When is a Social Media Strategy Not A Strategy

A self-promoting headline from the trades last week claimed a coffee brand in the UK "develops first social media strategy."

Here's how they describe the "strategy:"

"To target students and give the campaign an anti-corporate feeling, the brand will launch simple games on Facebook illustrated by DJ fly-poster and Nike T-shirt artist, Mark Ward.
The games, ... include ‘Pet the Puppies' and ‘Flick the switch', which time users on how many times they can hit their space bar within 10 seconds."

Now, this is just a report in Brand Republic so in all fairness there may actually be more to the tactic than described here. Still, knowing how much brands - especially FMCGs - want to succeed in social media, you would think they would be more careful in terms of how they describe their efforts via press release to the marketing pubs.

Plug-and-play Tactic

As described, this is a plug-and-play tactic to "check off" the social media box - create (or more likely, repurpose) some game apps, plop them in Facebook and hire a hipster the kids will like to offer a draw of sorts. What this has to do with a coffee brand beyond their desire to reach a younger audience is not clear.

Their communication goal may be to raise what we call "relevant awareness" - the top two levels of the funnel: awareness and evaluation. In social media, you would rarely set out to just achieve awareness. More likely, you would be laser-focused on a segment of folks by traditional demographics or some type of affinity ( younger folks who like drinking coffee for example) and then try to educate them to some preliminary evaluation. This presupposes that you have achieved some level of relevance - hopefully in relation to the product.

If all you want to do is achieve a superficial level of engagement - people playing a game that has little to do with the product, you are really approaching social media as an ad channel.You hope that the catchiness of the game will get them to play and pass-along. Your brand is the "host" of that game, logos emblazoned everywhere, and you hope that you "impress" upon them the brand name. That approach misses all of the true value potential of 'social' - sustained and relevant word of mouth.

The other watch-out in the story include the following words and phrases:

• "target" - time for a moratorium on the ancient use of warfare language. The use of words like "target" may reveal how little the brand is interested in social media
• "an anti-corporate feeling" - presuming they mean all the negatives we associate with corporations, then they may want to try "anti-corporate behavior" and not just a feeling. Brands can be genuine and personable - even big FMCG brands. That way they might earn the "feeling."
• "how many times they can hit their space bar within 10 seconds." - makes it sound like all they are doing is providing mindless finger-candy when I am sure (hope) it is so much more.
• "Facebook" - note to self: don't promote new Facebook-based campaign when you only have 146 fans, little true engagement and a different, unpopulated brand page comes up first in Google. Better to wait until your platform looks and feels more robust

Too Critical?
Perhaps I am being too critical. Maybe we should be satisfied as more and more brands - big ones - start experimenting in social media.

On second thought, lets not be satisfied with this approach. These experiments will blow-up for brands. Many will be ill-conceived or executed and the results will turn CMOs off to social. Social media is not a channel. It is a fundamental shift in consumer behavior. It is time for even "first-timers" to adopt a true social media strategy.  

Comments

[Geoff Scaplehorn]

Well... nothing says "individual" or "anti-corporate agenda" better than 'Pet The Puppies'.

I think you're right: this is little more than a token effort from a group that really don't understand how social media works - and, possibly, how internet culture has developed since 1995.

That said, I almost want to see how badly this turns out.

[Tomasgonsorcik]

I am inclined to play devil's advocate here and claim that there is nothing wrong with seeing social media as an ad channel. As long as that's where client's expectations in terms of objectives/results are. And given the nature of what elements (relevance, trust, access, newsworthiness, etc) indicate the parameters of brand success in SM, this ad campaign is not going to be the most effective media spend.. Shame.

[Robin Grant, We Are Social]

Ouch. Who woke up on the wrong side of bed today?

But, as they say - True, True...

[John Bell]

@Tomasgonsorcik - I would argue that unless you are going to try and push engagement or earned media strategies in social nets that there are more effective "pure" ad channels than socnets. Clearly, these folks would argue they are pushing "engagement" via game apps, they just seem pretty far afield to me.
@Robin - the reason I take umbrage with this example is that I see tis type of mis-applied experimentation as a force that will turn marketers off to the true best use of social media (i.e. it won't work and they won't realize that it was misapplied...)

[Scott Gould]

John, I agree with you totally. I'm having to deal with this junk all day.

I've developed a large number of models and frameworks detailing strategy and integration, yet many are happy to go with the hack-job you describe above, and then get mad when it fails.

The Eurostar debacle around Christmas time proves that Social Media cannot be peice-meal - it must have deep company integration.

[Jefferson B]

I think it's better to try and fail than not to try at all. Having some sort of optimization and evaluation plan is helpful, but so many campaigns just fizzle out without much accountability or assistance in education and fine tuning.

It is possible that there is a larger strategy of which you're not aware. The mistake I see some (but not all) partner social media marketing companies we work with is mediocre comprehension of real business goals. So they have a strategy, per se, but sometimes it seems to have little or no relevance to business objectives, or isn't presented as such. Or it's just backed into an idea they have. Sometimes that works, often it doesn't.

Gould has a good insight. Many times the failure is in the inability of unseasoned social media experts, and I use that moniker loosely, to sell through work because they are too easily frustrated by the reality of organizational behavior. There is this "throw up my hands in disbelief" that happens when working with big brands gets mired in the usual morass of worry and control. Get over it. Your strategy should have a strategy for sell-through.

And nothing says "junior varsity" than wishing failure on others when really you have no stake in the game (hey, wish failure on your competition all you want, but not every wish has to be made in a public forum.) That's the kind of attitude that simply doesn't make you look smart, paradoxically it makes you look kind of dumb about social media. We generally wouldn't hire people when we find evidence that they wish failure upon others. And, yes, we check. Discretion counts.

Second rule is don't treat your audience like they're stupid; marketers deal with failure all the time, in many more areas than just social media. If failure kept people out of the game, there wouldn't be any advertising.

But keep trying, please. I think it's helpful discussion that helps us work with our clients to support and keep them moving forward, even if it's one small step, and a few failures, at a time. That's because we're in it for the long haul.

[Martin Meyer-Gossner]

Well analyzed... and agreed from a PR point of view. Still, (IMHO) not many companies have proven their ability, credibility and sustainability in social web business intelligence. The reason? The social web is too young. Most companies never had a (web) business strategy. How can they know which ingredients a social media strategy needs? Aren't we living in a trial and error era in terms of web business?

[Advertising campaign strategy]

Regardless of the forms of advertising media that you choose to combine into your own campaign,don’t overlook specialty advertising products.By adding a well-choselong lasting, specialty item that meets your target market where they are, you will create a good and lasting first impression as well as a reference for your contact information for years to come.

[forum widget]

"don't promote new Facebook-based campaign when you only have 146 fans" - couldn't agree more. Over the last couple of years this has been the new trend and I keep seeing very small companies trying to use that "Strategy" when they have almost no FB fans to play with. Yeah, FB can be a great tool but people could learn to use it in better ways, could they not...? :)

[Kolb Learning]

Thanks for the article, you raise some excellent points. I'm glad I'm not the only one who dislikes using the word "target" to describe prospective customers. It seems to me that some companies need to realize that one of the biggest goals of a social media campaign is to build a relationship with your fans/followers/whatevers. This ends up creating brand ambassadors who will tell others about your company, essentially doing your work for you.