What social media gurus won’t tell you

The basics of marketing do not change:

I am a firm believer in getting the basics right. The risk one runs by hearing too many experts is that he can forget the basics and ride on a wave which takes him away from the shore. I received a call from an event management company and the caller said, ‘Have you heard of experience marketing?’ I said, ‘I heard of it four or five years ago, along with other terms like guerrilla marketing, emotional branding etc.’ The caller asked, ‘What do you think of experience marketing?’ I said, ‘I am a believer in the old school of marketing with four Ps. If you deliver them right, with passionate and innovation, you do not have to worry about anything else. Experience is part of the product, and more so for the industries where customer gets in touch with the product more frequently, such as airlines, automotive, hotels etc. So delivering right experience is fundamental necessity, it should not be thought as a new way to market your products.’ I believe, if you are trying to create experience by stepping out of your product interaction, such as Ferrari World in Abu Dhabi, you have to be Ferrari to do this. In fact, according to the old school of marketing of four Ps even Ferrari World is a kind of ‘promotion’ because you are building the brand image.

ROI should not be ignored for any business investment:

I read blog post of so called gurus of social media who invent fanciful terms such as social capital, social media quotient, community, and engagement. Nobody talks of marriage or ROI in the social media. I read one detailed article about ROI in the social media who wrote four pages but still could not explain clearly how can you measure ROI in the social media, especially if we talk of returns in monetary value. It is anyway a tough question in marketing, and it sounds villainous while talking about social media. ROI brings accountability and serious thinking in any investments that a company decides to make in social media.

Social media is not free:

The social media gurus claim that social media is for everyone and most business owners who have not tried it get the impression that it is free. Yes, it is free for me to post my blogs, presentations, photos and make connections, but a company has to try harder, and once you are client you know how much it costs. The case study of Ford Fiesta is often cited as a wonderful example of successful social media campaign, and most people get the impression that Ford generated lots of PR impressions for free. It was not for free. Ford invested millions of dollars behind the campaign and gave 100 cars free to their fans to drive across the country and post updates.

Social media is not the only way for two way dialogue with customers:

The impression one gets is it is first time in the history when companies are having a two way dialogue through the social media. This is wrong; two way dialogues have always taken place at point of sales, toll free numbers and customer service through emails or chatting. Yes, advertising tends to get response now in the social media, unlike before, because now audience can say ‘Your ad sucks.’

There is more to customer satisfaction than social media:

A company that has not tried other routes of customer engagement (let’s use this word, although I hate it. My favourite is term is customer satisfaction) should not think of jumping to social media. The website and customer service centre always remain the most important touch points outside the showroom or service centre. If your website is not updated, you will get fans who will post on your wall ‘hey guys your website has no information, what are you doing about it? You need a complaint resolution mechanism to resolve the complaints of angry customers, and it has to be off social media. In the absence of that, you will open up volley of complaints from the customers who did not have a channel to express their disappointment earlier. But, when the right mechanism of customer complaint management is in place, which is more appropriately CRM approach, rather than through Facebook or Twitter, you can direct angry customers to this channel. You can only listen to complaints on the social media, but trying to resolve them there is a bad idea. It is the same as if you have an angry customer in the showroom you better take him aside and listen to him patiently rather than argue with him in front of other customers.

Most of your customers may not become your fans on the Facebook:

It is also important to remember that only a certain section of customers who are comfortable with social media will come to your pages. We know from experience that people who like to talk loudly in a gathering are fewer than those who avoid it. There might be a significant number of customers who do not like talking in public or showing to others what they like or dislike about their brand will either not join your page and even if they do they will remain silent spectators. For example, Toyota sold 1.76 million vehicles in USA in 2010, however, Toyota USA Facebook fan page has 400,000 fans. It is the most popular Fan page for Toyota so I believe a lot of fans will be from Canada, as well as from other parts of the world. There are also fans or agents of competitive brands who just join to pour shit on Toyota. This means that not every new vehicle buyer who is spending thousands of dollars on the car is becoming a fan, and if we take an estimate of five year sale to be 8 million, there are only 5% Toyota owners who joined the Toyota Facebook fan page. The remaining 95% of the customers interact with the company more intimately when call their toll-free number or take their car for service. and the company gets many more opportunities to gratify them, let alone engage them.


Unethical practices:

Your Facebook fan page and Twitter followers might be people who do not give a hoot to your business. A friend told me that his business page had a swarm of fans from Far-East countries when ran some contests based on the-most-liked-content-wins. There is an army of geeks who claim to increase your YouTube videos views by thousands. I have seen some incredibly stupid videos, just arrangement of images available on a company’s website, to have more than 100,000 views which is not possible through ethical means. Just try searching on Google ‘Increase my YouTube video views’ and you will see how many suppliers promise to do that with dirt cheap cost. Facebook has right mechanism that it makes creating fake IDs difficult, yet it is not impossible for people to create them. This is why I joked with my friends that after Pay Per Click, Pay per Engagement, Pay per lead, Pay per Acquisition, (by the way I love all these concepts, and they bring in real accountability, ROI and value for investments) soon we are going to someone come up with the concept of Pay per fake account.


Conclusive thoughts:

My point is not that social media is a bad idea, of course you need to give platform to your passionate fans who want to say something publicly, and to those who believe they were not heard well on any other channel such as a toll free number or email. But, if a company has to choose in allocating the resources, spending money on customer retention is much better idea. It doesn’t make sense to invest in the social media when you do not have customer complaint management system in place and you are not tracking customer satisfaction through market research and taking appropriate actions to improve scores. The old wisdom that you get much more business from satisfied customers, as some say that 80% of the business comes from repeat customers, always holds true. A satisfied customer will only talk positively, whether in the social media or among a group of friends. Yes, an unhappy one has many more choices to curse you in the social media, so you need to be even more watchful for customer satisfaction than you ever were.