The Engaged Consumer

If you talk to anyone at Powered as a potential client, we will be very happy to give you a guided tour of the ROI our clients enjoy (to the extent that we can without violating confidentiality). The numbers are compelling, and we measure the heck out of everything – not stopping with just the level of community activity, but working toward business impact. Purchase, loyalty, advocacy, brand affinity, consumer insight – we’ve launched communities that focus in all of those areas.

The investment models are very important – they tell us what we can expect, how to contruct the unique business case for every potential project, what to measure, and how to adjust to optimize results. But it’s not really why marketers buy social. Let me explain.

Most of the time, the marketer who ends up talking to Powered is  someone in their 20’s or 30’s (or is young at heart!). This person is usually bright, innovative, and is a social marketing expert or consultant brought into a brand, corporate, or product marketing team (or agency) to enlighten the broader team on the world of social marketing. They speak the same language as Powered folks, and understand why a branded community could be a powerful tool for their company. They Twitter, they blog, they’re on FriendFeed, and you might even find them on Posterous or FourSquare.

Pretty quickly, the second stage of the conversation starts – the effort by the social media expert to sell our ideas internally at their company. This is certainly not reserved to Powered’s offerings. Selling social media/marketing broadly is a central part of this internal expert’s job, whether it’s why the company should open a corporate Twitter account, fill out a Facebook page, or invest in social media monitoring tools.

This is where the conversation often stalls. For some reason, the sales pitch based on ROI numbers doesn’t resonate with senior management. Certain parts of the case don’t hold up because they don’t agree with the statistical approach, or they don’t think the case study applies to them because of the unique market characteristics of their company or brand. These are often very valid objections, but sometimes they aren’t the real, underlying issue.

Good marketers are analytical, and they use analytics to compare channels and campaigns – eliminating the poor performers and putting more budget toward the high performers. But great marketers are also incredibly intuitive. They have a keen sense for what provokes an emotional response, what produces a feeling of influence, what modifies behavior. This intuition is based on personal experience. At some point every marketing exec saw a 30-second TV spot that made them love a brand more, or received a really interesting piece of direct mail, or visited a really well-designed corporate website. They also know the marketing efforts that left them cold in those mediums, and why.

When senior marketers with keen intuition step into an unfamiliar marketing environment (like a social network), they can suddenly feel like the internal compass that has served them so well for so long is broken. Without a feel for the medium, they aren’t going to be very inclined to put budget toward it, even if the numbers seem good on paper. This is exacerbated by the fact that their peers don’t have a good feel for it either and as a result have little trust trust in it. Social media is risky enough without feeling the rest of your management looking over your shoulder. As an old colleague used to say, “no one gets fired for buying more TV.”

So while putting together a compelling business case is important, the other and more fundamental side of selling social media is to help a senior marketer build a sense of value and intuition for the medium. I call this the “intuitive sell,” and it’s what for a marketer connects the marketing action to the results in a meaningful, believable way.

The best way to accomplish the intuitive sell is to encourage the unfamiliar marketer to use social media personally – not necessarily to become a power user, but to demystify the tools and the value people are getting out of them. The objective is to get them to understand the mechanics, and to feel the tug of why people spend so much time on social websites (compared to non-social) in a personal way – if just for a minute. Instead of showing them case studies, take them to the actual sites in the case studies and help them observe interactions at a granular level. Get them participating. Let them experiment with their own identity before they involve the identity of their company.

Feeding a senior marketer’s intuition is as important as feeding them a good business case. When both are served well, it may feel like less of a risk and more like an opportunity. Then the budget will start to flow.