The Homa Files

TakeAway: With all the recent social media flops some say the end of using social media is near. 

While the way people get and consume information is different, the idea behind making a product that people need and selling it them stays the same, and CMOs need to do things that matter like actually selling the product.  

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Excerpted from AdAge, “Do Campaign Failures, High-Profile Firings Signal the End of Social Media?” by Jonathan Salem Baskin, March 22, 2011

The latest news involving social-media pioneers isn’t good. Pepsi has fallen to third place behind Diet Coke in spite of its widely heralded switch from Super Bowl ads to a huge social charity program called Refresh Project. Burger King has …fired agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky after producing Facebook campaigns and viral videos that got lots of attention while the business witnessed six consecutive quarters of declining sales. …

Every CMO should use this occasion to pause and reflect …on rolling out a social-media campaign or start giving away content for free. Unfortunately, there are many reasons why you shouldn’t, and may not.

… what good are invented metrics for social campaigns if they don’t evidence any influence on sales? There’s no such thing as a successful brand that doesn’t deliver successful marketing, is there? In fact, the latter builds the former. They can’t be disconnected, and if social marketing can’t be made responsible for tangible behaviors that matter to the business, not just to ideas about branding, then no made-up measures of its importance matter much at all.

… Identifying what the social efforts did, if anything, requires the upfront presumption that they were necessary and therefore accomplished anything at all that mattered (like starting out to claim that cereal is “part of a balanced breakfast”). …

…beginning of the end of social media’s infancy. Maybe it’s time to stop talking unseriously and get serious for real. Technology has utterly changed the ways consumers get and use information, and it has completely disrupted how companies create, share and collect it. …People still need and do the same things they always did, and companies still need to sell to them. Pretending that conversation has any value apart from the meaningful, relevant and useful information within it — fad ideas, like “content” is anything more than a silly buzzword, or that anybody wakes up in the morning hoping to have a conversation with a brand of toothpaste or insurance — is no longer credible in light of the latest news.

Instead, CMOs need to discover new ways to do the old things that still matter: Offer products and services that someone truly needs, admitting that you want to sell stuff to them, and then properly serving them after they’ve given you their business. Sounds so easy as I type it but doing so has gotten so incomprehensibly complicated. Maybe the news coming out of Pepsi and Burger King is a wakeup call that we need to make all of this simpler, not harder. …

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This entry was posted on March 22, 2011 at 5:48 am and is filed under Internet - Soc Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.