing or masking the objects to pinpoint whats being detected.

While the AI is helping at the moment, and the companys plans sound appealing, Heffring doesnt believe that AI will completely take over, at least not yet. After all, that would somewhat negate the social in social media.

Marketers will always want humans involved, but for many of the common product, brand, and service questions, AI will take over thoseresponses, Heffring said. However, there will be limits in the near term. When acustomer is expressing emotions and speaking in nuanced language like through emoji, GIFs, and similar media AI wont cut itright now. That will change, though,as automated responses from marketers will soon be able to pass the Turing test.

And AI has benefits beyondwhat the companys customers see.

AI also willbe invaluable to aggregateinsights from human interactions to funnel back to product development, customer service, marketing, and other departments, Heffring said.

Ultimately, the combination of a unified platform for social media management, along with AI-powered advice and analytics, can helpbusinesses interact at scale without losing the human touch.

As AI takes over, these corporate interactions wont be social in any meaningful respect, and thatsfine, Heffring said. Social media has always been about people interacting with each other. Consumers wont care how automated the interactions from businesses are, as long as those interactions address consumers needs.

The Sysomos Platform is available from today.

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Sysomos launches its new AI-powered social marketing platform ... - VentureBeat

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