Less performing, more connecting

When social media cries for help

Let's get this out of the way once and for all:

Social Media should be more about connecting and less about performing. We're talking about people.

These vanity metrics we’ve been using do not mean much. They’re focused on eyeballs and not connections.

Brands are not people. And people are not on Social Media for your brand. They are there for their friends.

If we try to remember how relationships are, it all starts with empathy, but trust, which is conquered over time, makes it work. It makes this connection work. And this is what social media is all about.

I know some of us work in advertising and that most of us are biased into selling ads (even in social media) but honestly, this feels almost as selling our friendship, betraying our loved ones.

This is not what people think when they start a relationship. We do not choose to marry someone because of all the other women(or man) that we’re not going to sleep with anymore. We do it because it’s a choice to be with that person. And that’s exactly why we should see this relationship with brands differently.

We're not competing against other brands on social networks. We're competing against limited time, limited attention, 150+ friends and their status updates and stories. And that's our main problem.

We're trying to buy their attention and time not with our amazing content and unique stories but with our money on ads.

We've never talked so much with our consumers. We've never sent so many different messages to them. Maybe it's time to start to think like the old advertising or think as if the quantity of messages depended on our budget. Restrictions as an opportunity to do better stuff.

I see a lot of brands trying to act like people and trying to be ultra relevant on every single message. I have news for you. Not even newspapers can be this relevant all the time. Why do you think your brand could do it better than that? And I can go further.

No one is that funny, witty or well-informed all the time. So why do you think your brand should/could be?

Actually we're chasing our tails here. Most (if not all) metrics that we have now are a lame way to use regular advertising metrics in social media. We don't have a new way to measure based on true connections. All we have is engagement rate, reach and all. These can be a good way to measure it but they're not a transparent way to do it. We have to show our clients where their money is going.

Studies show that fans of a brand on a Facebook fan page are more inclined to buy a product than those who are not on a fan page. But wait a minute. Maybe the intention to be on a Facebook brand page may be the real reason why this happens. Maybe it's not about people's repeated consumption of a determined product but how people FEEL about this product/brand that matters. It all starts with empathy, remember?

That's why I think that this empathy towards a brand is important for the first movement only. The one which makes people follow a brand on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram or Pinterest. But we must try to understand that now we are only flooding everybody's timeline. Just like we did with email marketing back in the day. Or just like we did with regular mail marketing. Or just like we did with TV ads. It feels like:

"Oh! they're not listening? BUY MORE ADS."

“Oh! our reach is too low? BUY MORE ADS.”

Or as Gary Vaynerchuk said about our behaviour on the email marketing days:
"Wow! we sent this email marketing once and we sold more products. Let's send it twice. Three times, four times a week. Let's send it every single day"
Well, we don't have to look at our Spam folder to see what happened after this kind of behaviour, right? So why are we doing that again in Social Media?

All major brands built their reputation through out the years having moments which they spoke with their audiences and moments which they didn't. The main motive why that happened was budget limitation. Now we only depend on common sense to determine if we should talk more or less with this audience. And unfortunately common sense is not something that you can buy on the supermarket. So this is not as easy as it seems.

And before you mention Big Data or anything like it, try to think if the brands are using all these info mostly on ads or on content? There you go. It’s easy to blame it all on Facebook’s “lower reach tactics” but what’s our part in this? We, too, should be held responsible for this. We’ve been flooding their stream with “not-so-good content” for so long that it’s getting hard for us to see where it all gone wrong.

I understand that we're testing our way in this new media space but why can't we learn from the past? Because social media is not advertising? No. Because we want it all. We are almost like a cancer. We want to spread our mutant cells all over the place. Even knowing that this attitude might make our work harder in the future. And we know for a fact that people start to react to that by creating a defense system to avoid advertising. If back in the 90's a regular american was exposed to more than 3000 messages/day. Imagine what happens now with brands on Social media networks that should be made for people only.

I know that these sites must earn some money. But it seems to me that we're still using 1900's business models in a 2000's world. Analog logic in a digital world.

So let’s move forward and not think about vanity metrics. The real thing to measure in Social media is just one: True connection. Quoting Gary Vaynerchuk again “the1950's neighborhood butcher might know more about customer care and Social media than all of us”.

True connection, people. True. Connection. This will lead the way towards our beloved ROI.