Public Relations Strategery

This article originally appeared in PR Daily.

If you work in the marketing industry (“social media” is not an industry), you’ve probably either read or heard about this anonymous piece in Digiday and either scoffed at or empathized with the author’s plight.

If you haven’t, here are two of the most resonant points:

I sat in a brainstorm. We came up with a bunch of content ideas for our brands’ social channels—images, GIFs, and lines of witty copy. I went back to my desk, opened a container of leftover lo mein, and realized I’d wasted the last four years of my life.

And:

The underlying issue is that social departments place too much value on engagement. Those “likes,” “comments,” “shares,” “re-tweets,” and “pins” are the metrics that social content creators use to (1) judge success and (2) dictate what future content looks like. Here’s the catch. The people who are engaging with that content are predominantly worthless.

As someone who works at an agency that provides similar support to our clients, I empathized. I’ve been that anonymous author. I’ve lived that life. I feel your pain, anonymous author.

Here’s the thing, though: Empathy and pity aren’t going to solve the problem.

Instead of going back to our leftover lo mein to come up with more variations of “Keep Calm and Carry On” posts while questioning our life choices, I figured it would be more productive to offer tips on how to get out ourselves and our clients out of this rut. (Unless your job and/or bonus depends on amassing more “likes,” fans, and followers—in which case, have I got a lead for you.)

First things first—stop taking yourself so seriously. You’re managing Facebook and Instagram, not performing brain surgery. Stop thinking your customers are waiting with bated breath for your content. They’re not.

Stop treating your social media like paid media, and start treating it for what it is—a place for brands to come out of their ivory towers and interact, listen, talk, and share with their customers. Experiment. Be on your customers’ journey with them. Try new things. Engage in actual conversations. Act as though you actually care about what your customers need and want rather than what will get the most “likes.”

“But,” you say, “my client/boss wants to see the ROI of our efforts and if I can’t show the numbers going up, our budgets are going to get cut/I’m going to get fired!”

Here’s where you change the conversation. Review the metrics you’ve been using, and throw them away. Build a new key performance indicator chart, one that’s actually tied to your business goals.

If your goal is to increase e-commerce sales, show how much traffic is coming in through your social channels. If your goal is to improve your brand’s online reputation, point to the quality of the search results. If your goal is to increase awareness, point to the total number of mentions across all media channels. If your goal is customer service, track how many cases you’ve resolved via social media. If your boss/client gives you a hard time about wanting to see more “likes,” comments, and pins, that’s because you haven’t given her any other metrics from which to judge success. Figure out what role you think social media should be playing for your organization and measure against that.

You also should work with everyone in the marketing mix. Figure out what role social media plays in that regard. Figure out how you can use social media to help advance the other areas. Figure out how they can help advance social media. As a component of marketing, social media does not exist in a vacuum—and neither can you.

Rather than fighting for more dollars, headcount, or attention, look at the bigger picture and take a realistic view of where social media can and should fit in. It’s quite possible you’re stuck in this never-ending loop of crappy content because you have a much bigger budget than that of other areas and your clients (internal and external) want to get their money’s worth.

Don’t be afraid to look at the bigger picture and say: “What if we took some of the money we have allocated to Facebook ads and reallocated that to PR so that we can get some more earned media coverage? That would, in turn, drive more social engagement, because we’d be tapping into those publications’ social media channels, too.”

Finally, be ready to find and create content that makes your brand/organization unique. Everyone and everything has a story, so instead of following some social media guru’s best practices formula for online content that will increase followers, friends, and comments, think about the story you want to share and the conversations your customers actually want to have.

When building your social media content calendar, create and share content about your organization’s history, or the “why” behind some of your business decisions, or your organizational culture, your causes, or new product uses. Maybe it’s just to ask them what they think; you might be surprised at what you find out. If you’re scared of how your “fans” will react, you have problems that go beyond social media.

The Digiday piece struck a chord with so many because we’ve let our excitement for these channels overtake our better judgment. All is not lost—let’s not resign ourselves to a fate of leftover lo mein and crappy content. Let’s admit our faults, adjust our mindsets, and push forward.

Image Credit: Matt Becker

“Can’t see the forest for the trees” –> An expression used of someone who is too involved in the details of a problem to look at the situation as a whole.

Remember this scene in Major League (great movie, BTW) when Willie Mays Hays keeps trying to hit the ball out of the park even though he’s the fastest guy on the team? His manager comes over and tells him to hit the ball on the ground and leg out his hits because that’s the role he plays on the team.

Or this scene in Miracle when Herb Brooks says he’s “not looking for the best players, I’m looking for the right ones”?

Makes sense, right? Anyone who’s ever assembled a team – sports, work or otherwise – knows it’s about the sum of the parts, not the individuals. A team of superstars is great for fantasy football, not so much in real life.

Maybe you’re not as big a fan of sports movies as I am. In that case, think about your group of friends. You likely have a friend you go to when you have something serious to talk about. That same friend may not be the person you’d choose to plan your bachelor party. You, like both of the movie coaches above, realized that each player or friend played a different role when viewed in the larger context of your life.

I share these analogies because I’ve had quite a few recent conversations with clients, colleagues, and friends who were obsessing over the performance of an individual blog post, Tweet, or Facebook status. What was the reach? What was the clickthrough rate? How many times was it shared? It made me want to ask about the performance of that lunch meeting with a mentor or that single in the softball game last night. Did you compare that lunch to other lunches you’ve had and kick yourself for not fully optimizing it? Did you swing for the fences your next time up because why accept a lousy single when you can crush the ball over the fence?

Very little in life can be measured in a vacuum. A home run is better than a single right? Then why not fill your team up with huge guys who crush the ball every time up? A crazy weekend in Vegas is better than a night at home playing trivial pursuit, right? Then why not head out to Vegas every weekend? Well, for starters, you’d end up with a team of players who do this and a life that resembles this. But it’s also because the success or failure of anything has to always be considered within the larger context. A crazy weekend in Vegas is great, but sometimes you just want to chill out at home. A home run hitter is great except when you need someone to run down that fly ball in the outfield. 

The same thinking applies to brands and their use of social media. Just because that cat GIF you posted reached more people and had more likes than the post where you talked about your organization’s community service efforts doesn’t mean it was any more or any less “successful.” Just because that Tweet of your staff party wasn’t retweeted 100 times doesn’t mean you should stop sharing that sort of content. Just like the home run hitter and the base stealer, each piece of content plays a different role in your overall strategy and needs to be measured as such. Your goals for that content should be driven by you, not by the social platform. In some cases, you may be trying to drive traffic to a website, or to drive shares of a piece of a content, or sometimes, it’s just to show a different side to your organization. Your social media content and conversations are not banner ads so stop evaluating them that way. 

Continue to be a slave to the metrics these social platforms use and you will soon become part of their business strategy, rather than the other way around.

Oreo’s “blackout” tweet. Arby’s tweet about Pharrell’s hat, Nintendo’s Wreck-It Ralph Tweet. These are some of the go-to examples of “real-time marketing.” You can’t watch a live event now without being bombarded by branded messages, all of which are meant to associate the brand with the real-time event and become part of the conversation. Unfortunately, participating in these conversations in real-time is substantially more difficult for big brands than it is for you on your couch. 

Sure, a Tweet is only 140 characters. And yes, you may crack the same jokes as the ones you see brands make that then blow up on Twitter. But for a brand with thousands of employees and with legal, marketing, and PR departments, even a 140 characters can easily get caught in a mess of red tape.

On Tuesday, April 29 at 10:15 AM, join my social media supervisor Jeana Anderson and Joe Giallanella, Associate Brand Manager for H.J. Heinz at WOMMNext here in Chicago. They’ll be giving a “behind the scenes” presentation on how Heinz used social media to supplement their Super Bowl commercial and participate in the global conversation. Check out this interview with Jeana for more details on the session.

If you want to hear their happy and realistic session, register to attend the WOMMNext conference. Until then, connect with her on social personally at @jeanaanderson or through her company @cramerkrasselt and session co-speaker, Joe Giallanella @HJHeinzCompany/@HeinzKetchup_US.

This article originally appeared on PRDaily and also on Entrepreneur.com.

For a long time, there was a perception that social media marketing was free, or at least very inexpensive. Starting a Facebook or Twitter account was free, and hiring a part-time intern to manage them didn’t cost much.

In reality, social media marketing has never been free. Sure, there aren’t usually any hard costs required to set up social media accounts, but someone is still had to create the content, engage in the conversation, monitor and manage those conversations, etc. As we’ve seen time and time again, turning over your brand’s reputation to an intern isn’t always the wisest choice. Most brands now know the real costs of social media marketing are not as great as the opportunity costs of bad social media strategy.

Fast-forward a few years, and we’re seeing more and more organizations hire entire teams to create content for Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, and whatever hot new social media startup launched last week. Content marketing, the creation and distribution of content to attract leads and generate sales, has become a $118.4 billion industry. According to data from DOMO and Column Five Media, every minute of every day sees over 2 million Google searches, 571 new websites, and 48 hours of new YouTube video. It’s become overwhelming.

The social media arms race benefits no one

Unfortunately, it’s only going to get more difficult as brands compete in a social media arms race. Rather than creating a slow and steady stream of high-quality content, most brands believe they’re better off creating a ton of low-quality content in the hope that one or two pieces will have real results. Yet a recent study by InboundWriter shows only 10 to 20 percent of a company’s website content drives 90 percent of its online traffic.

Meanwhile, social networks realize that brands will pay big money for access to the millions of users in their online communities, and they’re going to charge more and more for that privilege. According to a recent Advertising Age article, Facebook reports: “Content that is eligible to be shown in news feed is increasing at a faster rate than people’s ability to consume it.”

This means the organic reach of any one particular piece of content is going to decline even more from the 16 percent rate it’s at now. Some may see it drop all the way to 2 percent.

Increasingly, to compete effectively in social media, brands realize that to play, they must pay.

To keep up with social networks’ efforts to monetize their massive online audiences, companies are allocating more resources to keep up. Simply creating valuable content and then authentically engaging with your audiences often is no longer enough, especially when you have to spend more to reach those audiences. Brands know they now must create distribution strategies for that content, sometimes at a substantial cost.

Here are seven ways brands will spend more money on social media and content marketing in 2014:

1. Creating content. If brands wish to rise above the glut of content that’s being created, they’re going to have to improve the quality of content they create. That viral video that looks like it was shot on a family member’s smartphone was actually just a bit created by the “traditional” media.
2. Promoting content. Expect social platforms to reward brands that spend a lot of money in ads on those platforms. It’s a vicious cycle. Paid ads and sponsored content will help drive the “organic” reach of your other content. In addition, brands with more Facebook likes are going to see a lower cost for paid distribution because paid social ads will show greater social context. If more “likes” and followers = cheaper ads, guess who’s going to start to investing in more contests, giveaways, and other tactics to reach more eyeballs and then subsequently buy more ads and sponsored content.
3. Increasing reach. As brands acquire more and more fans, followers, and “likes,” and as these social networks get larger and larger, the cost to reach them will continue to increase. When a brand makes an investment in creating high-quality content, you can bet they’ll ensure it reaches the largest number of people.
4. Syndicating content. Likewise, expect more dollars to go companies such as Taboola andOutbrain that specialize in placing content where it’s most likely to be discovered. In a sea of content, these companies help more people find yours.
5. Monitoring, filtering, and analyzing conversations. Social media monitoring platforms have been around for years, but their hefty price tags often relegated them to a wish list for many organizations. However, as more people and brands create even more content, it’s going to become more difficult to identify and act on what’s relevant to you. As a result, pricey monitoring and analytics tools will be migrating from the wish list to the approved budget.
6. Paid sponsorships. Those “influencers” you’re always trying to reach? They’re realizing their influence is in demand and that it’s not cheap. According to a recent IZEA survey, 61 percent of marketers have paid someone to mention their product, and that number is only going to rise in 2014. It’s not just celebrities and athletes, either. Everyday people are also asking for more money and more product, because they can and because brands will meet those demands.
7. More full-time employees. As more content is created and more money is spent promoting and distributing that content, more people will be needed to create, moderate, measure, and analyze it. Demand for data scientists, SEO specialists, media buyers, and creatives will increase as brands try to optimize the money they’re investing.

If you thought the days of trying to persuade your bosses to invest in social media were over, get ready to go back, hat in hand, and ask for even more money. With bigger budgets come bigger expectations and more pressure. Are your social media, content generation, and content distribution strategies ready?