Editorial Articles

First things first, I am an early adopter. I like new gadgets, I was one of those fools that spent £349 on a 5GB iPod in 2001 on a first generation iPod, I craved the iPad, I had HD TV when there were only a handful of channels. I get that we need to keep developing and striving for better and brighter things. So I am not a dinosaur when it comes to new technology and its uses and I am not adverse to change. But I am getting increasingly frustrated with clients thinking that Social Media is the answer to their marketing needs or to put it another way: “Social media is the answer, now what was the question again?” Yeah, right!

Social media operates in a category of its own, because it has to. Social media is not purely an awareness channel, nor is it a direct/1-1 channel. It is good at these things but not brilliant – there are better channels. We see buzz being generated by clever campaigns on Facebook but does that buzz amplify itself outside the self-congratulatory world of readers of the marketing press? I doubt it. I don’t see the national press running stories on the impact of the latest Honda Jazz campaign. We know social media helps us reach an audience, cheaply, quickly and if we are lucky it multiplies our media spend because lots of people get to see it/play with it.

But what does it return? This is the nub of it for me, how do we prove it works? And please don’t say it is about the number of fans you have – BBC news has 61k fans whilst a group demanding bigger Cadbury creme eggs has 100k. Are creme eggs really of prime importance to 40 per cent  more people in the UK, than the BBC news?

Marketing is about sales. Let’s not kid or delude ourselves: we sell or we die. Yet more and more budget is being diverted away from channels proven to sell: direct response, DM, eDM and pushed into social media. Why? It can’t be because Facebook ads work really well because a study in America has recently shown that click through rates have dropped from 0.063 in 2009 to 0.051 in 2010, and the CPM has gone up. And I have yet to see any robust ROI calculations for marketing spend on Facebook. Yet still the money flows in.

We all know the stats about Facebook; 500m users, it would be the fourth largest country 35m people update their status everyday (7 per cent) with 60m status updates daily. But in an environment dominated by how much things are worth, why are we not seeing the harder calculations – sales and returns.

Now I am sure it is coming, but until then clients need to remember that marketing budgets are delicate things and they can be easily moved or even removed. Don’t put them in danger, do the things that are proven to work until those things that say they work can show you they do.

For the time being, the major benefit of the social media boom is that it has overtaken porn and is now the no. 1 activity on the web!

Matthew Fitzsimons
Head of Planning
EHS 4D Group