Off The Grid PR

 

As Valeria Maltoni (@ConversationAge) put it so well in a recent post describing the increasing adoption of social media "marketers are finally putting their money where our conversation has been -- integrating social with their activities".

Even so, as a marketing consultant to smaller companies, I am approached by client firms that are still resistant to the "sea change" in the air. Frankly, some are still operating with 2007 market data (and schemas) in their heads. So it is I find myself called into executive strategy briefings and staff meetings and given a short time slot to plead the case for adopting social media.

Perhaps you know the drill?  Fifteen "make it or break it" minutes to stand and present, survive a firing line of questions and, hopefully, actually survive long enough to open the door to discussing the company's own social media strategy. Catch: There's not enough time to show the Social Media Revolution video.

What I've found works very well in such situations is to have an opening set of market research slides, "schema-busting" slides I call them, which set a big picture marketing context, highlighting that our former Google-centric view of the online universe of the past decade is changing.

Yes- I refer to the ROI of Dell's social media use, Zappos, the brilliant customer service case studies of Comcast, the product innovation crowdsourcing by Starbucks, the even more brilliant crowdsourcing experiment by NetFlix  and many others. However, too often, there can be a NIMI (Not-in-My-Industry) attitude that raises objections. So I launch usually with a more macro view of recent significant data. The sole purpose of these schema busters is to establish that significant changes are underfoot which require an alteration of the current marketing strategy, a realization of that "Ignore at your own peril" moment.

After all, why else would I be advocating a marketing strategy change?

Lately, I've had good results using the following slides.

 

Slide 1.

Social Media Sites are now among some off the top web properties. Dramatic changes have taken place since 2007.

Compete data | Erik Qualman's Socialnomics slideshare

There's no sense in being taken down on the first serve. As they say, begin on an unassailable point. Starting off with  Compete, Quantcast or Nielsen data -  authoritative market and web researchers - does just that. So I start by borrowing this slide from Erik Qualman's Socialnomics slideshare which shows Compete data to show that social media has changed significantly the top visited places on the net - places where people are sharing photos, product recommendations and links to articles with friends and colleagues. (Perhaps not the best time to point out that  'adultfriendfinder' will soon be replaced by Chatroullete though.)

This simple slide forces the conclusion " Dang, major tectonic shifts  have happened since 2007." More importantly, it forces the question," Maybe we should revisit our strategy?"

 

Slide 2.

People online now spend 7 hours per month "friendcasting".

This is more time than spent on search engines Google & Yahoo, as well as MSN and YouTube combined.

In a sense there's nothing really shattering about the data actually as it reinforces what we've always known, Word of Mouth is the most powerful recommendation driver.

You can make a similar point by referencing Compete's latest data in terms of "attentional time" market share, shown  in a more visual format.

Slide 3.

Facebook Commands More "Attentional time" Market Share than Google or YahooSource: MarketingCharts, Feb 2010

What's cool about these last two slides is that they now set the stage for you to raise the question: Would you like your company to be part of this 7 hour per month conversation, one which is rising in attentional market share? Be part of the shared photos? The shared articles? The product reviews and recommendations?

Slide 4

Facebook is Besting Google in Driving Traffic to the main portal sites.

Based on data from Compete, Feb 2010

Compete Inc. and their director of online media and search Jessica Ong ignited a powder keg in revealing this data during a late February interview with the San Francisco Chronicle,

I say "powder keg" as this data ignited considerable reaction from within the SEO community. So be advised, Search and SEO aficionados within your audience may also take issue, especially as that group commands the lion's share of the digital marketing spend today. (It may help with any tumult here to say, to those who dispute that Google competes with Facebook and Twitter that more recently Google lists both as competitors in their latest 10-K report. )

 

Slide 5.

Social Networking is Passing Search in Driving Referral Traffic

Source: Compete January 2010

I first saw this slide just days ago during an enlightening presentation by Gigya CEO, David Yovanno at Gigya's "Social is The Next Search" webinar. While I've not actually used this slide yet, I will as it really delivers the coup de grace. In fact, if you only have one slide to show - this is it.

That social sharing is outdistancing search in referral traffic was pointed out earlier in a prescient blog post by ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick. He wrote

What would it mean if social networking over-took search in terms of sheer visits online? It would mark a sea-change on the internet. No longer would our dominant use of the web be seeking out web-pages built by HTML web-masters! Now we would all be publishing tiny little updates that perhaps only our friends and family care about. We'd be subscribing, more than we ever did by RSS, to syndicated updates from organizations of interest, large and small.

There's no doubt: there's an increasing intersection between search and social sharing. But perhaps it isn't that people are changing the way they search,  so much as their friends are changing the way they find things. One of the more important questions you can open up at this point: Is the digital marketing spend allocation for social media vs search adjusted to these new market realities?

So there you have it: Five slides that can all be understood in five minutes. (Isn't it odd that we have to unroll the past conceptions, bust the old 2007 mental schemas, in order to see the best way to meet the future?)

What slides do you find work best to open the door to deeper social media discussions?

 

Postscript: My title notwithstanding, I am not advocating a wholesale revision of the search vs social media budgets planned. Just saying: The relative sizes may not be in line with the most recent 4-6 month marketing data.