« The Direct Marketing Voice Links 3-25-2009 | Home | The Direct Marketing Voice Links 3-26-2009 »
Social Media is Useless
By Luis Paez | March 25, 2009
This post is mostly aimed at those “pure” social media experts, who claim that anything short of investing totally in social media is a backward and doomed approach. There’s been a bit of backlash against social media experts, and this is close to that spirit, but also hopefully constructive. My primary point is that social media is useless – unless integrated into a larger context and a larger media mix. Considering all the current hype about these new online tools, here are some stats you may find interesting:
- Only 2 to 3% of the world’s population is on Facebook
- 80% of the U.S. population is not on Facebook
- 70% of the U.S. population is reachable via Direct Mail
- 10% of the U.S. population is reachable via an ad on the most popular television show (American Idol, currently). A greater percentage is available if advertising across a demographic block of tv shows.
- 73% of U.S. consumers ages 12+ heard one or more network radio commercials in the course of a week. Also, interestingly, if you advertised on all major stations in just the top 10 radio markets (metro areas), you’d reach 25.7% of all Americans.
I detail these points to give some perspective to the massive hype surrounding Twitter and Facebook. Yes, they are emerging tools for engaging with an audience, customers and contacts – but they do not yet have truly widespread reach. This may change in the coming years, but for now, the only marketing campaign that can come close to reaching 100% of your desired market or audience is an integrated campaign. It’s too bad that the main news media fails to put new social media platforms in a greater light.
This being said, you should think about cautiously adding social media to your current marketing mix, but just as it balances out against investments in print, radio, television, direct mail, and online ads. I would love to hear the term “integrated marketing” used more in common dialogue, which would mean more people are reading about integrated marketing and thinking about their strategy from the get-go. Maybe that will take time, or maybe we just have to make sure that conversation happens – at every event. If you’re unfamiliar with IMC, check out these two books: Kellogg on Integrated Marketing and IMC: Putting it all together.
How the stats were calculated:
2 to 3% of the world’s population was pulled from xyberlog
80% of US Citizens are not on Facebook: Facebook reports 175 million active users. Of those, more than 70% are outside the U.S., implying that less than 30% are inside the U.S. If we take 30% of 175 million, we have 52.5 million active U.S. Facebook users. Wikipedia has a figure of 306 million U.S. residents. Excluding the very young and very old, I estimate we can exclude about 15% of that total, leaving us with 260 million people. 52.5 million divided by 260 million people is about 20%. Only 20% of the U.S. Population uses Facebook (admittedly rough estimate).
70% of the U.S. population is reachable via Direct Mail- Taking a major consumer list provider’s public stats, about 210 million consumer mailing addresses are available. See the above wikipedia figure to determine percentage.
70% of the U.S. population is reachable via the most popular television shows. Nielsen reports 23.7 million viewers for American Idol.
73% of U.S. consumers ages 12+ heard one or more network radio commercials in the course of a week. Arbitron press release. Also, interestingly, if you advertised on all major stations in just the top 10 radio markets (metro areas), you’d reach 25.7% of all Americans.
March 28th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Great illustration Luis. Another thing to remember is that even if Facebook has 70 million users, you do not have access to all 70 million of those users. I support your advice that businesses should begin integrating social media into their marketing plan.
March 31st, 2009 at 11:11 am
Luis,
If nothing else, you’ve provided an excellent segue to a deeper dive on the utility of social media. As a caveat, we are in agreement that Social Media should be integrated into the broader marketing mix, and based on that agreement and our close proximity to one another, I’d love to buy you lunch to discuss. For our purposes here, today, perspective…
Counterpoints:
1) Quantitative vs. Qualitative Messaging and Positioning and Velocity
The statistics you provided assume one to one reach only, and do not account for latent (as opposed to direct) word-of-mouth conversations
that happen after or during engagement. What about the consumers turned brand evangelists? More precisely, how many social media users go on (word-of-mouth) to communicate a brand experience, a sale, a promotion, conversation, or direct one to one customer service experience to those that may not be active on or even have social media accounts? Are these people accounted for in the statistics/metrics? No.
The US population as of this writing is estimated at 306,120,792. US social media users are estimated at roughly 50 million (plus). This equates to 1/6 ratio of social media users to the general population.
More and more, consumers are empowered to control with whom they engage: Satellite radio; tivo/dvr; hyper-restrictions on telemarketing; tighter controls on direct mail (ie recent changes to NCOA protocols and inflated postage costs); digital technology designed to filter email; are consumer tools to counter the effectiveness of traditional advertising and marketing. Usability lab data demonstrates that over the last ten years, humans have been conditioned to avoid online banner ads.
Couple this with the fact that since the dawn of human history, humans are more likely to be motivated and subsequently act based on the advice, counsel, suggestion, purchase patterns and preferences of their friends, family and peers, and the fact that you are empowered to personally communicate directly with literally hundreds if not thousand of people at the speed of light, a paradigm shift emerges…
As a marketer, If I reach 1 member of a 6 person family/community with my message and brand experience, directly, coupled with the recipient’s opportunity to query me about said message, product, service, cause within ten minutes of engagement, the velocity with which I have garnered visibility, awareness, credibility, thought leadership, and conversion is unprecedented.
On the numbers, a personal anecdote (and here I readily admit I am but one data point): I buy shoes from Zappos.com, and have done so since Tony Hsieh, Zappos’ CEO, engaged me one to one on Twitter. I was deeply impressed with this experience because Tony directly answered to the pro’s and con’s of his service model, and gave me unbiased advice on the best way to procure size 13 footwear in shoe styles that I had a very hard time finding.
My grandmother suffers from disk bulge in her back and a degenerative disorder inhibiting her overall mobility. The same grandmother does not own a computer and has not been online since she sold the family business. Since her diagnosis, she has experienced some major lifestyle changes, and with every lifestyle change comes new purchases, including shoes.
So what did I do? I sent an email to Zappo’s customer service with photo attachments of my grandmother’s shoe preferences and the mechanical specs that her doctor suggested. Within hours, Zappos had solutions-comfortable shoes that my grandmother would actually wear becaue they looked like the shoes she used to wear. Zappos now drop ships shoes to my grandmother as I have created an account for her.
My Grandmother then told my Great Aunt, her former golfing group, my Mother, and my Sister, who then told my Dad about Zappos, and over the course of two weeks, each member of my grandmother’s community and my family had me either ordering their shoes from Zappos, or got online to create an account of their own. No one save me in this community of aforementioned people, uses social media.
What do you think the residual ROI/ROMI is on that “campaign”? Barring a hiccup or two moving forward, I’d say Tony enjoys an exponentially great return on his investment of ten minutes with me on Twitter, for the life of his business or the lives of these customers. And more to your point, no less than ten people not using social media are now being served by company that invests a large majority of their marketing budget on social media marketing.
It is next to impossible to duplicate these results with traditional marketing and advertising.
2) Behavioral Targeting, SEO/SEM
Social Media sites/apps are preference engines, first, and digital repositories of human motivation, second. At any time on any given day, an individual (regardless of their role or function) can immerse themselves in the social media stream and get an unfettered understanding of other individuals motivations, opinions, preferences.
Last November, I was in the market for make-up. Mom is the executive director of a non-profit in Houston and with the gig, she has a lot of speaking engagements. Mom’s skin is not the best, and knowing this, knowing that she is insecure about public appearances, I though organic make-up was a good gifting idea for Christmas. I knew nothing about make-up. So I did a search on Twitter and facebook and google to find brand advocates evangelists and their blogs for their preferred organic cosmetics. I then engaged individuals that were raving fans of organic cosmetics, listened, and asked a lot of questions. Once I had enough information to talk intelligently about organic make-up, I ran a query on the boutique make-up company that I heard good things about on LinkedIn. Within seconds, I had direct access to the cosmetic company’s representative; After a message on LinkedIn, phone number enclosed, I had a telephone conversation with the rep and learned what retailers in my area carried their products. That was a $400 sale.
I would never appear on a target list for a cosmetic company, and I certainly do not fit their demographic/psychographic. And though I am an advanced social media user, not much of my searching required social media accounts to obtain the information I was looking for.
Mom now exclusively uses this organic cosmetic company’s products; and though Mom is not a social media user, nor does anyone she works with engage online in social media exchange, at least four women at her non-profit are now brand loyalists of the organic cosmetics based on my Mom’s advocacy.
Before closing, in the next couple, given the opportunity, I’ll comment more congruently with your post when discussing the proficiency of direct mail/broadcast/outdoor–>social media, cross-media campaigns.
Again, thanks Luis for the opportunity to engage and share my perspective.
Towards creative fidelity,
Jason
March 31st, 2009 at 12:59 pm
I think Jason just about covered it all.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
[...] a backlash …and it now has. See for example Luis Paez’s provocatively titled piece “Social Media is Useless”, over at The Direct Marketing Voice. Actually, Luis backs away from the title a bit, marshaling [...]