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Social Media as Mass Marketing... Not the Future
"We're on Facebook."—Sign outside a nursery/garden center near my home
In 1994 I had the opportunity to work on the first hotel company website, when we pulled together 64 pages of brochure-ware for Hyatt Resorts. At that point, keyword advertising was years away and it would be another five years before Permission Marketing would be published. As people started to think of what marketing would be like on the Internet, mass marketing was the paradigm they used, because that was what they knew.
Looking back 15 years later, our mid-90s view of Internet marketing seems primitive. My opinion: In the future, our current view of social media is going to look similarly primitive, and this time we'll get smart much more quickly.
Like early thoughts about Internet marketing, popular discussions of social media tend to use a mass marketing paradigm. "Wow, there are 250 million active Facebook users!" "Twitter grew 752% in 2008. Incredible!" People talk about Facebook and Twitter user numbers with the awe that is usually reserved for late-January new stories about the power of Superbowl advertising.
More of my opinion: The big numbers won't be the big story in the future.
Already, the best uses of social media are not the mass uses. (Who cares if American Airlines has a Facebook fan page?) The best uses are the micro uses. Example: My 8th grade class, the 1973 graduating class of Lake Bluff Junior High School, has coalesced on Facebook and we're having a reunion. Now that's cool. I'll bet most of you have similar stories.
We don't know what social media's most effective marketing uses will be in the future. But if you want to get a hint of what it will be like, here's my suggestion: Don't think mass marketing. Don't think of advertising-type metrics, such as reach, frequency, big numbers, and "cutting through the clutter." Think micro. Think relationships. Think of a customer saying, "What's in it for me?" not a marketer saying, "Cool, I have another marketing tool!" Think of customers talking with each other, not companies adding social media to their "marketing mix."
Executives feel a need to be "On Facebook and Twitter," as if being "On" these sites signifies that they are up to speed on the latest marketing tools. But being "On" these social media sites doesn't mean a thing. When your customers use social media to talk to each other about you ... now that means something.
[Read more by Steve at Yastrow.com.]
Steve Yastrow posted this on 08/27/09.
Scariest News of the Day
One
of my favorite business books from the last few years was Chris
Anderson's The Long Tail. It showed how, in a marketplace characterized
by small customer-interest niches and unfettered by the constraints
of limited retail space, products can succeed without being "hits."
One example: Wal*Mart carries only the top 750 CDs, but consumers
can find millions of other titles through online music sellers.
Over
the past few days there was news that Britney Spears' new CD was
#1 on Billboard's charts. That, itself, is a scary piece of news.
But here's what caught my attention: Billboard later changed their
list, putting the new album by The Eagles on top.
Why
is that scary? The Eagles record is only available at Wal*Mart,
and Billboard had to change their rules to include sales in limited
retail distribution. Britney had sold about 300,000 copies, but
The Eagles had sold 711,000 copies at Wal*Mart/Sam's Club in six
days.
Personally,
I can't wait to hear the new Eagles CD. And, I'm not one of those
anti-Wal*Mart types, by any means. But it does catch my attention
when American buying behavior can be so concentrated in one place.
I'll admit it. I want to be part of the fragmented, interesting
marketplace The Long Tail, describes.
Steve Yastrow posted this on 11/08/07.
Taleb's Black Swan
Tom's
audioblog last week talked about the new book by Nassim Nicholas
Taleb, The Black Swan. I loved hearing Tom's comments because
I was, at the time, on vacation immersed in The Black Swan. But
I have only just finished Part 1, 133 pages. This book is not to
be read smoothly from start to finish. As it is a book about the
importance of what you don't know, and how we all tend to fool ourselves
about what we do know, it requires time to read, absorb, think,
and challenge some of your most fundamental ways of learning and
seeing the world. (And, I say, ignore Gregg Easterbrook's NY Times
review on April 22. Easterbrook picks on Taleb for certain comments
and ignores the mind-shocking new perspectives Taleb offers us.)
We
had some good discussion on this site about Taleb's Black Swans
back in December around my post, "The Aflac Duck is a Black
Swan," as I was eagerly awaiting the book's April publication.
Black Swans are highly improbable events. Our problem is that we
give undue importance to Black Swans that have already happened,
assuming they (despite their unpredictability) will predict the
future, and blind ourselves to those that might happen, because
they don't fit our generalized narratives about how the world works.
One of the comments from a reader on my December post was that "the
(Aflac) duck shows us that hard work can pay off in advertising."
A better assessment is that the unique success of the Aflac Duck,
relative to the gazillions of clever ad campaigns that don't work,
is that the Aflac Duck is a fluke that will more likely be duplicated
through luck than hard work. Taleb would call these many failed
ad campaigns "silent evidence."
Taleb
first started putting his ideas together as a young person in Beirut
as the Lebanese civil war began, making the assessment that "nobody
knows what's going on." (Even his grandfather, the defense
minister.) Taleb says we have gone from living in Mediocristan,
where any one individual event doesn't affect the entire picture
very much, to living in Extremistan, where individual events, such
as 9/11, can change the dynamics of our entire situation. But our
minds are still wired for living in Mediocristan, so we retrospectively
generalize after Black Swan events, and infer patterns and narratives
that we have no real reason to believe in.
This
is a very interesting topic, and I'm eager to hear your comments.
(And if you don't have a copy of this book, get one!)
Steve Yastrow posted this on 05/06/07.
The
Aflac Duck Is a Black Swan
In
a recent workshop of mine we were discussing the waning effectiveness
of advertising. A participant asked, "Doesn't the success of
the Aflac duck prove that advertising works?" I responded that
of course some advertising works, but for every Aflac duck or GEICO
gecko there are a million (billion?) ad campaigns that don't work.
The success of one does not imply the success of any others.
Then
I realized that the Aflac duck is actually a Black Swan. Nassim
Taleb describes Black Swans as "large-impact events with small
but incomputable probabilities." Black Swans are often associated
with 18th century British philosopher David Hume but, as Taleb points
out, Hume never used the term. The similarity comes from Hume's
"Problem of Induction" that says that we can't infer anything
outside our own experience—I have only ever seen white swans,
but that does not prove that there are no black swans.
Taleb
is more interested in approaching the same induction problem from
the other direction. His Black Swan concept would say one Aflac
duck doesn't tell us anything about how likely it is that other
similar advertising successes could happen. In fact, as Taleb would
say, we are "fooled by randomness" and have a tendency
to overestimate the likelihood that unlikely events will repeat
themselves. The Aflac duck is an "outlier," a "surprise,"
not an indication that other companies should spend millions of
dollars behind animal advertising mascots.
I
will freely admit (possibly opening myself to criticism), that I
have not read Bang! Getting Your Message Heard In A Noisy World,
by Linda Kaplan Thaler, the creator of the Aflac duck. I'm told
by mutual acquaintances that Kaplan Thaler is brilliant. But the
idea that we can translate these Black Swans to good, productive
marketing decisions for our own companies is completely antithetical
to my beliefs. We have been fooled by the relatively infrequent
successes of brute-force advertising and branding for too long.
We must recognize that these visible successes don't give us any
more reason to invest heavily in advertising than does George Clooney's
success tell me I should move to Hollywood and try to make it in
the movies.
Steve Yastrow posted this on 12/02/06.
Sell
in What Language?
New
U.S. Census Bureau stats: Nationally, 1 in 5 Americans speaks a
language other than English in the home. In California, it's 2 in
5, and for 2/3 of those California homes the other language is not
Spanish.
Steve Yastrow posted this on 08/23/06.
Short
Lived CMOs
An
article in today's adage.com discusses recruiting firm Spencer Stuart's
latest survey on the longevity of chief marketing officers. The
key result: The average CMO lasts in the job only 23.2 months, down
from 23.6 just two years ago. More than 50% of CMOs surveyed had
been in the job less than a year.
The
causes? The implications? I have my thoughts, which I'll share in
the comments. Your thoughts?
Steve Yastrow posted this on 06/20/06.
The
Road Never Closes
Two
hundred years ago, a man named Mendel of Rymanov reminisced about
quieter times:
"As
long as there were no roads, you had to interrupt a journey at nightfall.
Then, you had all the leisure in the world to recite psalms at the
inn, to open a book and to have a good talk with one another. But
nowadays you can ride on these roads day and night and there is
no peace anymore."
In
our age of 24 hour connectivity, the road really never closes. (As
I write this at 12:15 A.M. in San Francisco.) Does it interrupt
peace of mind? What would Mendel say today?
Steve Yastrow posted this on 05/02/06.
Craigslist
I
assume that virtually everyone on this site finds discriminatory
housing practices to be abhorrent, and thinks the 1968 Fair Housing
Act is a good piece of legislation. That certainly sums up my opinion.
But what do you think of this:
Craigslist,
the online do-it-yourself classified forum, is being sued because
some apartment rental advertisers have used language on the site
such as "No kids allowed," "No minorities,"
or "Africans and Arabians tend to clash with me."
The
advertisers are clearly doing something wrong. But should Craigslist
be sued? Is Craigslist more like a commercial newspaper, which is
responsible for the content of classified ads, or more like a town
square? If I hear people saying terrible things on a park bench,
I can't blame the city which provided them with a place to sit.
Craigslist
carries 8 million new classified ads per month, with a staff of
only 19 employees, making it impossible to police all ads with its
current low-price model. (However, readers are able to flag offensive
ads, and the "No minorities" ad was caught in this way
and removed with two hours.)
This
presents us with an interesting challenge for the Internet age.
Are we willing to allow some things we find repugnant to happen,
in order to allow the frictionless, inexpensive communication the
Internet enables? Or are we willing to give some of that up to prevent
these types of situations? Comments?
Steve Yastrow posted this on 02/24/06.
Yahoo!
He's In Jail!
An
editorial in today's New York Times says Yahoo admitted that it
"helped China sentence a dissident to 10 years in prison by
identifying him as the sender of a banned email message." The
Times also says that Microsoft, at the Chinese government's request,
closed the blog of someone criticizing the government, in addition
to enabling the Chinese government to censor MSN searches and blogs.
The
Times calls this "obvious disregard for users' privacy and
ethical standards," suggesting that Microsoft and Yahoo are
willing to do this to make it easier for them to do business in
China. Microsoft responded to criticism by saying, "We think
it's better to be there with our services than not be there,"
as if it's worth sacrificing some freedom in order for the citizens
of China to have access to the wonders of Microsoft.
Comments?
Steve Yastrow posted this on 01/17/06.
What
a Story
Just
finished Matt Ridley's book Genome, which is billed as
an "autobiography of a species in 23 chapters." The book
format follows our 23 chromosomal pairs, focusing on a human characteristic
in each chapter that is related to a particular chromosome.
The
book has been out a few years, so many of you may have read it,
but if you haven't I highly recommend it. Basic genetic literacy
is becoming what basic geographic literacy has been for 150 years—basic
knowledge needed for everyday understanding.
Steve Yastrow posted this on 01/12/06.
NYT
OP-ED #2 Wal-Mart
Also
on today's New York Times op-ed page is a piece by Pankaj Ghemawat,
a professor at Harvard, and Ken Mark, a consultant, on research
they've done on the effects of Wal-Mart on society and the economy.
We've had great debate on this site about Wal-Mart before. This
article says that Wal-Mart benefits the rural poor in significant
ways by bringing low prices to them. They show that Wal-Mart brings
8% price decrease to rural areas, and that their stores are disproportionately
located in the country's poorest zip codes. It also makes the claim,
discussed here a number of months ago, that Wal-Mart's customers
benefit from their lower prices more than their shareholders do.
They say that "the debate around Wal-Mart isn't really about
a Marxist conflict between capital and labor. Instead it is a conflict
pitting consumers and efficiency-oriented intermediaries like Wal-Mart
against a combination of labor unions, traditional retailers and
community groups. Particularly in retailing, American policies favor
consumers and offer fewer protections to other interests than elsewhere
in the world. Is such pro-consumerism a good thing?"
Comments?
Steve Yastrow posted this on 08/03/05.
NYT
OP-ED #1
Tom
Friedman started his op-ed piece in today's New York Times by suggesting
that he'd run for office on a one-issue platform: He'd promise to
make America's cell phone service as good as Ghana's.
Friedman
points out that our technological infrastructure is actually falling
behind the rest of the world—in addition to frustrating cell
phone coverage, our broadband connectivity has fallen to 16th in
the world. As he points out in his book, The World is Flat, the
advantages we've grown up enjoying in the U.S. are evaporating,
and these technological deficiencies will have a direct result on
our wealth and productivity.
Ask
he asks in the article, do we depend on private companies to provide
better connectivity for us, or is it not in their interest to make
access easier and more ubiquitous?
A
month ago I opened my laptop in a coffee shop in a 150 year old
building in Jerusalem and was immediately connected to the Internet,
for free, because the center of town has been set up for wireless
access. The only place that has happened to me in the U.S. is the
Roanoke Airport—not exactly the center of our universe.
Steve Yastrow posted this on 08/03/05.
Marti
Making Sense
I
heard Marti Barletta speak twice today at the Marketing to Women
conference in Chicago. Her first talk focused on her overall philosophy
of marketing to women, and the second talk focused on "Prime
Time Women." (The mature market)
Marti
was, as expected, awesome. As can be read in her book, Marketing
to Women or in her tompeters.com Cool Friend Interview, Marti
has a keen grasp of both the market opportunity and the reasons
most companies miss this opportunity. If you ever have a chance
to hear her speak, don't miss it!
Steve Yastrow posted this on 04/19/05.
Where's
the Innovation?
Stats
from Tom Friedman in an interview on MSNBC, regarding international
patents from 1980 to 2000:
The
280 million citizens of Arab countries: 270 international patents
South
Korea: 16,000 international patents
Hewlett-Packard:
11 international patents per day
Is
there anyone who thinks this is insignificant?
What
causes it?
How
does it hurt these 280 million people?
If
so, how can it be remedied?
Steve Yastrow posted this on 09/24/04.
Tagging Credit
Infineon
believes its break-through idea on RFID technology will create sand
grain sized tags soon. Which means everything could be tagged. So
you enter a shopping mall ... pick up all the stuff you want ...
leave the shopping mall and NEVER STOP AT CHECK-OUT. The info on
the smart tags immediately uploads to a server which itemizes your
purchases, distributes the info to the various stores, and accesses
your credit card verification. Ooopps. That is if you have credit
card verification. While I love this technology, it does mean the
digital divide is increasingly becoming a financial divide. The
divide used to mean having enough money for a computer and access.
It now may mean having enough credit.
Young
folks struggle to manage credit. Over 1.6 million Americans filed
for personal bankruptcy last year. This doesn't take into account
the 1.2 billion or so on the planet below the poverty level.
Some
claim this type of technology will enable a leveling of the literacy
field. But what about the financial field? Love to hear from some
of you about this.
Steve Yastrow posted this on 07/29/04.
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