Let’s get that out of the way first off.

It’s not a criticism, either do most agency folk. When you’ve been trained and employed in an industry for 10 -20 years and it suddenly flips on its head it can be difficult to comprehend your new position. Humans are creatures of habit. For some I assume it’s difficult to accept that someone straight out of uni can tell you how to reach your core consumer.

I remember meeting Terry Leahy in his final year as Tesco CEO. One of his top 10 life lessons was to ‘Be smart. If you do you might just stay closer to the curve than your competitor…if you’re very lucky’.

As Sir Terry alluded to technology moves faster than anything, particularly advertising.

When social kicked off people and in particular marketers needed to catch up. For the first time in history consumers knew more about the worlds hottest advertising platform than the advertisers did — pretty monumental if you draw a comparison with most other industries. Health, engineering etc.

So where does that leave us? And why are we still not really in the know.

Different agendas by different people mean that clients are often misinformed. The real issue seems to be that not enough people understand the key metrics in measuring social success.

A while ago I reviewed a campaign for a client. It was average at best. When I reviewed it, I looked back on my marketing education. It was fractured and didn’t hit all touch points, certainly not through the line by any means. And this alongside poor creative is why it failed. That is basic marketing know how which for some reason isn’t always applied to digital campaigns.

Strangely I was told post meeting that socially the organisation in question had ‘done really well’. Why? On Twitter, they had received a huge amount of shares for a small part of their campaign.

If like this blind do-gooder you think this is a metric for measuring campaign success I’m afraid you’re deluded. If social is to work it has to be non-siloed, which is why this campaign, along with the Oreo Superbowl shut down are both failures; albeit on different scales. Oreo’s social was funny and engaging and so received some good PR and worked as an equity piece. For it to really work though this should have been leveraged in other channels which would have brought real gains.

Think about this the next time you want to engage in digital.

Start with a clear marketing objective of what you really want to achieve and why? Above a certain level likes and retweets really aren’t that important.