Modern Insider – Online Marketing Blog

Today I had the opportunity to attend the “New ‘Rules’ of Engagement, Making Online Shopping Relevant to Consumers” presented by BazaarVoice and RichRelevance. There were a lot of great comments by the speakers / panelists a few of which you can find in my twitter feed but one item came up that I felt was worth pulling out and spending more than 140 characters on. As the title indicates, the issue I’ll be briefly discussing is social media as an awareness tool and not a DR campaign. This point was first made by Patti Evans of Jupiter Research who pointed out that while social has become more and more important “traditional” sources are still driving online sales and people just aren’t turning to social networking to do research. Patti summed up the point basically saying that while social is a great tool, it should be used for conversation and awareness, not direct response.

I agree with Patti on this is not because social can’t drive sales but because measuring it as a DR tactic is simply setting yourself up for failure. As web marketers we’re always told to measure everything because “if you can measure it, you should.” While it’s true that we should measure, compare and test everything we can it’s easy to make the mistake of actually believing that the web is entirely DR – it’s not. Social media gets visibility, drives clicks, and people buy because of what they see but they don’t always do so the same day, the same week or on the same computer. By its very nature social media is incredibly difficult to track and while there are methods to track more when your goal is to get people talking you can’t ever know how many sales actually came as a result.

Equally importantly social media, when used successfully isn’t just about driving people to click buy now. It’s about relationships and image. Whether it’s an upset customer being calmed, a prospect finding out information or a customer trusting enough to share a message to their network relationships are what makes social work and brings in the results. After enough relationships have been built an image is formed of a transparent or at least accessible brand which becomes part of the perception and starts to influence even more people. Those relationships and the perception have real value and real impact on the business but they won’t show up in an ROI analysis.

Thus when you’re thinking about doing social you have to set the right stage. Sure response can be tracked on some of the campaign and it should be tracked when it can but that’s only the first step in the process. To even have success you need to look at the campaign from the awareness, relationship and viral perspective rather than the DR one. The mistake many companies make is to focus so tightly on DR in social that even though other metrics are suppose to count, everything is setup to drive those sales to the horrible expense of the relationship building process. Establishing metrics about engagement, awareness and response is how to truly understand the campaign and while that’s not as nice an argument to make to the executive team, it’s what has to be made.

As today’s panel said many times, transparency and authenticity are what matters in todays market and for the modern consumer – and that’s not going to change in the future. So rather than approaching social from the perspective of how do we make people buy from us, approach it from the perspective of how do we make people understand us. Once customers remember you’re a human the barriers are removed and the positive comments, viral messages and sales will all come. Part of being transparent is using tactics in a way that user’s can accept and that bring them value too.

Thanks again to BazaarVoice and RichRelevance for today’s session. I suggest you checkout both vendors as they have truly useful solutions. BazaarVoice offers an array of user generated content products centered around product reviews while RichRelevance is about driving relevancy in product recommendations.

Stay tuned for another post inspired this weekend about shifting away from the “sale! Sale! Sale! “ content and identifying the true needs your audience has.