This post isn’t meant to be an attack on Seth Godin or his online effort “Brands in Public”. After all, many are already attacking him for his decision to launch a site which basically aggregates social chatter about a brand into a public facing site, which they then have to pay $400 a month to customize. Some have called it a game changer, while others have declared it outright brandjacking.
The problem I have with “Brands in Public” is that it feeds into a myth… a myth perpetuated by frustrated marketers that just don’t want to admit that in the current digital landscape, we have our work cut out for us… it’s the myth of the social media shortcut.
So, why is Seth’s effort both ineffective and against best practices:
1. Aggregation isn’t conversation. Pulling a bunch of feeds together does not create a story about the brand, or open the doors for a new kind of communication.
2. Fishing where the fish aren’t. Seth suggests that brands add to the “conversation” in a platform where no one is currently listening.
3. It goes against integration. If any site should be pulling in twitter feeds and YouTube links, it should be the brand’s website. Wouldn’t it be a much more of a game changer to see brands putting their twitter feed under the “customer service” section of their website?
Marketers want so badly for a $400 month solution that just brings everything together into one place. They want there to be only one channel they need to respond in, rather than several dozen. But there is no easy out, you have to roll up your sleeves and prepare to spend hours and dollars to do social media right.
Maybe that’s why 84% of marketers don’t measure ROI. They are still looking for the easy solution, and don’t want to admit that it doesn’t exist.
Marta Strickland
Comments
Connections
Great insight. I was thinking the same when I read Seth’s post. Seemed somewhat out of character I thought.
Marta -
I have long been an advocate for brands to setup conversation hubs around their brand. There are a few instances where brands are doing this correctly.
Dell is a perfect example of how they showcase their social media footprint – http://en.community.dell.com/
Southwest is another great example with their “Nuts About Southwest” social hub – http://www.blogsouthwest.com/
So brands that have a true understanding of monitoring their community take an approach of providing their customer/client a way to engage in the conversation directly from their brands site (or micro-site).
For a third party marketer like “Brands in Public” that Seth has launched, it will only be a short time before brands realize that there is greater value in aggregating the brand conversation and reacting publicly directly from the brand itself versus a collection of brands that haven’t learned how to monitor the conversation of their brand the correct way!
The words “easy” and “social media” don’t belong in the same sentence. There is no such thing. In order to be successful in social media and create dialogue about your brand, you must invest the time and money into integrating it properly. Sure having all of the online information about your brand feeding into one place is a great idea, but isn’t that why companies put a news and events page on their websites? Easy is not a word that applies to social media and in order to use it successfully, we must stop thinking in those terms.
Tessa Carroll
VBP OutSourcing
http://www.blogs.vbpoutsourcing.com