Social Media and the 'Interruption Marketing' Menace
I'd like to point your attention to two unique pieces of information.
First: The 2011 State of Digital Marketing report. Inside, it states that 39.9 percent of business-to-customer businesses expect sales generation to be the primary return on investment of utilizing social media.
Second: email provider iContact's recent study that says 1 in 4 business owners can't identify the usefulness of social media.
What's Wrong with This Picture?
If you'd indulge me in a brief mental vacation, picture a venn diagram (that thing with two overlapping circles that describe the relationship between two disparate groups that have something in common). In the circle on the left, picture our population of 39.9 percent B2C businesses who want sales to be the primary way of measuring social media ROI.
In the circle on the right, picture the population of 25 percent of the business community who can't identify the usefulness of social media.
Where do those two circles overlap in your mind?
In mine, the circle on the right - the 1 in 4 who think social media isn't useful - is sitting completely inside the circle on the left. That is, I would imagine that 100 percent of the folks who perceive that the biggest thing social media should do for them is increase sales - those are also the folks who are disenfranchised with social media as a business tool.
Why?
Because social media is a ridiculous medium that has turned the act of conversation into a massively multiplayer online game.
And if you're the kind of business owner who expects that the biggest objective of participating in social media should be an immediate ROI of increased sales? Well, you're probably also the kind of business owner who thinks your massive sales team of phone solicitors are having deep and meaningful conversations with your leads.
They're not, for the record. They're bugging the hell out of them during family time. And that's not a conversation, that's an interruption.
Pardon the Interruption
That's the problem. Old school businesses see "interruptions" as conversations. Billboards while we're driving. Commercials during our favorite shows. Awkward J-Lo dance numbers synchronized around an on-stage Fiat which "drives" through a city to semi-catchy pop-music during the AMAs.
Except that for you, me, and the average consumer, all these horrendous things are just interruptions. They don't make sense to us - the people who weren't chugging Redbull in a high-pressure marketing agency meeting room at 3 a.m.. The people who weren't there when some intern's caffeine-riddled brain managed to eek out, "J-Lo should take a fake roadtrip on stage while we spin the car around in front of an LCD screen."
Interruption marketing fails the customer and it fails the business. Yet this is exactly how most small business owners end up when using social media.
Interruption mode is hard to get out of. The only way to avoid interruption marketing is to actually care about the people you're marketing to - and not just see them as dollar signs, clients, customers, or anything else. People want to buy from people - brands are just adornments.
This leaves us with two realizations: 1 - yes, you actually have to converse with your market and 2 - no, you can't just automate your way to social media success.
You can find more from Nick Armstrong on Twitter (https://Twitter.com/ImNickArmstrong) and at his personal website (https://www.IAmNickArmstrong.com).
