Social media marketing, and why we shouldn’t talk to strangers
Public service message: please don’t push strangers in front of oncoming trains (by freshelectrons on Flickr)
When we’re using push channels like display ads, direct marketing or pull channels like websites or search marketing — numbers are what count, and numbers are enough. But when we are talking about social media channels, we shouldn’t target strangers. Instead, we should look at our existing relationships and learn how to make the most of these to our mutual benefit.
I don’t know whether you’ve had the experience of meeting someone famous in an ordinary context (in the street, say, or in a supermarket queue). I have.
It is a profoundly disturbing experience. For a split second your brain tells you that this is someone familiar but not why. Since you’re not expecting to meet David Bowie in your video store, your brain leaps to the most probable conclusion — this is clearly an old acquaintance or a friend-of-a-friend. By the time you realize who it is, you’ve already been staring at them too long, possibly waving and beginning to say hello.
What’s unnerving about this experience of course, is the asymmetry of the relationship; you know who they are (and possibly even some intimate details of their private lives) but they have no idea who you are. For all that you think you know them, you are in fact complete bloody strangers.
The circle of complete bloody strangers
At Porter Novelli, we’ve been trying out a new way of helping people think about the targets for our social media activities. Targeting in social media is one of the many places where conventional marketing experience fails to help; and indeed, generally hinders. For want of a better name, I’m calling it the “circle of complete bloody strangers.”
This may not be the most elegant name, but it does help simplify the problem. Here’s the synopsis: in traditional on and off-line marketing disciplines, planners like me tend to play a numbers game. We’re looking to reach the greatest number of people who will be receptive to our message, and (whether behavioural or demographic) we define our targets accordingly. And so, we spend nearly all our time crafting our messages and campaigns for complete bloody strangers.
Targeting strangers
Agencies do everything we can to get to know our target audience. At Porter Novelli, for example, we follow a process that has us (among other things) conducting desk research, running focus groups and interviews with representatives from the audience, and doing mystery shopping. At one of the wackier ad agencies where I used to work, there were workshops where hypnosis was used to break down barriers and aid rôle-playing exercises.
But however well we get under the skin of our target (say “C2DE mothers with young families”), they remain complete bloody strangers.
You might recognize them in the street, say, or in a supermarket queue – but like the celebrities whose lives you follow in the news – they have no idea who you are.
Social media marketing and social currency
There is (to my knowledge) no single precise definition of social media marketing. Many, I think would agree that it involves something like “using blogs and podcasts and social networks and media sharing sites and stuff to promote a product or service,” but that’s hardly precise.
Some would argue that simply buying advertising on a blog/podcast/social network meets the requirements, others would say that it doesn’t.
As a broad digital comms planner, I tend not to fall one way or the other, but suspect that if buying media or sponsorship was all that it took, we should all have stopped worrying and gone home by now.
I suspect that when we talk about social media marketing, we mean something like “generating word-of-mouth buzz and recommendations – whether for a product or a campaign promoting that product.”
I believe that we’re trying to use existing social relationships between colleagues, friends, tribes, and niche interest groups as the pathways along which we disseminate information. This isn’t as sinister as it sounds; we know that people use brands and branded content as what Douglas Rushkoff calls “social currency.” Content, he says
…only matters in an interactive space or even the real world … because it gives us an excuse to interact with one another. When I was a kid, we’d buy records not solely because we wanted to hear whoever was on them; we wanted an excuse for someone else to come over! “What are you doing after school? I got the new Stones’ album…”
In this sense, our content choices are just means to an end – social currency through which we can make connections with others.
So — in Rushkoff’s terms — what we’re doing when we do “social media marketing” is stamping new coins that can be released into the general circulation.
At Porter Novelli, my mantra is that “people want to promote themselves, and may be prepared to let you help.” This helps me remember that, however important my client’s campaign appears to me, my audience’s motivation is markedly different.
Why we shouldn’t talk to strangers
Take a look at the target diagram again. Normally I scrawl this on a flip chart and tell the story as I’m going along. The circles aren’t precise, and I often draw them differently depending on context, but these things are consistent: you are always at the centre of the target, and the outer circle is always defined as “complete strangers”.
Now ask yourself – who’s most interested in what you have to say, and who is most likely to repeat it in subsequent conversations? I’d say that the progression goes something like:
- You (naturally.)
- People you’re close to (friends, family, and colleagues for example.) If you can’t get these people interested in what you have to say, what hope do you have?
- Your “ecosystem”; people who depend on you economically – whether suppliers or employees or retailers who carry your product or developers who develop for your platform. Trade and specialist bloggers and journalists fit in somewhere around here.
- People who have a strong relationship with your product, tailing off from advocates to simple repertoire purchasers (people who regularly — but not exclusively — buy your product.)
- Complete bloody strangers.
Let’s take an example.
- The people who will be most interested in the launch of your new FMCG ad campaign will be people who work with you and at the agency who created it.
- People at other agencies will also be interested in the campaign, so it’s a good thing that there are lots of inter-agency relationships. And so will your friends and family — they like seeing what you’ve been up to and will tell their friends.
- The retailers who stock your product will naturally be excited to hear that there’s a campaign coming. And Campaign and Ad Age are always hungry for content.
- If you’re smart, you’ll have run test campaigns among your customer database of people who have asked to receive information. Asking their opinion makes them feel involved, and means that they’ll feel a little pride-of-ownership when the campaign does launch. “I helped with that,” they’ll say to themselves, and maybe to their friends.
- If your media plan and creative are any good, you’ll create a stir among the complete strangers.
Do you see what I mean? As you move further and further out, the more tenuous the connection, and the less certain the response.
Another thing to bear in mind; the further away you are from the middle of the target, the more noise you encounter. By the time you’re out in the complete strangers circle, you’re just another voice making demands on their time.
So why do so many of the campaign ideas I come across require the active involvement of complete bloody strangers for them to be successful?
Let’s host a competition on YouTube where people send in films about our product! Wheeee!
Let’s create a community! Wheeee!
Let’s send out a short film and hope that people will send the link to each other! Wheeee!
Let’s make a Facebook app! Wheeee!
None of these ideas is inherently wrong from the traditional marketing point of view. As an industry, we are (rightly perhaps) judged by total exposure to our campaigns. For most channels, numbers are what count, and numbers are enough.
But how on earth can we hope to influence the social networks of complete bloody strangers when we aren’t even making proper use of our own?
Makes perfect sense but I can see why we don’t exploit our own social networks. Partly it is because it does feel like exploitation and partly because it seems too easy. Of course friends, family, colleagues are interested in what you do. They care about you, or they care enough to fake interest. Getting complete bloody strangers to change their behaviour is much more of a challenge, and something that clients are going to be more interested in. What brand would pay for an agency to impress their own parents?
You know, before I joined the PR world, I thought that good personal networks were exactly what public relations was all about!
Seriously, while I’m not sure that ones parents are necessarily the best people to help start social media brushfires, I’m damn sure that strangers aren’t.
Social media (ipso facto) works because one person is motivated to tell another about a product or service (or “thing”) because it will help them fulfill a social purpose (i.e. they aren’t being paid or given any other incentive)
As discussed, strangers have little reason to pass on your message. But (we know) no-one is a complete bloody stranger. We’re all linked. Your network links into other networks, which in turn link into yet other networks.
Clients who expect us to activate networks that are at two or three removes from our own are making a category error. That’s what they’ve been led to expect from years of push marketing. But social media operates in a different way, and we need to adopt a different approach.
I strongly believe that only those with healthy personal and professional networks (and one where the boundaries between those networks are blurred for that matter) will make it in public relations and social media relations. People who have been trained to do nothing more than shove out releases or rely on third party networks just won’t cut it.
This is a great post and should be read by all clients venturing into social media campaigns, in my view. On the ‘friends’ point – maybe there’s a wider definition of ‘friends, family, colleagues’ than just ours. Many brands or companies have their own (not ours) friends – or at least potential friends – that they may or may not use effectively. Customers who are ultra loyal, or groups with an interest for some reason. (Years and years ago, I was involved in a huge promotion of a new roller coaster in a Florida theme park, and we recruited the Roller Coster Club of Great Britain to do the first reviews and spread the word for us in the early forums – what we’d now call a social media ‘seeding’ campaign, I suppose. They were sort of friends of the park and helped us get what now we’d call early adopters out to try the ride.) If a friend group doesn’t already exist, I guess part of the job of PR could be to create them for the overall brand, before embarking on word of mouth campaigns against specific projects.
Great article…
and I completely agree… the way I see it is there is a point scale…for counting origins of visits through links – ( where by the influence of a branded message online will be weighted by who suggested the connection… as those motivations are what count – not just how many passed through the site)
I see it something like this…
1 – A link from a “friend” – or blog – has a rate of 3 (as the influence is already set…)
2 – a link from a bookmaker.. 2 … (as the former decision suggests awareness… but its origins and needs my be not be clear… )
3 – Direct URL 2 – suggest media which has been driven by another source.. should be cross referenced with any print campaigns running…
4 – links from online adds or search… random… 1 (chance encounter… even if from target media…)
So if 4 is your “complete bloody strangers” , who has no loyalty or recommendation or point of reference to the branded message this will result in lack of history, or solid point of reference… which would be the counterbalance to any decision they will use to make their decision…
Through.. ripples… communities are building and promoting social recommendations which will have trust….. The one thing you do not get for free from a stranger…. and right now… there is not much trust in the market place….
@Kate – that’s a great reading of the post. Every time I re-read what I’ve written, I think “surely I’m stating the bleeding obvious — start by talking to the people who are most willing to listen, and work out.”
But your idea that one of the strategic responses is to draw people in towards the centre is one that hadn’t actually occurred to me while I was writing this. There are reasons for that (one is that I’m a curmudgeonly soul, another is that this is the starting point for another couple of articles that lead in another direction.)
I’ll give this more thought.
@victoria — “this will result in lack of history, or solid point of reference” — yes! Exactly.
I’m the last person to suggest that non-social media marketing channels don’t work. They do, and they’re cost-effective. I’m just saying that we mustn’t judge social media strategies by the same standards from nothing more than habit.
We must be courageous enough to think about all this in a different way, and find ways to think about it that make sense.
Hi.. know this is an old blog… but I’ve been watching the new Cadbury campaign fly around the net… through the exact network which you are talking… if another person suggests that I see it… I think I’m going to go and Fireball Cadbury’s factory in a hyperactive rage of consuming too many e-numbers, sugar and caffeen.
There are often campaigns though that ‘Complete Bloody Strangers’ will be more interested in than my friends and family. Whether this says more about how much the latter want to hear about what I do for a living is one thing – but actually mainly beside the point.
The real point is that brands need to think about whether what they are doing is going to ‘earn attention’ on its own merits and ‘be spreadable’.
What does this mean? It means, as you rightly point out, that You Tube comps and Facebook groups may not in themselves earn attention or be spreadable if they are just me-too and offer nothing new / don’t successfully interupt / disrupt whatever else I am doing at that time.
The friends / family etc concentric rings are useful in that they tell us who ‘should’ be most interested – because they are likely to at least take ebough time to consider and evaluate our ‘call for attention’ but of course rather than just start there and work outwards, the realisable potential of social media campaigns / ongoing presence is to connect, converse and commune with not so much ‘Complete Bloody Strangers’ but er…’Friends We Don’t Yet Know’.
i have tried social media marketing for getting our new products to be known on the market. it seems to work well specially if the audience is targeted .
I must say I am more astonished about on-line marketing on account of observing the way in which the the current generation communicate with the outside world with technology. My 14 year old son just showed me a website they had created to aggregate areas of interest for their group of friends. They needed to know a way to create online advertising on the website to create revenue. We are extremely proud and amazed.