Last week I wrote a blog post about "Earned Media and Siren Song of Mentions," where I outlined the problem that digital media professionals face when it comes to a world increasingly dominated by social media.
I promised to follow up this week with some ideas for a solution, since where I left off it was looking pretty grim. Have we lost complete control over message, time, and place? What can a media professional actually do in a new world slowly being taken over by the Conversation Stream?
I think the answer has something to do with hydroelectricity.
Hydroelectricity, according to Wikipedia, is “the production of power through use of the gravitational force of falling or flowing water.” The hydroelectric engineer doesn’t try to fight gravity, he or she just tries to divert falling water in a natural way so that it flows through turbines and creates energy.
For media professionals, the Conversation Stream is that falling water. The infrastructure you build to divert it, and the way you test and optimize that system over time, is the new structure for engineering brand success.
The Non-Sequitur
The first step to channeling Conversation to drive marketing, of course, is to understand how the Conversation Stream flows. The answer is actually pretty simple – it flows like any other conversation does. The enemy of any hydroelectric engineer is turbulence, and similarly the enemy of a social media pro is social awkwardness. There are lots of ways to be socially awkward, and sadly most of us have probably experienced them at one time or another in our personal lives. You can talk too much and not listen enough. You can be loud, interruptive, talking over others. You can be too quiet and not contribute anything. You can be distasteful or insensitive to others’ situations.
But the most common socially awkward action in social media today is the non-sequitur. It’s the marketer who, in the middle of the Conversation, changes the subject to something obviously self-serving or irrelevant. It happens in the ads along the side of the Stream, and it happens within the Stream itself when marketers tweet or publish a Facebook message that is promotional or faceless.
The commonly referenced solution for low relevancy is segmentation and targeting, but the problem here is less about who sees your ad and more about how they are using sites like Facebook. People watching the Conversation Stream are networking with friends and colleagues, and typically tune out ads. Not only do ads miss frequently on relevance, but the means of delivery isn’t relevant, either. This is why ads on Facebook have historically performed very poorly, even relative to ads bought elsewhere online.
Building Channels for the Stream
Have you ever observed anyone who is a really good conversationalist? One of highest order skills a conversationalist can have is the ability to elegantly “change the subject.” As a marketing conversationalist who has an end in mind, you need to ignore conversations where they are mentioning your brand (again, earned media is the end, not the means) and seek to join or start conversations about things that might be relevant – but one or two steps away from your brand. This is partly an exercise in smart hunting, but it’s also a numbers game. Only 20% of the Stream is about brands themselves, and a very small fraction of that will be about your brand, according to a recent study by Penn State.
If you are an automaker, go talk about travel. If you sell insurance, you probably know a lot about safety. Selling any type of food item? Tweet about nutrition. As a marketer, it might feel unnatural to focus on messaging that doesn’t push product, but remember that we are joining a Conversation already in progress. People will know you are from a brand (you should always tell them), but if you choose topics of conversation that have some relevancy to your brand it won’t seem weird that you are talking about it.
Once you’ve learned how to have these topical conversations and identified the ones where you can or should play a part, you can take advantage of your ability to facilitate these conversations structurally. By this I mean that instead of just striking up these conversations where they exist on third party networks, you can build digital properties that allow richer or deeper exploration of these relevant topics, and channel the Conversation Stream into them. You are now a hydroelectric engineer not seeking to interrupt or fight the flow, but redirecting it to your purposes.
Why not take this further by facilitating conversations about the category where your products or services exists? Another level of flow that moves the conversation even closer to your brand, but you still aren’t talking directly about yourself. It’s polite.
If Someone’s Interested, They’ll Ask
When someone has moved from a conversation about travel on Facebook to a conversation within your online community devoted to road trips to a conversation about the best cars for road trips, it’s time to give them the opportunity to ask you about one of the cars you make. By simply serving a highly relevant ad at this point, you give them the opportunity to click, and by clicking they are asking you about yourself.
These last-step ads are the turbines in your hydroelectric powerplant, the place where the Stream gets converted into the bottom line results that justify the investment. At every step of the way you haven’t tried to force the conversation, you’ve just helped it along, let it flow, and now a highly self-selected audience is rolling right past ads that are on your own site.
And as the Stream rolls through, it takes nuggets of your brand back with it into the main Conversation. If you are keeping it interesting and serving visitors, they will recommend your content and conversations, through technologies like Facebook Connect and various social networking APIs (Twitter’s being most notable).
Build vs. Buy
So in the end you are still placing ads. The difference is that the focus has shifted away from the place where people finally encounter the ads (and how you allocated money to buy those placements) to the pathway that they took to get there. By the time they see a product placement, it will seem like the natural next step, not an interruption, and as a media pro you will need to expand your skills to deliver that experience.
Does this mean you’ll have to start thinking like an online publisher? Yes. Does it mean that you’ll have to expand your skills to include digital development? Yes.Being a steward of a conversational brand means you will have to build the content and code that creates a pathway that is uniquely relevant and appropriate to you.
But take heart, media (be in paid or earned) is still about reaching out and forming new connections with your audience, and you’ve been doing that for
years. The difference is that now that connection begins much farther away, upstream.
Filed under: Social Marketing Tagged: | facebook, Twitter
