In 2011, back when social media hype was at its greatest, I wrote about the "slow-motion social media valuation bubble burst." Since then, year after year, social business and social marketing companies that are publicly held (and thus report their business results) have consistently struggled for stable, profitable performance. For marketing leaders striving to leverage social to improve their firms' customer experience, the performance of social companies contains lessons about the future of social media and the present of marketing.

In 2014, just three of the 11 social companies I tracked had a P/E ratio (Price/Earnings ratio), because only three had positive net earnings in the trailing twelve months--Facebook, HomeAway and Yelp. A year later, it is much the same story. In 2015, just four of the twelve publicly-traded companies in the social media and social marketing category had positive net income from continuing operations over the past four quarters--Facebook, Angie's List, Yelp, and HomeAway. This says something important about the value these firms are delivering for both consumers and marketers. (Please see my list of corporations included in this list at the end of this post.)

Marketing leaders can learn three things from the financial performance and business models of these companies:

• Facebook is diversifying and so should marketers 
• The sharing economy will change the customer experience landscape, but a long road lies ahead 
• Social media marketing will continue to be a struggle in 2016 

To read more, please visit my Gartner blog for Marketing Leaders.

photo credit: IMG_5134 via photopin (license)

Two weeks ago I wrote a blog post that quickly became the most popular I have ever published, "Burn It Down, Start From Scratch And Build a Social Media Strategy That Works." One of the reasons it was so popular is that my friend and former Forrester peer, Josh Bernoff, replied to my post from his terrific Without Bullshit blog, "Augie Ray, can we admit now that social media marketing is dead?"

The dialog between Josh, Forrester analyst Nate Elliott, me and dozens of commenters was vigorous and fascinating, so much so that Josh has now published a worthwhile follow-up, "To be precise, Social Media Marketing is just mostly dead." But where Josh took me to task for not delivering the Last Rites on social media marketing, I believe his latest blog post pulls its punches with respect to blame for declining organic reach and poor social media marketing results. Josh's article ends with:

And if you’re looking around for someone to blame, blame Facebook. It sucked up all the social energy among consumers, then squashed marketing effectiveness. Thanks for crashing the party, Zuck. We thought you might be Miracle Max, but you left us mostly dead all the same.

For too long, marketers have pointed fingers at Facebook. "Facebook lied to us." "They pulled off one of the most lucrative grifts of all time." "Facebook is Machiavellian." As Josh might say on his blog, I find these arguments bullshit.

Brands have lost organic reach not because Facebook took it away but because consumers did. No one blames the television networks for the declining reach of TV advertising lost to ad-skipping DVRs. No one blames Google for the rapid growth of ad-blocking that is reducing online advertising's reach. So why do we let marketers shift the blame from themselves and onto Facebook for the inevitable decline of brand content in users' news feeds?

Yes, Facebook is in a position to profit from brands' struggles on the social network, but the essential factor for brands' poor unpaid reach is not Facebook taking away things people want to see. Facebook implemented and improved its algorithm to make sure that the content presented to users is the content they most want, and that means the things posted by friends and family rather than our bank or toothpaste. Brand content on Facebook simply did not measure up--it could not compete with the content posted by the people about which we most care.

Think of it another way: What would happen tomorrow if Facebook took away content from our closest friends and charged us to see it? The uproar would kill Facebook overnight, of course. So, where is the uproar from consumers for all that missing brand content? Do you hear any consumers clamoring for more brand posts?

Assigning blame where it belongs is not merely a matter of right and wrong--it is vital for marketers to understand the problem so as not to repeat it. If we all blame Facebook for the demise of brands' organic reach, then marketers may be encouraged to give the same strategies another shot on other social networks. Why not Tumblr? Or Periscope? Or Twitter? Or Blab?

But if we instead place blame where it belongs--on the misguided belief that an army of consumers is hungry for brand content--it forces marketing leaders to reconsider strategies. Why would consumers welcome and pay attention to my brand's content on Periscope when they have abandoned it on Facebook and Twitter? Should content marketing really be the most significant slice of my marketing budget given consumers have rejected our marketing communications on television, online and on social networks?

Blaming Facebook may be a salve for marketers' wounded egos, but it is not the least-bullshit, most-truthful message. Nor is it the most helpful in terms of resetting expectations for content and social media marketing in the future.

As I noted in a blog post last year, "Stop Social Media Marketing," there are certain brands and verticals that can make organic social media work, but most cannot. Why not? As I noted to Josh, we each interact with hundreds of brands every week, but with how many do we wish to have a content relationship? How much time will each of us really make to consume and engage with content posted by the long list of brands in our lives?

The first step toward getting marketing right in the social era is to take responsibility for convincing ourselves that consumers who block our calls, skip our commercials and obstruct our banner ads will suddenly embrace brand content in social channels. The last few years were not a grift by Facebook but a healthy reminder to marketers that consumers have never been more informed, distrustful or empowered. If marketers wish to win the millennial consumer, it will require a lot more effort than clever content and free posts.

Want someone to blame? Face facts, not Facebook.

A few years ago, blogs and industry pubs were full of hopeful predictions of how Facebook and Twitter would usher in a new age of cost-free or low-cost marketing. Brands would "authentically" earn attention, and friends would see each other's likes and retweets, creating viral success for brands.

Fast forward to today, and marketers are struggling to figure out the value of their Facebook pages as engagement drops, and some are opting out of Facebook altogether, Meanwhile, the interaction rate with brand tweets stands at 0.07%, which is less than the current click rates for banner ads.

So, what have we learned from the brand marketing experiences on Facebook and Twitter?

Have marketers realized that in social channels controlled by consumers, brand messaging is so much less welcome than content from friends and family that it is impossible for most companies to earn attention, acquire new customers or generate marketing ROI?

Have we realized that, just like on the Web (where Adblocker is the most popular Chrome download) and on TV (where almost half of millennials now timeshift to improve convenience and skip ads), consumers in social media will ignore or actively reject most brand messaging?

Or maybe we have concluded that while it is possible to get consumers to click a "like" button in exchange for a discount, this cannot create a new brand relationship if over 90% of consumers do not agree it is fair for companies to collect information about them without their knowledge in exchange for a discount.

Is that what we have learned?

It does not seem so. The lesson marketers seem to have gleaned from the past few years is that something is wrong with Facebook and Twitter--they are boring and black-and-white--so let's instead shift our attention to the Technicolor world of Instagram! In the last couple of months, my email box and feeds have been full of hype for Instagram, and the justifications are exactly the same as they were for Facebook and Twitter back in 2010.

For example, "Why Your Business Needs an Instagram Account in 2015" contains no business justification whatsoever. The reason your business "needs" Instagram, the author argues, is because "Instagram is exploding," you can "get creative" and "show people what you do behind the scenes, not just what you're selling." Does any of this sound familiar to you? Remember in 2010 when Facebook was "exploding," brands could use it to "get creative" and the key to success was to "be human"?

In "A Three Step Guide to Winning at Instagram," the author never once suggests how to convert pretty pictures and likes into business wins (particularly on a social network that does not permit links within posts). Instead, it offers the same tired advice brands got about pictures on Facebook and Twitter: Image quality is everything; Consistency is key; Photography is aspirational. If those tips did not work in Facebook and Twitter, what would lead us to believe it will be any different on Instagram?

One analyst firm promoted its Instagram 2015 report by noting the social network offers "100 percent organic reach," unlike Facebook, "which inserted a paywall between brands and their communities." First, Instagram handles followers in the same way as Twitter, offering no filter or algorithm for the people following the brand, so there is no reason to think brands will not suffer the same fate on Instagram as on Twitter. Second, as we have learned on Twitter, there is no such thing as "100 percent organic reach"--the vast majority of posts on Twitter and Instagram are not seen by followers because they are ephemeral, disappearing rapidly in feeds that are not monitored 24/7. And lastly, what do we expect will happen as brand presence grows on Instagram, consumers become increasingly tired of brand content and Instagram improves and expands its pay offerings? Put simply, Instagram 2017 will look a lot like Twitter 2015--decreasing organic engagement, increasing costs for paid media and disappointed brands.

Will some brands succeed on Instagram? Sure, just as some have succeeded in Facebook or Twitter, but this has been the exception and not the rule, as there is little evidence brands are delivering marketing success on a widespread basis. Despite billions of dollars spent on content strategies, social media management platforms and engagement-building campaigns, the percentage of online sales attributable to social media in 2015 stands at a mere 1%, one point less than it was last year and more than 90% less than acquisition from email, CPC or affiliate sources.

Some will argue, as they did on last night's Beancast, that this sort of click-attribution is a poor measure of social value, and I would agree--if brands were earning significant levels of engagement. But in a world where Facebook Organic Zero is approaching and Twitter engagement is less than banner ads', what reason do we have to believe there are broad and unmeasured benefits in a channel where so few people see and engage with brands? (Case in point: As I type this, the past week's posts for McDonald's, which has 57 million fans on Facebook, each have earned fewer than 500 likes and 35 shares--one of the largest brands on Facebook is engaging 25% fewer people with each post than walk into a single of the company's 35,000 restaurant locations in an average day.)

As I have argued in the past, there is undoubtedly value in social for a select few brands in the right verticals or that have built the right customer relationships through actions, products and services, but too many brands are struggling to make themselves appealing and engaging on social networks when they have failed to do so in the real world. Distrusted brands with weak customer relationships that try to be interesting on Instagram will be like Oz frantically pulling levers to create distracting visual effects while demanding, "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"

Pay no attention to that brand, er, I mean man behind the curtain!

The signs are not difficult to read, and the future is not hard to see. We are a decade or more into the social era, and we know how it works. Instagram is sufficiently similar to Facebook and Twitter that expecting a different outcome is, as the saying goes, the definition of insanity.

Social media is a powerful platform for consumers. It can also be powerful for brands that unleash Word of Mouth and earn true advocacy with their products and services. But we now have too many years of social media experience to think that attractive pictures on Instagram will deliver marketing results outside of select niches. Heck, even some in the fashion industry, which recently honored Instagram's founder with an award, are beginning to question the impact of Instagram (and if hot models and stylish clothes snapped by the world's most experienced photographers may not deliver business results for style brands, what do you think your social team will accomplish?)

You want your brand to succeed in Instagram? Put down the camera and give your customers experiences they will want to capture and share. Or you can try to make your brand fascinating and creative in Instagram, but just remember--even the great and powerful Oz was smart enough to know he would eventually be discovered and keep an escape balloon at the ready.

This week is the annual SXSW Interactive conference, where social media elite descend on Austin to party on Sixth Street, post selfies with people who have higher Klout scores and pick up the mad schwag liberally distributed by startups. A few may even wander into conference halls to see some presentations, although that is far from certain.

This will be my third year staying home, and while I will miss the chats and parties, I will not miss the general sense that SXSW is a missed opportunity for the social media industry. All the best and most experienced minds in the business gather in one spot, but few find themselves in sane, sober and expansive conversations because it is hard to focus on serious topics when one is screaming over an indie band or dashing from the Convention Center to South Commerce to West 6th for events.

Although SXSW Interactive has tended to feature more hype than criticism, perhaps 2015 will be the year when reality sets in. At last fall's Social Shake-Up, I was pleasantly surprised at the candor at which people were discussing declining reach, difficult social metrics and social media marketing obstacles. It will be interesting to see whether the predominant buzz from this year's SXSW is about social media marketing difficulties or the more typical chatter about the next hot new app.

If SXSW Interactive gets serious about substance over hype, here are seven recent studies that should be mentioned from stages in Austin. All challenge assumptions about the value of social media marketing and offer the sorts of data that should guide tough decisions about investments and strategies in the social channel this year:

• Bounce Exchange find poor organic social acquisition and conversion:  In 2014, Bounce Exchange analyzed more than $1 billion of e-commerce revenue. Their research found that organic traffic from these companies’ social media channels accounted for only 1.2% of clients’ overall revenue. Moreover, conversion was 1.3%, less than half of their clients’ overall average. (Source)
    

Source: The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

• The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth finds fewer companies optimistic about tracking sales through social media: In interviews with executives at Inc. 500 firms, the UMASS study found a drop in companies tracking sales through social media, from 36% in 2013 to 32% in 2014. Even more telling, at a time when marketers are spending more on social media and should be improving their metrics, the number of executives who do not know if social is driving sales increased seven points, from 11% to 18% (and another 44% believe it accounts for less than one percent of sales).
  
  Finally, the UMASS study found that Inc. 500 executives are losing faith that social has the potential to increase sales in the next year--the percentage of executives who indicate social is the tactic with the most potential to drive sales dropped from 16% in 2013 to 13% in 2014. That puts social media well below online advertising, less than business directory listings and equal to traditional print/broadcast media. (Source)
    

• Source: Custora E-Commerce Pulse

  Custora finds social drives small fraction of sales compared to organic search, PPC and email: Custora tracked 100 million anonymized shoppers, $40B in e-commerce revenue, and 100+ online retailers in January 2015. It found that social media delivers just 2% of ecommerce sales. This figure is 91% less than organic search, 88% less than CPC and 87% less than email. Custora's data was no different over the holiday period. In its E-Commerce Pulse 2014 Recap, the company notes, "Similar to the trends last holiday season, and throughout 2014, social media (including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest) is still not driving a substantial share of e-commerce transactions. Through the holiday season (November - December 2014), social media drove only 1.9% of all e-commerce orders - a similar share to holiday 2013, when it drove 2.3%." (Source and source)
   
• Webmarketing123 finds that, when it comes to social media investment decisions, marketers are using assumptions rather than hard metrics:  A November 2014 study by Webmarketing123 found that that "many marketers still relied on 'gut instinct' when determining which channels to use for marketing campaigns, as the most-used weren’t always the most-measured." The report called social media "one of the biggest pain points for respondents." While 87% of B2B marketers used social media, just 17% were able to prove its ROI—that is the lowest percentage among channels used. As for B2C marketers, social is now the most commonly used channel, with 87% of B2Cs using social, but only 27% could calculate ROI. (Source)
    
• MaritzCX finds that social media is not an influential information source for car buyers: MartizCX surveyed 60,000 people and found that social networks (Facebook, Google+ and Linked) were the 19th most influential information source when customers under the age of 35 research a new vehicle. While "Family/friend/word of mouth" ranked second at 18.8%, online social channels were much less significant, with "Chat rooms/blogs/forums" at 1.5%, online videos at 1.3%, social networks at 0.4% and Twitter (dead last) at 0.2%. Beating digital social channels at influencing car purchases are very traditional channels such as salespeople at dealerships (the top influencer at 21.5%), newspaper/magazine reviews (4.7%), TV ads (3.6%) and manufacturer's brochures (2.8%). (Source)
    

• Source: CMO Survey

  The CMO Survey finds that marketers continue to use the least powerful social media metrics: It is amazing that the two most common social media metrics used by marketers this far into the social era are still Hits/Visits/Page Views and Number of Followers or Friends. We are well past thinking that top-of-the funnel metrics are a good way to measure any digital marketing tactic, much less social media. Less than a third of marketers evaluate social media based on conversion rates, and fewer than one in seven use customer acquisition cost.
  
  Even more concerning, there has been a decrease since 2010 in the number of marketers using bottom-of-funnel social media metrics such as Sales Levels, Revenue per Customer and Profits per Customer. Marketers are ignoring the most powerful metrics in order to focus on the ones that are easiest to collect (and to manipulate). (Source)
    

• Source: Marin Software

  Marin Software finds social advertising significantly lags search and display: The Marin Software Performance Marketer's Benchmark Report is expansive, covering over $6 billion worth of ad spend from advertisers and agencies with budgets in excess of $1 million annually on paid-search, display, social, and mobile. First the good news for social media: The clickthrough rate for social ads is better than for display ads--social CTR was double that of banners on desktop and 50% greater on smartphones. However, while social ad clickthrough may beat display, it still pales in comparison to search, which has a 425% better CTR on desktop and 383% greater on smartphones.
  
  Once the folks who click on those ads arrive on your site, social conversion rates are downright dismal. Compared to social ads, display advertising's conversion rates are 255% greater on mobile and 900% more on smartphones. Social advertising conversions fare even worse against search ads; search ads deliver conversion rates 818% higher on desktops and 2100% greater on smartphones versus social ads.
  
  While social advertising offers the lowest cost per click (CPC), advertisers (at least those whose goal is conversion) are over-paying for social ads. Desktop social ads offer a CPC 82% less than desktop search ads but return a conversion rate 89% less than desktop search, making social advertising's cost per conversion around 65% greater on desktop. On mobile, social advertising has a cost per click that is 80% less than search ads but experience conversion rates 95% less than search, resulting in a cost per conversion that is more than four times greater in social than search. (source)

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.

Most companies still have no idea how to make social media work for them. They know consumers spend 50% of their online media time with social networks, microblogs and blogs. And they know social media professionals have been promising a new age of brand-building power via engagement and content. But they also know brand engagement is dropping and 85% of CMOs cannot validate a quantitative return in social media.

There is a serious disconnect between the promise of social media and what it is delivering for brands, and it can be explained in one simple sentence: Social media is a customer channel before it is a marketing one.

A marketing channel is one (like TV or banner ads) where brands' primary objectives and investments are focused on prospects and success is measured in marketing outcomes like acquisition and sales volume. A customer channel is one (like phone and inbound email) where brands' primary objectives and investments are dedicated to serving current customers and where success is measured in increasing satisfaction, likelihood to recommend and repurchase.

The difference between treating social primarily as a customer channel versus a marketing channel may be subtle, but Papa John's social media mistake of last week well illustrates the contrast. Pop star Iggy Azalea ordered a pizza from Papa John's, and shortly after delivery, she started to receive texts from the driver's family who had received the celebrity's personal phone number from the employee. Iggy did what many of us would do and tweeted about the blatant infringement of her privacy:

. @PapaJohns was my favorite pizza but the drivers they use give out your personal phone number to their family members.
— IGGY AZALEA (@IGGYAZALEA) February 8, 2015

Papa John's gave the star a blithe and unacceptable response:

@iggyazalea #We should have known better. Customer and employee privacy is important to us. Please don’t #bounce us!
— Papa John's Pizza (@PapaJohns) February 9, 2015

"Don't #bounce us?" What would cause the brand to give such a terrible response to a celebrity whose privacy was violated? This can only happen when a brand treats social media first as a marketing channel and second as a customer channel.

No customer care representative in the world would--when presented with evidence of an employee violating customer trust, company policy and possibly even the law--give the response that Papa John's tweeted. That response was a marketing response authored by a marketer to elicit a marketing benefit. Iggy did not receive a reply designed to satisfy her legitimate concerns but one that attempted to turn her tweet into viral gold for the brand.

Well, if going viral was the goal, score one for Papa John's. Their careless response angered Azalea, and she went off on the brand. "A lot of damage can be done if that falls into the wrong hands, we give them this information with the expectation it remains confidential," she tweeted, followed by, "When an employee steals information it's called data breach. It's illegal. There are steps a corporation is supposed to follow afterward." That's right, a giant corporation needed to be schooled on the importance of data security and customer care by the pop star famous for singing, "Pu$$y."

This is far from the first time a brand has been spanked for treating social media as a marketing channel before a customer channel; in fact, I would suggest all brands are being spanked for this, whether or not they have had a "social media disaster" like Papa John's. This is why, despite the promise of social media adoption ushering in a new era of Word of Mouth, most brands still struggle for attention (and even the ones that manage to earn a high level of attention often fail to convert it into any brand benefit; see Kmart's "Ship my Pants, Farmer Insurance's Farmville promo, Blackberry's record fan counts and Samsung's "Selfie heard round the world.")

So how do you devise a strategy that is customer first/brand second in social media? There is no one answer, but here are places to start:

• Focus metrics on customer happiness, not CMO happiness: Are you measuring social media by the size of your fan count, the number of likes and conversions? Who cares most about those metrics--your customers or your CMO? Instead of aligning social objectives to things like reach, engagement and conversions, instead measure responsiveness, satisfaction, and loyalty (such as NPS and share of wallet) for those with whom you interact in social media. Those are the metrics that indicate your customers are being served by your brand strategy in social media.
   
• Let your Customer Care professionals, not Marketers, respond in social media: Your company already has a department dedicated to handling customer complaints and inquiries, and they do it quickly, accurately and empathetically. Let the Marketing Department worry about broadcasting content and buying paid media in social media, but when an inbound request is received, leave it to the same professionals who handle the same questions from the same customers received via phone, email, web forms, chat and other channels.
   
• Your social media playbook should treat serious customer needs as such: Every corporate social media team needs a playbook to help guide tone, content and escalation of significant customer concerns. A serious claim such as a privacy violation should not be left up to the judgment of whichever marketing intern happens to monitoring the stream at the moment (or, as Rose Cameron suggested on this week's BeanCast, the only person in the office who knew who Iggy Azalea is.)
   
• Listen and be present for customers: Times are changing for social networks, and this means your brand strategy must change with them. With organic reach trending downward and widely expected to hit (essentially) zero in the foreseeable future, now is the time to rethink why and how your company engages in social media. Brands are disappearing from consumers' newsfeeds, which means a strategy of being present when customers want the brand to be will beat a strategy that assumes consumers will see (and want) marketing content. 

The coming year will be a watershed one for social media marketing, I predict, and not in a positive way. A topic that was only whispered about in private conversations early in the year is now being openly discussed: For many brands, earned media and content marketing are not delivering results in line with the investments. Some claim our metrics and strategies must mature, but it is getting harder to ignore the limitations of marketing in the social channel. So unavoidable is this discussion that even at the Social Media Today Social Shake-Up, a confab of social elite, a speaker asked from the main stage, "In a year, will any of you produce a deck with 'social' in its title?"

While social circles are buzzing with increasingly sober discussions of the channel's difficulties delivering marketing results, that conversation seems not to have reached the ears of the CMO quite yet. Mainstream marketing media, which was late to recognize the growing investment in social media marketing, is now tardy in covering the growing body of data demonstrating social's challenges as a marketing channel.

Adweek, continuing its trend of being impressed with engagement rather than results, recently featured an article on the "top Tumblr posts of 2014." These posts were not selected as "top" because they delivered any marketing ROI but because lots of people liked them, and thus Adweek has once again uncovered that deep marketing insight that people love inspirational quotes, hot models, animated GIFs and pets. (Shocking!) This is representative of the coverage that social media continues to receive from the marketing media--big numbers lead while investments bleed.

Since your CMO does not seem to be getting good advice to guide decisions on social investments, I'd like to offer up five tips to help him or her consider how to manage social media budgets and efforts in 2015:

• Stop trying to make your brand interesting with tweets and posts; instead, give people a reason to talk about your brand in meaningful ways. The organic reach of brand content on Facebook is dying. Not dwindling; dying. The story is little different on other social networks. Brand engagement on Twitter is minuscule and, although engagement on Instagram is fine today, it is only a matter of time before Instagram goes the way of other social networks before it.
  
  By the end of 2015, the talk will be about zero reach in brands' organic social media marketing efforts, and it will become impossible to ignore that brand publishing is not and never was going to be the way to succeed in social media. The real social media strategy that has worked from the beginning is to get people talking with each other, not about brand content but about actual products and services. The reason is that people trust each other far more than they trust you and your brand.
  
  
  There are several ways to leverage peer-to-peer brand communications. Bring trusted consumer ratings and observations into your site, integrated on the pages where prospects consider your products and services, as USAA has done on product pages. Leverage trusted relationships to create connections between your brand and prospects, as Ameriprise does with its LinkedIn "Find an Advisor" feature. Encourage positive comments, not on Twitter where tweets are quickly lost in the void, but on the rating and review sites that people trust to help them make purchase decisions. In 2015, CMOs will be forced to realize that the key to social media success is not publishing content but getting people talking with each other about brands' products and services.
     
• Stop trying to go viral; instead, use social media to solve consumer problems:  Viral posts get a lot of attention because everyone loves big numbers, but there is little evidence they drive brand value. KMart had the most viral brand video in 2013, but it didn't stop the retailer's continued slide. The same thing happened in 2014: This year's most viral brand campaign was the Ellen Oscar selfie, but despite Publicis CEO Maurice Levy's claim it delivered Samsung a billion dollars of value, Samsung's smartphone market share slipped 25% from Q3 2013 to Q3 2014. (Where viral campaigns tend to help is not with established brands but with up and comers such as HelloFlo and Wren, but even then, the one-in-a-million shot of achieving "viral' scale is so remote, the few success stories hardly suggest that viral marketing is a smart strategy.)
  
  Your marketing goal is not to go viral; it's not even to get engagement. Your marketing goal is to deliver demonstrable business results, and that means changing consumer behaviors and attitudes. Viral videos too often sacrifice brand impact for entertainment value, and that is a lousy trade to make.
  
  
  
  Rather than try to be funny, instead focus on solving consumer problems. Fifth Third Bank didn't make the waves that Samsung did, but its Reemploy campaign got unemployed mortgage borrowers back to work and delivered the brand the sort of "buzz" that encourages consideration. USAA partnered with the NFL for a Salute to Service campaign that increased appreciation for military service members, raised over $400,000 for military support organizations and generated considerable social media buzz with on-field events.
    
• Stop saying "Content is King." Start focusing brand-building energies on the Customer Experience. First exercise: Other than brands whose product actually is content, name a brand you purchase regularly because of content it produces. Now list the brands to which you are loyal because their products or services furnish a great and consistent experience. How do those numbers compare?
  
  Here's another exercise: List brands you know that have achieved significant success in the past two decades years with content. Then, list the brands that came out of nowhere with little advertising or content but built World of Mouth based on their product or service experience. (Here's a list to get you started on the latter: Ebay, Amazon, Uber, Nest, Square, Flip Video, Google, Krispy Kreme, Zappos, Tesla, Facebook, Apple Store, Jawbone, Angry Birds, PayPal, Evernote, Dropbox and Warby Parker.)
  
  There you go--I have cured you of the need to ever again say "Content is king" in just two paragraphs. Content is not king--customer experience is king. Why do marketers keep repeating that tired and untrue phrase? Probably because content seems easy to do (just a hire a "brand journalist," whatever that is), is in their wheelhouse (they have been producing ads for decades, after all), and marketers generally control content but not the product and service experience. Well, it is long past time for that to change.
  
  Advertising and content are important, but nothing is more powerful than Customer Experience. This has always been the case, but in an age of transparency where media is splintering, mass media is slipping and consumers have greater control over communication channels, it is not content but Customer Experience that fills the top of the funnel. Marketers can no longer afford to ignore the high-impact product and service experiences being fashioned by others in the organization while they worry about less powerful ad impressions and social engagement. Smart marketers must turn inward and ensure that the brand experience is crafted end-to-end--not just what happens leading up to purchase but what happens afterwards--because that is where true brand building occurs.
    
• Stop being lied to and start demanding better information. Who do you expect will tell the CMO the truth that social media marketing is widely failing to meet expectations? The professionals getting paychecks to produce content for social channels? The agency trying to maximize utilization of its storytellers and community managers? The authors whose books extolling the value of earned media launched their careers? A social media industry has been built to separate the CMO from his or her budget, which is why marketing leaders must seek out the real, unadulterated and unbiased data and insight about social media marketing.
  
  There is a lot of bad data and analysis out there, and even data from reliable sources can be twisted and misrepresented. For example, dozens of blog posts have mentioned that IBM's recent Black Friday white paper reported that Facebook traffic delivered an average of $109.94 per order over Thanksgiving weekend. That sounds important, but is it really without knowing the scale of orders delivered? IBM is suspiciously silent on that topic considering its 2013 study found that social media drove a mere 1% of purchases. While IBM may not be divulging social network traffic's share of purchases, Custora is. The company evaluated data from 100 US online retailers, 100 million online shoppers and over $40 billion in transaction revenue in the first two weeks of December. It found that social media (including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest) drove just 2% of orders (down from 2.5% during the same period in 2013).
  
  The time has come for marketers to get more critical about the data and analysis they receive. If marketing leaders rely on incomplete, unreliable or misrepresented data to drive social media decisions, they have no one to blame but themselves for disappointing outcomes.
     
• Your social media metrics suck, so change them. Social media has been Goodhart's Law in action: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
  
  Likes, retweets and shares were briefly meaningful in the early days of social, when brands earned them solely by offering great products and services, but the second those social engagement metrics became goals rather than measures of success, everything changed. Brands started buying fans with contests, sweepstakes and giveaways. Community managers started gaming engagement with posts of puppies and "like-bait" images. Fan counts soared and engagement rose, but since these tactics were designed to yield positive social media metrics and not valuable business results, it all amounted to little for brands. Is it any wonder that the vast majority of CMOs have no quantitative idea if their social investments are paying off or not? (They're not.)
  
  If you have a social media scorecard with counts of likes, fans, retweets and pins, throw it out and demand better. Those metrics are easily manipulated and are not measures of business success. Marketing leaders need to focus on more important measures in 2015: Improvements in preference and purchase intent, enhanced share of wallet, beneficial social behaviors such as recommendations, and financial measures including repurchase, clicks and conversions. Those are not as easy to measure as likes and retweets, but the most valuable marketing metrics are rarely the easiest of obtain.
     

By the end of 2015, I believe we will be having a much different conversation about social media with substantially less focus on brand content and more about social products, social services and social good. If your CMO uses the five tips mentioned above, he or she can be ahead of the game and ensure the company is aligning its marketing budgets to the strategies most likely to deliver results that matter. Or, brands can keep running social sweepstakes, doing funny videos and begging for likes and shares, but I can promise those tactics will not get the job done for the Marketing department, and by the end of 2015, that will be impossible to hide.

Today, I gave a keynote address at the PR + Social Media Summit in my hometown of Milwaukee. My presentation was entitled "Stop Social Media Marketing (Unless)," and I have embedded the deck at the end of this blog post.

I predict that many CMOs will diminish their support for social media, content and earned media marketing in the next year or two, and when they do, careers will be adversely impacted. If your career relies on Marketing Department support for content or social media marketing, now is the time to take stock of the trends and consider some actions to protect your career. It is possible that you work for the right sort of company for which social media is well aligned for Marketing Department expectations---that's the "Unless" part of the title--but, as you will see, I believe this is the exception and not the rule.

What is (and is not) Social Media Marketing?

Before we explore where social media marketing works and where it does not, let's first be clear that the definition of "social media marketing" does not include paid media on social networks. Go ahead and invest in advertising on Facebook and Twitter, just do not call it "social." The most popular forms of advertising on Facebook today are retargeting and custom audiences, neither of which are remotely social, and less than one in six ad dollars use social data.

I suggest a better definition of Social Media Marketing is this: Content authored or encouraged by the brand and shared by Word of Mouth that creates earned media and delivers on Marketing objectives. This definition excludes a couple of things, such as advertising (which is not social) and consumer content not coaxed by a marketing program (which is not marketing). It also excludes social media programs that fail to deliver on key marketing metrics, and therein is the problem for most brands.

The Earned Media Venn Diagram

A simple Venn diagram explains what works and what does not in Social Media Marketing. The first circle includes what your brand can say to move consumers closer. This does not mean retweets and likes--the fool's gold of social media marketing--but rather changes in consumer attitude or behavior such as greater awareness, consideration and purchase intent.

The second circle in the Venn diagram is what consumers want to hear from your brand. For years, we have acted as if consumers crave branded content, but the data on this clear; a 2014 Kentico study found that 68% of US consumers “mostly” or “always” ignore brand posts on every social network. The situation is much worse for some categories than others--a 2014 Scratch/Viacom study found that 71% of Millennials would rather go to the dentist than listen to what their banks are saying! If people would rather get a cavity filled than listen to your brand, it's a good bet your content and social media marketing faces a profound uphill challenge.

Where Social Media Marketing Works

Some brands have an overlap between these two circles of the Earned Media Venn Diagram; most do not. There are three types of companies that have this "magic intersection" between content that helps the brand and that consumers want:

• Brands in select verticals:  Some categories have built-in consumer interest. For example, sports brands can easily post content that drives engagement and also increases demand for team attire and products. TV shows and movies have an easy time offering content fans will share that also increases ratings and box office receipts. Style brands are another example--in the same way that women eagerly purchase the September issue of Vogue with its 631(!) pages of ads, so too will style-conscious women pay attention to and share the latest pins and posts from their favorite fashion brands. Brands in select verticals enjoy a magic intersection between the content consumers want and the content that drives consideration and sales.
    
• Brands with purpose:  Consumers may have little interest in what banks have to say, but that does not stop USAA from delivering great engagement and inbound traffic with its posts. This is because USAA has created a brand with a purpose that resonates with its audience. Another example is Chipotle, which has outperformed other brands in the restaurant industry by promoting its commitment to more locally- and organically-sourced ingredients. (Just last quarter, Chipotle delivered a same-store sales increase of 17% in a vertical where almost no brands are able to achieve half that.)
    
• Brands with better products and services:  Of course, there is always the old-fashioned way of encouraging attention from consumers: Be better than the competition! Apple has no official company profile on either Facebook or Twitter, yet it still beats Samsung when it comes to building buzz. Both companies had product unveilings in early September (Samsung for the new Note and Apple for the iPhone 6), yet despite the fact Samsung has 2,350% more fans, followers and subscribers on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, Apple still delivered far more Word of Mouth about their event and product. Apple does not need social profiles and content to drive WOM; it just needs to continue producing interesting, innovative products that get fans talking.
    

When brands have nothing to say: Example of a brand exploiting a personal tragedy to build its own brand engagement.

Social Media Marketing's Inability to Deliver Trust, Acquisition or Purchase Conversions

Social Media Marketing on a Collision Course with C-Suite Expectations

How to Protect Your Social Media Marketing Career

In the last couple of months, as the organic reach of brands' Facebook posts plunged, some agency and marketing leaders have engaged in a game of blame shifting that I find distasteful and disingenuous.

'Facebook lied to us" seems to be what many marketers are saying; in fact, this is specifically what one company, Eat24, said as it deleted its Facebook fan page. A media executive accused Facebook of "one of the most lucrative grifts of all time" for, supposedly, urging brands to "purchase" fan bases and then charging those same brands to reach their fans through paid media. "Marketers feel tricked," my Forrester friend Nate Elliott recently noted.

To be sure, the decreasing opportunities in earned media have put agencies and marketers in an uncomfortable spot. For years, agencies promoted and marketers purchased programs to build fan bases on Facebook, and once that was accomplished, those same agencies and marketers invested still more money to exploit those fans with games, contests, real-time marketing newsrooms and content strategies. There has been a great deal of investment in "earned media" strategies on Facebook that now show little promise with paywalls going up and organic reach plunging.

Who is to blame if those strategies were ill advised and the benefits of earned media were overstated? Everyone with a frustrated boss or disenchanted client raising questions about Facebook's dwindling organic opportunities are certainly quite clear: Blame Facebook!

I am far less convinced this is where the blame lies. If you disagree, let me ask you a few questions:

• Did you think social media changed basic consumer attitudes toward brands and marketing? Did you suppose that consumers who avoid marketing communications in every medium--skipping TV ads and abandoning commercial radio for subscription music services--where going to suddenly gravitate to brand content in social media?
    
• What did you anticipate would occur as more brands pumped more content into Facebook? As brands multiplied and marketing posts expanded, did you imagine consumers would push aside their family and friends in order to embrace ever more marketing content? Or did you anticipate that your content was going to be that much better and more engaging than everyone else's, not just within your industry but across every brand, celebrity, news source and friend that your fans liked?
    
• Who told you could reach most of your Facebook "fans" in the first place? When Facebook announced EdgeRank four years ago, did you understand what it meant to your organic reach? Did you recognize the significance of Facebook's announcement two years ago this week that Pages organically reach just 16% of their fans on average? Where did you get the impression that your brand could get free access to more of your fan base--was this expectation set by Facebook or by a vendor or agency?
    
• Did you believe Facebook would set aside its own financial goals in order to help your brand achieve its goals? Did you expect Facebook to frighten off users by turning their news feeds into a constant flow of marketing communications at the behest of marketers? Or was it your expectation that your brand could make free money on Facebook while Facebook itself set aside its own financial objectives?
    
• Who told you that harvesting large numbers of fans was the right strategy? When you were sold on a dubious program of giving away crap in Farmville or forcing disinterested people to "like" your brand in order to enter your sweepstakes, who was sitting across the marketing conference room table--was it Facebook execs or sales folks from an agency or vendor?
    
• Who urged you to invest in Facebook content strategies? Was it Facebook that recommended you launch real-time newsrooms to spam customers' social discussions about events such as the Super Bowl or Oscars? To whom did you cut checks for all that content your brand developed for Facebook? Did Facebook get paid to develop all those viral videos, infographics, pictures of kittens and posts that asked your fans to "like if you drink coffee or comment if you prefer tea"?  (Thank heaven those desperate and useless bids for meaningless engagement will come to an end, now that Facebook is clamping down on such tactics.) 

Perhaps someone can dig up a rare Facebook post or some old Facebook sales deck that demonstrates the social network misled marketers, but I doubt there is much damning evidence to be found. At worst, Facebook seems guilty of failing to discourage inflated marketer expectations. (Of course, it was in its best interest not to.) Conversely, it is easy to find thousands upon thousands of blog posts, tweets and Slideshare decks from agencies, consultants and vendors painting an unrealistic picture of the future of earned media on Facebook and other social platforms.

Heck, as recently as three months ago, marketing media and agency bloggers were tripping over each other to praise the ridiculous Esurance Super Bowl Twitter sweepstakes, congratulating the brand for useless fans and valueless tweets. (In the months since, the brand has lost half of its new fans and is getting less engagement than before the misguided promotion.) This sort of mentality--than any fan, any post, any engagement drives brand value--is precisely what led us to the current level of disappointment in Facebook. Even as agencies and marketers are coming to realize the reality of earned media on Facebook, they are repeating the same mistakes in other social platforms!

Today, social media marketers are waking up with a Facebook hangover. They binged, partied, drunk-dialed consumers, posted regrettable selfies and damaged relationships while under the influence of free marketing via earned media. In the harsh reality of the morning after, it is easy to blame the bartender, but Facebook wasn't the one doing keg stands with your brands' content for the last several years.

"It's Facebook's fault" may be a convenient and safe excuse, but taking responsibility is the first step to a cure. Blaming Facebook may get marketers or agencies off the hook today, but if they repeat the same mistakes in Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Snapchat and the like, they will only end up with same painful hangover.

Today's unpleasant realization about organic opportunities on Facebook is not just a problem but a golden opportunity to reconsider social media strategies across all platforms. Marketers tested and they learned--the only failure at this point is to expect different results from the same strategies on other platforms. As noted in my last post, I urge marketers to consider what it means if everything they understand about social media marketing is wrong.

Rather than assign blame, now is a good time to take a fresh look at what social media is doing to brands rather than what it can do for brands. That is the mindset that can lead to a new, different and successful course for your brand's future social media strategies.

I am deeply disappointed to see Esurance's Super Bowl sweepstakes results widely celebrated. Six years into the social era, I thought we had reached a certain point of social media maturity where we realize that fans and followers are not leads and that relationships are built through shared values and meaningful interactions. I naively thought that we had turned a corner, with widespread understanding that winning in social media occurs by providing great experiences that build long-term relationships and not with campaigns that yield short-term spikes of activity. I was wrong.

You no doubt already know about the Esurance program (which some of you perhaps think is evidence of its success). Esurance bought the first post-Super Bowl ad spot and ran an ad featuring John Krasinski promoting a twitter sweepstakes. Since Esurance "saved" $1.5 million by buying the $2.5 million spot after the game rather than during the Super Bowl, one lucky winner who tweeted #EsuranceSave30 won that $1.5 million.

On Thursday, the brand released campaign figures, and at a glance they looked impressive. Esurance claims to have garnered 5.4 million uses of the #EsuranceSave30 hashtag and 2.6 billion social impressions on Twitter. I have some doubts as to the validity and interpretation of this data, but I will save those for an appendix at the end of this post, because my bigger concern is not about the accuracy of the data but whether this data ought to be celebrated as evidence of marketing or business success.

The attention heaped on Esurance's campaign data is just another instance of bloggers, marketing media and social media professionals celebrating questionable programs based on inconsequential numbers. This has been going on for years; for example, four years ago, Einstein Bagels gave every new Facebook fan a free bagel, and thousands of blog posts and headlines were launched when the brand saw a 7,000% increase in Facebook fans in just three days; six months after the Facebook stunt, Einstein reported disappointing revenue with same-store sales down more than a percent, and two years later, the company had the lowest earnings growth in its industry. The lesson from this (and a thousand other sweepstakes and giveaway programs that "bought" fans) is that fans and followers are not a business metric.

Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, and once again, there has been an onslaught of articles and blog posts lauding Esurance's short-term metrics. Adweek embarrassingly called the Esurance outcome "mind-boggling," as if it is surprising that a $1.5 million prize would result in millions of tweets. (It would have been more "mind boggling" if the program hadn't!)  The Wall Street Journal breathlessly declared Esurance "won" the Super Bowl. And one agency called this campaign a "master class in expanding your audience."

A $5 million campaign that yields 250,000 new Twitter followers is a "master class" in expanding audience? That represents a very pricey $20 per follower, not even considering that in the week since the Super Bowl, Esurance lost 15% of the new followers it gained. Besides, if fans and followers amounted to some sort of marketing or business asset, Blackberry, with 3.9 million followers, would be flying instead of knocking on death's door; Dippin' Dots would have announced record profits rather than declaring bankruptcy mere days after collecting its 5 millionth Facebook fan; and Pepsi, one of the top 30 brands in terms of Twitter followers, would be blowing away the market rather than under-performing the S&P500 by 50% since the brand joined Twitter in December 2008.

Why must the marketing industry continually relearn that fans and followers are not prospects, nor are they a reliable leading business indicator? The fans that are worth earning--the ones that follow or friend your brand not because of a freebie or sweeps but because they have experienced and loved your product or service--are lagging indicators.

No matter how many millions or billions of eyeballs or impressions were delivered, the Esurance campaign was flawed from the start. It encountered some of the typical issues we have seen with hashtag campaigns in the past, including offensive tweets people posted to enter, spammers and scammers jumping all over the Esurance hashtag and people now convinced the entire thing was rigged. But even aside from the inevitable mixed reaction that greets these sorts of campaigns, there are several issues that must be considered to critically evaluate the results from this and similar social sweepstakes:

Awareness is the right goal--for brands in a different place than Esurance

Awareness can't lead to trial and purchase without depth and breadth

Setting aside the question of whether Esurance should have been investing in awareness as a marketing goal, let's instead consider if big-dollar sweepstakes actually deliver awareness that matters. The lack of understanding of awareness among marketers has been one of my pet peeves for two decades. Awareness isn't unidimensional; brands cannot simply count impressions or measure whether or not people recognize its name.

For awareness to matter, it has to have depth and breadth. Depth is how deeply the awareness is held and whether the consumer can recall it aided or unaided. Breadth is about context--when does the brand come to mind, how positive are the associations, and what does the consumer recognize about the brand. Most social sweepstakes and giveaways are good for garnering narrow, shallow awareness--impressive-sounding numbers with no impact to the vital aspects of brand awareness.

What depth of awareness has Esurance created with this campaign? The brand utilized Twitter not to create dialog or engagement but as a means of entering a sweepstakes. Claiming that these impressions are meaningful to the brand would be akin to saying that someone photocopying their paper entry form and mailing it to friends creates valuable brand impressions.

And what breadth was created? The buzz today, if you look at Twitter, is focused on three topics--the success of the social campaign, that people are disappointed they did not win, and that some think the contest was rigged. What you do not see is a discussion of the value of insurance or why anyone should consider Esurance. There is no dialog about Esurance products or services. There is no breadth. It is not good enough to get people talking; you have to get them talking about something that changes brand perception or behaviors.

People will claim that perhaps this is the next step in the campaign--after collecting a bunch of new followers, the brand will shift the conversation. That argument ignores the way social media works and how consumers use it. The brand is already shedding many of its new followers, and the ones that remain are no more likely to pay attention to tweets about insurance products than the average consumer. We have seen it time and again with brands that collect fans and followers with cheap stunts and free stuff: the path through the marketing funnel from Twitter follower to customer is extremely weak.

To be fair, it is possible to run a sweepstakes that creates awareness with depth and breadth. My friend Ken Hittel shared a New York Life example. The brand ran a contest to give away 60 financial versions of The Game Of Life board game. By keeping the reward small and focusing not on distributing money but on a relevant promotional item, New York Life created deeper, broader awareness and kept the dialog going (for a tiny fraction of the cost of Esurance program).

If it's too easy, that tells you something

Another one of the hints that there may be less to this story than the data indicates is this: The program was easy. Since the beginning of the social era, marketers have been trying to find simple ways to exploit social media for their advantage, but success in social media is not straightforward, nor should it be. If brands could honestly build interest, purchase intent and sales merely by dumping a bunch of cash into a hashtag sweeps, Twitter would be full of these sorts of promotions. Nothing worth doing comes easy, and any social program this shockingly easy to execute and repeat ought to raise doubts.

The funny thing is how easy it is to see this program for what it is if you remove the dazzle of the post-Super Bowl ad spot and the reflexive excitement over the big numbers. For example, what if tomorrow I offer to give away $500 to someone who posts #AugieRayRocks and follows my Twitter handle? You would not advise this tactic to me or anyone else, would you? This hypothetical program is obviously spammy and impractical, more inclined to collect useless followers who want to win cash than worthwhile followers interested in my content. So what makes Esurance's campaign different? If anything, the huge wad of dough offered by Esurance only made their effort more interesting to less valuable prospects, the kind who haunt sweepstakes sites and spend hours every week entering random contests.

Esurance isn't the first brand to buy fans with a giveaway or sweepstakes. Marketers have been trying this for years. Five years ago, in the early days of Twitter, UK hosting company Moonfruit launched what may be the first hashtag sweeps on Twitter, but traffic and engagement dropped like a stone the moment the program ended, and the company did not repeat it. Einstein gave away free bagels to increment Facebook friends; as we have previously noted, it did not drive demonstrable success and the brand never repeated the program. If brand success were as easy as giving away stuff on Twitter, we would all be doing it already.

Conclusion

Social media is not new any longer. We have seen enough brands fold with strong awareness and lots of fans to know that there are far more important metrics than awareness and follower count. We have observed enough sweeps and giveaways to know that the brands that ran them did not get the sort of results that encouraged them to continue using those tactics (or they would do so). It is long past time to stop shoveling shallow praise at shallow programs yielding shallow results.

I believe the social media marketing business is in for a rough couple of years as the value of branded content changes and marketers gain further understanding of how social does and does not fit for marketing goals. On Facebook, marketers face collapsing engagement and even greater challenges this year as the opportunity for earned media dwindles. Twitter is struggling to demonstrate it can deliver the goods both to marketers and investors. New social networks are being promoted as the next big thing, but thus far scale has been truly problematic. (Many marketers praised Tide for its creative use of Vine during the Super Bowl, but just one of the brand's 19 videos earned more than 500 shares and most did not get shared even 100 times on Vine--an outcome that may thrill the corner boutique but not marketing leaders for a massive P&G brand.)

To have so much attention heaped on Esurance with so little care given to whether Twitter sweeps fit the brand's needs, if Esurance can convert followers into customers at any reasonable scale and efficiency, or if the program will or can contribute to the bottom line is, in my opinion, an embarrassment to the industry. The amazing level of buzz demonstrates how quickly social media professionals grab onto any hint of success and how unwilling they are to deeply explore and challenge the ways social fits (or doesn't) with marketing objectives.

I thought our industry was maturing, but once again I am reminded that too many marketers believe social is a medium to be exploited by brands and not a new way of thinking and acting that happens to brands.

Postscript: The validity and interpretation of the reported data:

I know this blog post is more than long enough already, but I wanted to explore the data and whether it jibes with what we know about Twitter. I would have included this analysis earlier, but I thought it would detract from the primary point I wanted to make; nonetheless, I think if we fire up our calculators and apply our experience, we can begin to uncover questions about the data shared for this program.

The figures imply each tweet was seen 481 times (2.6 billion social impressions divided by 5.4 million uses of the #EsuranceSave30 hashtag).  I've seen some data indicating the average Twitter user has 208 followers, but a recent and thorough analysis revealed that active Twitter accounts (those that have posted in the last 30 days) have a median of just 61 followers. Moreover, since many folks created new Twitter accounts just to enter, it is safe to assume the typical account tweeting #EsuranceSave30 had fewer than the median. As a result, it is very difficult to square the number of hashtag uses with the number of impressions reported.

Moreover, even if we set aside questions about the accuracy of the 2.6 billion figure, it is important to understand that Esurance is playing loose by calling these "impressions" and not "potential impressions." No Twitter user can know how many of their followers see a given tweet--at any moment, most people are not signed on to Twitter and watching their tweet stream, so any single tweet is actually seen by a fraction of an account's followers. No accurate data exists as to the percent of followers that read each tweet, but I have seen estimates in the five to ten percent range. If this program had 2.6 million potential impressions (computed with the assumption every follower of every account that tweeted saw every tweet) and if just 10% of those accounts' followers actually saw the tweets, then actual impressions were closer to 260 million.

And, while we're at it, let's also point out the giant difference between reach (the number of unique people who saw the tweets) and impressions (the number of times tweets were seen by non-unqiue individuals). If the average person who saw an Esurance tweet saw three of them, then the reach of this program is one-third the impressions (actual, not potential). Considering all of the above, we can calculate the following based on hypothetical but reasonable assumptions:

• 5.4 million hashtag uses x
• 61 median followers x 
• 10% of a tweeting account's followers that actually seeing the tweet /
• 3 impressions for each unique individual who saw a tweet = 
• Reach of 11 million uniques

Still a big number but quite a bit different from 2.6 billion, wouldn't you say?  This is the sort of analysis I would expect from mainstream media outlets like Adweek and Ad Age before they jump on the bandwagon and merely repeat the numbers they are fed by a brand.