Death to the Community Manager
Less is more in branded social content
Great article today on Digiday, as brands (ahem) agencies are shifting strategies from inserting-themselves-into-every-pop-culture-conversation to a less-is-more approach.
I certainly have been guilty of injecting brands into pop culture situations online with brands like Travelocity and Chick-fil-A. We found ways to make the Gnome and the Cows a phenomenon that gave people a wink and a nod while on their favorite social site. We had our guidelines on what we would talk about and what we wouldn’t touch and for the most part, our customers loved it.
Unfortunately, gone are the days when you have a few brands peppering the conversation on MySpace (we were cutting edge in 2007!), Twitter, and Facebook. Now we have brands that are weasling their way into all sorts of socially unacceptable situations. We’ve seen this backfire time and time again.
Agencies and brands were dying to be a part of the conversation and one of the best ways to do it without paying for media was to jump on conversation trends. Community managers popped up all over the place as brands wanted their agencies to manage their social presence around the clock. The problem is that many times, in an effort to be clever, the agencies shot themselves in the foot with ill-advised and ill-timed tweets or brand associations.
Even with these agency blunders, Facebook and Twitter were still trending up for brands until Zuckerberg dropped the hammer. The Facebook algorithm changed once again, which greatly reduced a brand’s ability to talk to all of the fans they accumulated unless they paid for it. Brilliant for Facebook’s revenue stream, terrible for advertisers. Mark Cuban even boldly claimed the Mavericks would be leaving Facebook altogether.
Keep in mind, this was two years ago, but what have we seen since? The quality of a brand’s posts and interactions are somewhat dependent on their budget, in that Facebook has figured out how to quarantine a large population of a brand’s fans from seeing their posts unless they pay for them to see it. It’s directly affected reach.
The main catalyst behind this change, according to 360i’s general manager of social, Matthew Wurst, was decreased organic reach.
We’re willing to sacrifice a quantity of low-quality impressions for few quality interactions,” he said.
Since brands can no longer use social media as “free media” with an opportunity for something to go viral, it’s becoming more of another tool in the toolbox. The question that lies before us is if the role of the Community Manager will dry up because the volume of work that each brand desires in social media is trending downwards. We’ll see, but I’d put my money on agencies shifting the work back to the junior account executives.
