photo credit: on strike via photopin (license)

There are times you simply need to destroy what exists in order to replace it with something better. Such is the case for social media. The past seven years have been so full of mistaken beliefs, poor assumptions and outright misinformation that the time has come to reassess completely what social media is, how it works, how consumers use it and what it means for brands.

The fact is that much of the social media dogma we take as gospel has been wrong from the start. As a result, brands are wasting good money to chase irrelevant or even damaging social media outcomes, and the required improvements are not minor adjustments. In many cases, the wrong departments have hired the wrong people to do the wrong things evaluated with the wrong measures.

Together we will burn social media to the ground and rebuild it from scratch. We will do this with data. Data will provide the spark and accelerant that destroys today's social media strategies, and data will also be the bricks and mortar to build a credible and accurate understanding of consumers' social behaviors and the legitimate opportunities available to business.

Destroying Social Media Marketing Myths With Data

Every social media marketer and pundit knows case studies that tease the promise of organic content success. They share and reference the same ones time and again, building false hope that marketers' next social campaign will be Oreo Dunk, #LikeAGirl or Real Beauty. But tear yourself away from the rare and apocryphal stories of success and focus instead on broad, unbiased data, and a different picture emerges.

"Organic social media stopped working." Those words are from the latest Forrester report, "It's Time to Separate the 'Social' From the 'Media.'" This is the same Forrester that in the 1990s counseled IT leaders to pay attention to "Social Computing" and whose 2008 book, Groundswell, introduced many business executives to the ways social media was changing consumers and the marketplace. Today, Forrester is again ahead of the curve, making the case that brand organic opportunities have disappeared and social media marketing has become entirely a paid game. As a result, the research firm recommends that marketing leaders assign their social budgets not to the social team but the media team because, as Forrester notes, "Social ads aren’t social; they’re just ads."

The report states a simple fact that too many content marketers ignore in 2015: "If you can’t get a message to your audience, you can’t very well market to them" Facebook reach for top brands' posts was just 2% of their fans in 2014, and that number will only decrease further this year.

Evidence of social media's remarkably poor reach is all around, and many social media marketers are simply ignoring it (or hoping their bosses do). For all of its brand strength, Coca-Cola's Facebook page this past weekend had a People Talking About This figure--which includes every page like, post like, comment, check-in, share and mention the brand earned in seven days--of just 37,700 people. The world's largest consumer brand (which sells 1.8 billion drinks a day) on the world's largest social network (with 1.5 billion monthly active users) engages fewer people in a week than can fit in one MLB stadium--and not even Dodger Stadium but Kansas City's modest Kauffman Stadium.

Source: Custora Pulse

Not only is reach falling but social has never succeeded in delivering reliable marketing scale, no matter how many case studies suggest otherwise. Social does not deliver purchasers (accounting for 1% of e-commerce sales, compared to 16% for email and 17% for CPC). Social delivers poor conversions (with a conversion rate of 1.17% compared to 2.04% for search and 2.18% for email). Social fails to deliver trust (with B2B buyers rating social media posts among the least important for establishing credibility and just 15% of consumers trusting social posts by companies or brands.) Nor is Social media a major factor in search engine rankings (placing dead last among the nine major factors affecting SEO according to MoZ's 2015 Search Engine Ranking Factors report.)

Rather than hit the brakes, social media marketers are trying to keep their shaky strategies together with wishes and duct tape. For example, marketers are desperately trying to overcome declining organic reach by posting more frequently, but that is not a long-term solution (nor much of a short-term one, either). Another tactic is to chase consumers from one social network to the next for brief windows of organic opportunity. Instagram is the latest social network hyped for delivering higher engagement, but the social platform is busy adding and growing its advertising programs, which means organic reach will rapidly decline on Instagram as it has elsewhere.

Social media marketing has become a house of cards, teetering with lies stacked high since the dawn of the social media era. Entire corporate social media strategies are crafted on baseless assumptions that presume brands can reach prospects and customers in social networks, consumers want and trust brand content, all engagement matters, likes are marketing KPIs and fans and followers are advocates. The best thing social media professionals can do now is to burn down that tower of cards and start from scratch by studying the data, creating new and realistic proof points and producing more effective social media strategies.

Building Social Media Strategies With Data

Starting from square one, please allow me to introduce you to social media and the opportunities available to your company, one fact at a time:

FACT: People take social media seriously, and so should business. 
The numbers are impressive--1.5 billion people use Facebook, 316 million use Twitter, 300 million Instagram and 200 million are on Snapchat. And social media behavior is still growing, with the average usage time rising from 1.66 hours per day in 2013 to 1.72 hours last year. Despite some spurious headlines suggesting Facebook's demise, that social network continues to dominate, with 59% of users accessing the social network two or more times a day (which is two-thirds more than Snapchat or Twitter and 1000% more than Pinterest). What these data points tell us is that social media is important to consumers, and brands should find ways to meet consumers' needs and expectations in the channel. While numbers like these typically tempt marketers into believing social media is a fertile content marketing opportunity, this is not the case because...

Source:  PageFair

FACT: Consumers work hard to block and ignore brand messaging.
Use of adblocking software is on the rise in 2015, having gone up by 41% since last year. Of people who view time-shifted TV, 37% do so because it permits them to skip ads, and 56% skip every commercial when viewing from a DVR. Of those who have seen online pre-roll ads, 94% have skipped them. And 57% of consumers are actively taking steps to avoid brands that bombard them with irrelevant communications, with 69% having unfollowed brands on social channels, closed accounts and cancelled subscriptions. The reason people do this is that...

FACT: Consumers do not trust brand content.
In the latest Edelman Trust Barometer Study, the majority of countries now sit below 50% with regard to trust in business, and this past year trust in business dropped in 16 out of 27 countries. In the US, consumers do not trust text messages, social media posts or ads from brands. Millennials are an especially tough crowd, with only 1 in 100 saying that a compelling advertisement would make them trust a brand more and they place sales and advertising at the bottom of their trust rankings. So, if organic reach is continually declining toward zero and consumers do not welcome or trust brand messaging, should brands abandon their social profiles? Of course not, because...

FACT: Consumers count on brands to be present in social media, particularly on Facebook.
Consumers indicate they expect brands to be available in an average of 3.5 social media channels, and around 80% of consumers expect brands to be present on Facebook. But if we have established consumers do not want or trust brand messaging in social media (or pretty much any other channel), why do consumers want brands on social networks? It isn't for brands to fill their news feeds with a stream of promotional messaging but...

FACT: Consumers expect brands to engage on consumers' terms.
62% of Millennials say that if a brand engages with them on social networks, they are more likely to become a loyal customer. It is not as if brands have no opportunity to listen and engage with consumers one-to-one, considering nearly 50% of people have used social media to praise or complain about a brand in the past month. On the B2B side, 75% of B2B buyers want brands to furnish content of "substance," that helps them to research business ideas, but 93% of brands focus their content on "marketing" their own products and services. Of course, while too many marketers believe broadcasting messages is a way to engage consumers, people do not consider marketing content to be "engagement." Instead, they want brands to treat them individually, listen and respond. For example...

FACT: Consumers want fast, responsive customer care in social media. 
63% expect companies to offer customer service on social media, and one in three social media users prefer to reach out to a brand on social media for customer service. 75% of consumers using social media for customer service expect to hear back in an hour or less; half want a response in real time. But despite the demand for customer care in social media, brands fail to meet expectations; one study found that 33% of consumers who reach out to brands for customer service get no response, while another recent study found four out of five inquiries go unanswered on social media. The stakes are high for brands to get this right. Econsultancy asked consumers how brands performed to resolve recent issues, and of those who said the brand was very ineffective, 46% are still customers (compared to 71% for very effective brands) and 13% shop at the same level (compared to 46% for very effective brands).

FACT: Consumers want to collaborate with brands to develop better products.
42% of Millennials say they are interested in helping companies develop future products and services, and studies have shown, not surprisingly, that customers are more likely to buy products they helped to create. The secret isn't merely to offer a database into which people can dump their product ideas; once again, people want true bilateral engagement with brands. A recent study of ten co-creation projects found that the largest percentage of participants (28 percent) was driven by curiosity and a desire to learn, and another 26% had an interest in building skills.

FACT: Consumers want brands to stand for something, not simply push products and generate profit.
People want more from brands. Consumers do not see a conflict between businesses being profitable and being good for the world--81% agree that a company can take actions that both increase profits and improve the economic and social conditions in the community where it operates. Edelman's 2015 Trust Barometer study also found that half of respondents attribute increased trust in business to the fact that a business enabled them to be a more productive member of society. Edelman found the biggest gap between business importance and business performance on 16 trust attributes was not products and services or even purpose--it was integrity and engagement. The Nielsen Global Survey on Corporate Social Responsibility found much the same, with 55% of global online consumers across 60 countries saying they are willing to pay more for products and services provided by companies that are committed to positive social and environmental impact. Millennials have even higher expectations--three-quarters say that it is either fairly or very important that a company gives back to society instead of just making a profit.
In the US, 70% of consumers trust brand and product recommendations from friends and family, which is almost 400% greater than the trust they have in brand posts in social media. Millennials do not trust traditional media and advertising, so they look for the opinions of their friends (37%) and parents (36%) before making purchases. However, marketers continue to struggle with Word of Mouth (WOM)--64% of marketing executives indicated that they believe WOM is the most effective form of marketing but only 6% claim to have mastered it.

Doing Social Media Right

Most companies are doing social wrong and have done it wrong from the beginning. The key to success is to stop most of what today passes for social media strategy and rebuild social plans from the ground up:

• First, create and measure a new definition of WOM. An individual who recommends your brand based on their actual customer experience is gold; a customer who clicks the "heart" button on a pretty photo posted by your brand isn't even tin (and a like that is bought is a stain on the soul of your brand). Now is the time to recognize that not all consumer interactions are equal and to succeed, brands must generate the WOM that matters--not the activities that are easy to manipulate and tabulate but the ones that are difficult and meaningful. Discard the fake WOM strategies created with brand-to-consumer content broadcasted in social channels and focus on the real WOM forged peer-to-peer with customer stories, recommendations and advocacy. Fake WOM gets people to click "like" on something the brand posted; real WOM gets people to tell others why they should trust, try and buy your product or service.
     
• Toss out your social media scorecard immediately. The first step to refocus social activities on what matters is to change what is measured. Stop rewarding employees or agencies for generating engagement that fails to deliver business benefit and start measuring what matters--changes in customer loyalty or consideration, positive and authentic Word of Mouth, inbound traffic that converts, quality lead acquisition and customer satisfaction.
   
• Reconsider what department should lead your social media efforts. Once you have reconsidered the metrics that matter, the next question is who within the organization is best equipped and staffed to deliver on those metrics. If organic social media is not proving an effective marketing channel, should your marketing team be responsible for content creation and managing social media calendars? If one-to-one engagement and responsiveness are the new goals, which department is best staffed to provide what the brand needs and consumers expect in social media? These are vital questions, because whichever department funds and manages social media will expect the outcomes and use the metrics about which they most care. A recent report from Econsultancy makes the case: Among Financial Service firms, just 38% see social media as a channel for retention; the majority sees it geared for acquisition and cross-sell. That means most of these firms are using social media to chase marketing strategies to drive sales (an approach we now know will fail) while the minority have social media strategies designed to improve customer satisfaction, reputation, loyalty and retention--goals generally not associated with Marketing but with Public Relations and Customer Care departments.
        
• Objectively assess the return your brand generates with content marketing in social channels, and stop what is not working. If you are not today validating positive return on marketing content posted to social channels, you certainly will not do so in the future as organic reach crumbles to nothing. Marketers continue to act as if content marketing is destined to work and they have simply failed yet to find the right content marketing strategy. Data tells us otherwise; customers and prospects inundated with marketing messages, distrustful of brand content and protected behind social paywalls and adblocking software are not interested in or available to your content marketing output. Content is essential and has a place in Marketing strategies, but now is the time to rebalance the investment the brand is making to match the return it receives and can expect.
     
• Stop talking at consumers and telling them what you want them to hear. Start listening to customers and responding with what they want and need. Your brand's intent is more evident than your content, and actions speak louder than words. If the best thing your company can think to do with this wonderful one-to-one relationship channel is to talk about itself, you have no right to be disappointed when consumers perceive and punish your company for its self-interest. Brands that win in the social era will not be better at storytelling but in using social media to hear, help, educate, encourage, empower, connect and respond to their customers and prospects as individuals.
    
• Get social customer care right. There is no excuse for failing to staff a customer care team properly, secure the right social media management platform, listen for customer needs in every appropriate social channel, manage inbound messages, answer every question, address every complaint and help every prospect or customer in a timely manner. Self-service and peer-to-peer support are valuable tools, but they are no substitute for getting responsive one-to-one customer care right in a growing (and very public) channel of preference for many of your customers.
    
• Get people talking to each other. Your brand is disappearing from consumers' news feeds (if it has not already), but friends will always see content from the people they know, care and trust. Stop trying to spark engagement using funny, clever, hip, edgy or inspirational content, and stop acting as if authentic peer-to-peer engagement can be bought by paying influencers to tweet about your brand. Find ways to get people talking to each other about their real experiences with your company and its offerings. Engage your happy customers and help them to share their experiences; intercept customers at moments of truth to encourage sharing; build P2P ratings and assistance into every mobile and web experience; connect people to each other in meaningful ways; and more than anything, provide the sorts of product and service experiences people will want to talk about and their friends will find worthy of attention and consideration.

Here is a place to start as you rebuild your company's social media strategies: If your brand never posted another piece of marketing content to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, how would you demonstrate your firm's values in social channels? If the ability to post promotional messages were taken away, what social media strategies would your company execute to create awareness, attention, consideration, trial and loyalty? If you could no longer rely on your brand journalists, paid influencers, social designers and marketing agencies to create content for social channels, what one-to-one, peer-to-peer, responsive, collaborative, integrated, authentic and meaningful strategies would your brand execute? (Why isn't it doing those things effectively today?)

The question is no longer if the tired, failed strategies of the past seven years will miraculously yield success; it is if your social media leaders are willing to admit the mistakes of the past, throw out what is not working and chart a new course. The data to build practical and potent social media strategies is not hard to find, but it easy to ignore.

While many in the social media business hang on every Gartner Magic Quadrant or Forrester Wave, doesn't this seem a rather unsocial way to evaluate social solutions? Sure, those research firms do a very thorough and objective job of assessing the platforms, but their approach is akin to the Golden Globes (which only has 93 voting members) in an era when million of reviews can be found on sites like Rotten Tomatoes, Yelp and TripAdvisor.

For a more social perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of Social Media Management Software (SMMS), TrustRadius has released its free report of crowdsourced evaluations. The TrustRadius Buyer’s Guide includes a detailed review of products by use case, culled from more than 400 authenticated end-user reviews of 23 social media management products.

TrustRadius's latest report is structured in a very smart way that accounts for the three predominant use cases for enterprise social media: customer care, social intelligence and marketing. "Social media programs are now enterprise-wide and no longer confined to marketing," notes Vinay Bhagat, CEO of TrustRadius.

Out of the 23 SMMS platforms evaluated, all laid claim to being a marketing platform, and for the most part, users agree, with end users mentioning 21 of the vendors in terms of marketing solutions. The outcomes for the other two use cases were far less uniform: Nineteen of the platforms identified themselves in the listening space, but users agree for only eight of those platforms, and 17 of the SMMS companies associated themselves with the customer care use case, but users only identify seven in this category.
 

Social Customer Care

The TrustRadius report defines some of the special needs for social customer care, such as the ability to view entire customer interaction histories and integration with CRM systems. The Buyer's Guide notes that Brand Embassy, Conversocial, Hootsuite Enterprise, Lithium Social Web, Spredfast Conversations, Sprinklr, and Sprout Social offer "true high-volume, enterprise examples of social customer care, based on statements in reviews on TrustRadius."

The report includes comments from enterprise leaders addressing how these platforms help them resolve the unique needs of customer care in social media. For example, David Tull, customer engagement manager at JackThreads, reports that "Conversocial allowed us to work 7-10X faster than we had previously," and Comcast's Bill Gerth notes that "Within five months of launching Lithium Social Web, we were able to justify a 30% increase in staffing through the use of clear and concise operational reporting."
 

Social Intelligence

The TrustRadius Buyer's Guide guide identifies two dozen features that organizations seek when selecting an SMMS for social intelligence. It also conveys some specific user insights about the best platforms for this use case, including Attensity, Brandwatch, Netbase, Radian6/Salesforce Social Studio, Sprinklr, Sysomos and Viralheat. For example, Will Hall, digital analyst at Waggener Edstrom, says, “Brandwatch has given us a quantifiable way to prove ROI to our clients.
 

Social Media Marketing

The TrustRadius report notes the distinction between the marketing use case and the other two: "Whereas customer care is focused on using social media to engage with customers and resolve issues on their terms, and social intelligence is focused on leveraging the vast amount of conversations available in social media for various business purposes, social marketing is generally about using social media for brand amplification."

For the Marketing use case, TrustRadius identifies eight separate use case definitions and matches each platform's claims against user observation. For example, almost all platforms claim to assist with Lead Generation, but only two--Salesforce Social Studio and Viralheat--are mentioned by users for this need. Other marketing categories that TrustRadius includes are Community Management, Publishing, Campaigns/Promotions, Influencer/Advocacy, Content Marketing/Curation, Analytics/Optimization and Paid Media Management.

Many of the platforms receive attention in the Social Media Marketing section of the Trust Radius Buyer's Guide. HootSuite and Sprinklr are the two that stand out in terms of scale (which TrustRadius measures by page views on their platform and number of evaluations submitted). A social media and IT manager at a digital agency says of Hootsuite Enterprise, "The detailed analytics package not only lets us see how our campaigns are performing, but it also allows us to share detailed metrics with our clients to justify the fees we charge them." And of Sprinklr, Frontier Airlines' Justin Macauley notes, "A big issue for us is understanding when to segment messaging through geo-targeting and when to push out blanket messages. Sprinklr has allowed us to test many different scenarios and to better understand what kinds of messages work best for what kinds of offers."
 

Conclusion

2015 SMMS ratings and frequency Source: TrustRadius

In terms of ratings across all use cases, the social media management platforms that score best are:

• Brand Embassy
• Conversocial
• Lithium Social Web
• Simply Measured, and
• Viralheat.

Let's start by giving credit where credit is due: Within many companies, there is no more consistently innovative organization than the Marketing Department. Fifteen years ago, while everyone else was deriding the information superhighway as some overhyped playground for nerds, it was the Marketing group in many companies that advocated for the World Wide Web and found the budget to create the first corporate websites. And six years ago, while most executives were chuckling over their kids' obsession with MySpace and Facebook, it was likely the Marketing Department in your company that staked out the firms' social profile on social networks.

But while Marketing Departments may have controlled the first iteration or two of their companies' web sites, that time has now passed. Today, the Marketing Department has responsibility for driving traffic to the site and may control the corporate website's look and feel, but it is very unlikely (if your company is of a certain size) to own the content, the business functionality or the underlying technologies such as web content management, search, hosting, web analytics and the like. In other words, today Marketing brings its traditional strengths and capabilities in reach, scale and acquisition to the web, while other parts of the organization bring their own strengths.

Today, it is common for the Marketing function to own companies' social media accounts. In Spring, SmartBlog on Social Media asked "Who controls the social media efforts at your organization?" and over half the respondents noted their Marketing Department is responsible for social media. No other answer even came close--Public Relations was second with just 18% of the responses.

But in 2014, it is time for change. In the same way Marketing ceded control of corporate websites as the rest of the organization matured digitally, it is now time for Marketing to leave most aspects of social and earned media to others in the organization. That means that primary responsibility for social accounts, daily posting and organic content must shift out of marketing and to other departments, if this has not already occurred.

There are three reasons why this shift is occurring and will continue to do so in 2014:

Reason One: It Is Increasingly Difficult for Earned Media to Furnish the Reach Marketing Needs 

Earned media, that golden promise of the social era, is dying. You don't even need to examine data to know this--just look at the wave of whiny blog posts we have seen this year from marketers accusing Facebook of breaking promises. Apparently, marketers thought Facebook was going to be a place where basic consumer behavior changed: As more brands joined social media and increased their content marketing output, consumers who avoid ads in every other medium would suddenly welcome and engage with marketing content on Facebook.

Of course, that isn't what happened--people sign into Facebook and other social networks to see what friends, family and peers are up to, not to get marketing content. On Facebook, as more brands paid for access to users' news feeds, it was absolutely inevitable that brands would find it increasingly difficult to "earn" their way into fans' news feeds organically. (And if you think I am demonstrating 20/20 hindsight, feel free to read my blog post from almost two years ago, "Did Facebook Just Kill Earned Media?")

Ignite studied 689 posts across 21 brands; only one brand saw an increase in organic reach.

How difficult is it becoming to generate earned media on Facebook? Two recent studies demonstrate that engagement and penetration are sinking very quickly. Komfo found a 42% decrease in fan penetration from August to November, and an Ignite study revealed that in the week following Facebook's December 2nd news feed tweak, brand page organic reach declined by 44% on average. Ignite notes, "Facebook once said that brand posts reach approximately 16% of their fans. That number is no longer achievable for many brands, and our analysis shows that roughly 2.5% is now more likely for standard posts on large pages."

And if you think the earned media bloodletting is over, think again. The slow decline of earned media on Facebook will continue in 2014. Ad Age recently reported that Facebook is telling marketers, "We expect organic distribution of an individual page's posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site."

Make no mistake, the phenomenon of shrinking earned media is not just a Facebook issue. Facebook is on the cutting edge of social media because of its scale and longevity (not to mention investor expectations, with a market cap almost 50% greater than Twitter's, LinkedIn's and Yahoo's combined), so it provides a peek into the future of all social media. As more brands pay for access and as social networks strive to monetize, brands' earned media will get pushed aside.

Earned media is dead; long live paid media! Marketers should not mourn the loss of earned media but rejoice that their traditional skills and abilities are in ever higher demand. The need for paid media expertise in social media has never been higher and is going to continue growing. The Marketing Department is uniquely equipped to stay abreast of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks' rapidly evolving ad programs, develop and test targets and creative, and measure advertising success. Marketing can focus on what it does best and leave the rest of social media to others.

Exception to the rule: While it is ever more difficult to gain access to consumers via earned media, this is not a universal problem for all categories. Entertainment, news and style brands continue to have opportunities to increase reach and engagement both in traditional social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as the newer breed of visual platforms such as Vine, Instagram, Pinterest and perhaps, if they can prove themselves to marketers, Snapchat and Whatsapp. Most other categories simply do not have the luxury of innate consumer interest, and trying to manufacture it where little exists only pushes brands to, well, let's move on to reason number two...

Reason Two: The Harder Marketers Try To Win Earned Media, the Greater the Risks

You're getting a little choked up with the emotion of this respectful post, aren't you?

As earning organic social media becomes more difficult, marketers get more desperate to break through, which elevates the risk for brands. No consumer hopes for a daily dialog with their brand of canned pasta, as evidenced by the fact Spaghettios has just 2,600 people "talking about the brand" despite having amassed 518,000 "fans." Since no national brand can succeed with a marketing effort that has a reach of just 2,600 consumers (and since some Social Media Marketing Manager's job depends on it), Spaghettios' Marketing Department has to churn out daily content that struggles to get more attention than other brands. The more they produce and the harder they try, the greater the risks, so it is of little surprise that Spaghettios stumbled instead of soared. The brand's recent Pearl Harbor Day post of a smiling brand logo waving the American flag was widely criticized and embarrassed the brand.

Spaghettios apologized and said its intent was to pay respect, but you and I both know that is not true. This was marketing content, and the goal in posting it was to achieve what marketers always want to achieve in social media--likes, comments and shares. The intent of the smiling cartoon Spaghettio was not to pay respect but to create brand engagement (and in that, at least, the brand succeeded).

Of course, I should not pick on the Campbell Soup brand when there is an almost limitless number of examples of social marketing missteps to choose from in 2013: The #AskJPM, #AskBG and #AskRKelly hashtag dustups; endless look-alike newsjacking after the royal baby's birth; embarrassing campaigns to extort retweets in exchange for charitable dollars; failure to control social accounts from dismissed employees; pathetic fake account hacks to jack up follower counts; branded hashtags inserted into tweets about tragedies; accidentally racist posts; misguided humor about fatal airport crashes. Was that enough, or should I go on?

Cole defended his tweet as a way to "provoke a dialogue." How far is your brand willing to push to get attention?

Okay, I will! Epicurious insensitively exploiting the Boston Marathon tragedy for social content. Kenneth Cole joking about war to sell footwear. Taco Bell turning fans into detractors by mistakenly sending thousands to restaurants that were not yet carrying a promised new product. Nokia failing to put a language filter in place, permitting someone to post "F### you" on its corporate account. (Yes, that "F" word!) The Onion calling a nine-year-old girl a c###. (Yes, that "C" word!)

In 2014, we will see still more brand blunders in social media, but there is a simple solution: Stop trying so hard! With shrinking opportunities to reach the kind of mass scale marketers want and need, consider the risks versus the potential modest rewards. If you do, many of you will shut off the lights on those special-event real-time marketing newsrooms--your brand is more likely to be criticized for spamming consumers' conversations than be next year's Oreo Blackout. Put an end to those tweet-this-or-we-won't-save-a-starving-child campaigns, which consumers increasingly see as mercenary attempts to boost brand reach. Stop desperately asking people to "like this if you love Fridays." Tactics like those may deliver some bumps in your social media analytics, but they are more likely to create negative sentiment than to boost consideration, purchase intent or loyalty at any reasonable scale.

Note that I said to stop trying so hard, not stop trying altogether. Brands certainly have a place in social media, but the time has come to focus not on what your marketing department wants but on what your customers want: Deals, information, education, customer service, co-creation and social functionality. In this list, the Marketing Department is best aligned to furnish just one type of content--promotions. The remainder of the content and services are better left to Public Relations, Customer Care, Product Management and Development and Channel Management.

The Marketing Department is an important provider of content for social channels, but that does not mean those social channels should be run by Marketing with the goal of producing marketing results. In the coming year, I anticipate we will see more Public Relations and Customer Care departments take over companies' social accounts. This will decrease the chances for the kind of social missteps that embarrass brands. No PR or customer service department will ever post an image of a smiling Spaghettio waving a flag, newsjack a national event or fake an account hack. Those departments do not need to win a battle for hundreds of thousands of eyeballs in order to succeed, and they will not push the envelope until, inevitably, the envelope tears and creates a social PR mess.
Exception to the rule: If your brand does not offer the kind of customer experience that earns advocates, then attempting to earn organic attention at scale is difficult and risky. If, however, your company creates advocates with a great product or service experience, that bestows opportunities for social media marketing that is safer and more prone to success. Coca-Cola, USAA, Apple, Trader Joe's and other successful brands don't succeed in the real world because they have great social media; they succeed in social media because they offer a great experience in the real world.

Reason Three: There is Little Evidence that Social Media Marketing Success Drives Business Success

No matter what your corporate social media scorecard may imply, all engagement is not created equal. Getting consumers to engage with your jokey posts or videos is not the same as making a brand impression, building purchase intent or driving sales. Too many brands continue to chase social media metrics while failing to measure how and if social media efforts drive business results. For every Dove "Real Beauty" or Secret "Let Her Jump" that delivers measurable marketing results, there are dozens of other social campaigns that fall far short.

It is easy to see the gap between social media success and business success by looking at Kmart's 2013 efforts. Few brands were as talkable as Kmart this year. Thousands of blog posts and tweets trumpeted the brands' success with funny viral videos like "Ship My Pants" (20 million views!), "Big Gas Savings" (6 million views!), "Show Your Joe" (16 million views!) and the new "Ship My Trowsers" (3 million views in a week!) Even though Kmart, which is owned by Sears, amassed twice as many views as top-rated primetime program NCIS has viewers, the retailer has continued its slow decline, with same-store sales falling 2.1% in the second quarter and an equal amount in the third quarter. As Mashable's Todd Wasserman notes, "It's hard to make a case that the ads did much for owner Sears's bottom line."

In the article on Mashable, Sears chief digital marketing officer says he judges success by "the amount of engagements in social media surrounding the brand." It is long past time for digital and social media leaders to stop this kind of idiotic babble. Marketing that entertains or engages without driving measurable brand or business benefits is failed marketing. Television ad buyers don't claim success based on gross rating points, and neither should digital and social marketers claim success can be counted in "likes" rather than dollars, new customers or brand equity (such as awareness and purchase intent).

Kmart is not the only brand we can study to see the tenuous relationship between social media success and business success. Late last year, Red Bull launched an amazing social campaign around Felix Baumgartner's record-setting skydive. The YouTube video earned 35 million views and got everyone talking. Two months ago, uberVU evaluated Red Bull's and Monster's social media presence and declared Red Bull the winner. But while Red Bull may be winning the social media battle, it is losing the market share war. In recent years, Red Bull has been slowly bleeding market share to Monster, and the trend continued in 2013. In Monster's third quarter earnings call, CEO Rodney Sacks announced that Monster's year-over-year growth was greater than Red Bull's and that Monster was close to overtaking Red Bull in US market share.

Two of the biggest social media marketing successes of the past fourteen months seem to be driving no demonstrable brand success. Maybe my Kmart and Red Bull examples seem unfair since, of course, social media is but one small factor in overall brand success or failure. After all, customers disappointed with past Kmart experiences won't be enticed into stores with a funny video, and Red Bull may be leaking market share because competitors have better product innovation. If you buy this line of reasoning, then you are acknowledging my point--entertaining consumers with funny videos and knee-slapping posts do little to impact the bottom line when consumer perception of the brand is shaped by more powerful experiences with the product or service.

I see little evidence that entertaining consumers with social content imparts benefits to brands. Consumers are awash in entertainment options, and your brand cannot compete with the likes of Beyonce, PewDiePie, Cinema Sins, Rihanna or Reddit. Those channels and pages, and thousands of entertainment options like them, are unencumbered by the limitations faced by your brand, such as reputation considerations, brand fit, legal and regulatory concerns and, most of all, the need to drive purchase of goods and services. (Yes, Rihanna and Beyonce want you to buy their music, but in that case their entertainment is their product, while your brand is left producing diverting videos in the wild hope they will drive folks to purchase pistachios or bottled water.)
There remain several ways marketers can succeed in social media, including paid media and using social networks to distribute promotions. In addition, brands that create advocates through superior customer experience can work to increase Word of Mouth. For many marketers, however, 2014 will be the year they must contend with the diminishing reach, increased risk and dubious business results of organic content and earned media. The earned media equation is changing, and marketers must ensure they don't make the mistake of committing to a strategy that cannot deliver the audience, opportunities and results necessary.

The time is right for a reassessment of your brands' cost-benefit equation with respect to marketing content in social media. If you are achieving significant organic scale and positive outcomes for a reasonable cost, keep up the good work. But if you are employing writers, videographers, photographers, illustrators and other creatives to develop social media content that is reaching too few customers and fails to deliver measureable results, then a change is in order.

There is no shame in acknowledging that earned media does not offer the marketing opportunities that we hoped for years ago as social media was developing. There is, however, shame in continuing to invest if the strategy is not producing results or in striving so hard for marketing success that the company is embarrassed with a social media misfire.

In 2014, I believe the time has come for a normalization of roles in social media. Your organization has professionals with decades of experience creating earned media, and they are not in Marketing but PR. Your organization also has professionals able to scale one-to-one relationships, answer customer questions and engage consumers individually, and they are found in Customer Care. These are the departments that can better manage corporate social accounts. More importantly, they can measure success on their own terms, with metrics based on responsiveness, reputation and satisfaction rather than on acquisition and sales.

The shift has already happened at many companies, but if the Marketing Department at your firm still "owns" the corporate social media accounts, it may be time for them to hand over the keys. Moreover, if your marketing function is ramping up a content marketing program at the same time earned media opportunities are vanishing, caution and careful consideration of costs and goals is advised. Marketing will always have a role on social networks, but the time has come to recognize that social media is not primarily a marketing channel but is better aligned to the longstanding responsibilities and capabilities of others throughout the organization.

Over the past couple of years, I have presented at or attended many conferences where the topic of social customer care was discussed. Invariably, as the dialog turns to rising customer expectations, a hand goes up or a voice shouts out the one question that, perhaps more than any other, makes me irrepressibly angry. That question is "Is the customer expectation reasonable?"

It may surprise you, but I am not a believer that the "customer is always right." Individuals can be wrong, sometimes. Each of us, at one time or another, has been an unreasonable customer demanding something that a brand could not and should not provide us.

However, while an individual customer may not always be right, once a significant portion of customers express the same expectation, the time for debate is past. The question stops being what is fair, reasonable or right and becomes how the company must change to meet those expectations. We are well past the time for deliberation with respect to social customer care.

There are plenty of studies that demonstrate what consumers expect from brands in social media when it comes to customer care. For example:

• In 2011, Oracle found that 46% of worldwide Internet users expect brands to furnish information and customer service through their Facebook pages.
    
• In 2012, American Express found that 17% of consumers have used social media at least once in the last year to obtain a customer service response, and of those who did, 83% have not completed an intended purchase because of a poor customer service experience. [Note: American Express is my employer.]
    
• A 2013 study by LiveOps found that 89% of consumers surveyed believe it is important to be able to communicate with companies by any channel, including social media, and still receive the same quality and efficiency of response. 
    
• A 2012 Nielsen study found that one in three social media users say they prefer to use social media rather than the phone for customer service issues.
    
• In 2012, Edison Research found that 24% of US internet users 12+ who have contacted a brand in social media expect a reply within 30 minutes, regardless of when the contact was made.
    
• Finally, a new study by Lithium and Millward Brown reveals that, among those who engage with brands on Twitter, 53% expect a brand to respond to a tweet within an hour. That number jumps to 72% of consumers expecting a response if the tweet is a complaint about the brand or its products. The study also found that 38% of respondents said they felt more negative about a brand if the brand did not respond to a tweet in a timely manner, and 60% claimed they were more likely to take a negative action toward brands that did not respond to tweets in an acceptable time period.

The consumer has spoken! How are brands doing? Pretty darn poorly:

• The LiveOps study found that about 70% of complaints on Twitter and Facebook are ignored, and more than one-third of retailers have erased a customer's question from their Facebook page.
    
• A 2013 Ragan study revealed that around 70% of companies involve their marketing and/or PR departments in social media, while just 19% of firms involve their customer service department. That same study found that while 87% of companies engage in social media with a goal of raising brand awareness, only 38% do so to improve customer service.
    
• And a recent study out of the UK revealed that fewer than half of customers who have used social media to secure service are happy with the experience (but that was still better than satisfaction with the phone channel!)