The Face-to-Face Book: Why Real Relationships Rule in a Digital Marketplace by Ed Keller & Brad Fay

Author:Ed Keller & Brad Fay [Keller, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2012-05-21T14:00:00+00:00

Not a Mirror to the Real World

If social media isn’t a sales tool, then what is its use for a brand? Social media executives and advocates will argue that social media is more about building trust and engaging with consumers. We agree that Twitter and Facebook can be highly useful as conversation channels. But to have that conversation and earn that trust, consumers first have to be willing to talk about your brand and your product through that channel.

The problem is, as studies have found, online consumers aren’t equally interested in all product categories. As we discussed in chapter 1, in 2010 Keller Fay Group contributed to an ambitious academic research project that compared offline conversations about brands with online conversations, and found that just three categories—technology, cars, and entertainment—accounted for two-thirds of all the online conversation about brands. That’s a dramatically different situation from offline, where conversation is far more evenly distributed across more categories. For example, whereas beverages account for 13 percent of offline word of mouth, they account for only 3 percent of online conversations. Other categories that see similar gaps are beauty, food and dining, retail, and apparel. Based on this, we’d argue that if you’re a tech marketer, an investment in a social media presence makes good sense, although our data make clear that you need to be mindful of offline conversations as well, since far more conversations will be taking place that way, even in tech. If you work for a beauty brand, the most effective social media approach is less clear.

Because online word of mouth behavior isn’t an accurate proxy for offline, heavy expenditures of money or human resources in social media shouldn’t be an automatic reflex. In an increasingly resource-starved marketing world, why waste time trying to talk to your customer base about something they don’t want to talk—or, more accurately, tweet—about? More productive investments can be made in other channels that are known to drive word of mouth, for example, advertising, promotions, or in-store media (as we’ve shown in chapters 4 and 5).

One very clear indication of just how different are the worlds of offline and online conversations comes from an analysis of the most talked about brands of 2010, as measured in TalkTrack (factoring in both offline and online conversations), versus the most social online brands of 2010, as measured by Vitrue, a social media management company (see Chart 6.2).

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