Social Pros 13 – Ryon Harms, Farmers Insurance
Posted on 27. Apr, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, edison research, Facebook fan pages, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media research, tom webster
This is Episode 13 of the Social Pros Podcast : Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media. This episode features Ryon Harms, the head of social media for Farmers Insurance. Read on for insights from Ryon, and our Social Media Stat of the Week (this week: 44% of Americans see tweets mentioned nearly every day, but only 10% of Americans actually use Twitter).
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Social Pros Transcript For Your Reading Enjoyment, Thanks to Speechpad for the Transcription
Jay: And here we are with episode number 13 of the Social Pros podcast. Lucky number 13. I am Jay Baer, joined today not by Eric Boggs, not by Eric Boggs, but by a different Tarheel. Our good friend, oft-mentioned on the podcast but never actually a participant, Mr. Tom Webster, the Vice President of Strategy for Edison Research.
Tom, thank you for pinch hitting for our man Eric. It is fantastic and an honor to have you on the podcast.
Tom: Hello today. Not lucky 13 for Mr. Boggs, I’m afraid.
Jay: Evidently not. It will all be fine we hope for Mr. Eric. Thanks for being here, Tom. You were in a crazy season. Some people know you, many people on the podcast of course know you for your work in the social media research area. But your company is perhaps best known as the proprietors of the exit polling in American politics.
Tom: Yeah, that’s right. Pretty much everything that you’ve seen on TV, anything that you’ve read in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, NBC about who voted and why in the recent primaries, and certainly who’s going to vote and why coming up in the national election this November. That all comes from my company. We see lots and lots of numbers.
Jay: I know you picked it for Dukakis, but forgive that one.
Tom: Well, yeah. Unfortunately Paul Simon dropped out before the primaries start.
Jay: Every time I’m in Illinois and I drive past the Paul Simon Memorial Expressway with the bow tie on the highway sign I always chuckle a little bit about that.
You have some exciting research that you have put out recently, which we’ll talk about in the social media stat of the week. You have some additional research on the way. Would you like to tease that research Mr. Webster?
Tom: I would tease it. I’m not sure it’s going to behave very well when I tease it. We’re going to be releasing a major update to our social habits series. This will be a presentation on how Americans are using social media and why, and a general look at various platforms and different behaviors on those platforms.
I’m going to be releasing that at BlogWorld, I think kicking off BlogWorld, the morning of June 5th with that. We’ve been teasing little bits of data from it. I know I teased a little bit this week, which perhaps we’ll get to. It’s from a major national random representative survey of Americans 12 plus. Super excited. This is our 20th such survey, and we’ve been tracking a lot of these things for six years now.
Jay: Nothing starts off a major conference better in the morning than a presentation on research. That’s been my experience.
Tom: Bucket full of numbers. That’s how I like to start the day.
Jay’s Thought of the Week
Jay: Fantastic. My thought of the week is this: I found an interesting blog post the other day on Social Media Today. I really enjoyed it, because it did some myth busting. It was from JD Rucker.
The headline was provocative. It said, “Why local businesses should stop focusing on their Facebook page.” JD’s premise was that lots of local companies have rushed into Facebook, created Facebook pages, because of course it’s low cost or no cost at least from an out of pocket perspective. Of course, it takes a lot of time to do it well as we all know.
But that many of those local businesses then don’t actually have any audience, so they’re putting up all kinds of photos of dining patrons and aren’t our donuts fantastic, and it’s crickets. There’s three people commenting or liking.
His premise is that geez, maybe what we need to do is turn this on its head and encourage the patrons of those businesses to create content in Facebook so that their friends will see chatter about the businesses that they support. As opposed to social media essentially just being a tiny little press release machine.
Tom: That is a super-interesting take on that to me, because I think a lot of what people forget, especially for local businesses, is that social media starts offline, goes online, and then goes back offline again. If you are a local business, encouraging people to tell their stories I think starts at the store. It starts at the retail location, it starts in the restaurant, it starts where you are, and giving people a reason to tell those stories.
The other thing I would point out too, and some of this research that we will release, some of this is research that we and others have released. There are a lot, especially younger demos have lots and lots of Facebook friends. If you’re 18 to 24 or 18 to 39 or so on, you’ve got 300 or 400 Facebook friends.
You’re checking your Facebook page several times a day, four or five times a day. Thanks to the Facebook algorithm EdgeRank, the content that you’re actually interacting with, largely from your actual friends is what’s getting prioritized. If you’re local business and you’re not bringing it on Facebook and actually interacting with people and getting them to engage with you, your content will just never be seen.
Jay: Yeah, I did a webinar earlier today with our friends at ExactTarget. We talked about how email has a linear deliverability mechanism. If you send somebody an email, they’re going to get it. They may not open it, they may not click on it, but they’re going to get it.
You put a status update on Facebook and a much, much small percentage of the people who theoretically have subscribed to interact with you will actually see anything that you publish. I think that’s a misconception in the industry. People say, “Well, I’ve got 16,000 fans, so 16,000 people will see that.” That’s just not true.
Tom: Well, I’ll give you a bigger misconception. Social media throws off a ton, a crap ton in fact, to use the technical term, of click stream data. We think we have all of this information that we can mine from Twitter, we think we have all this info that we can mine from Facebook.
If I run an ad on AMC or A&E or some cable network, I can give you a pretty good estimate how many people saw that ad. It’s an estimate, but an estimate works within some kind of parameters, right? But if I put out a tweet or I put out a Facebook post, you cannot tell me how many people read it. There’s no click stream path to that data.
You cannot tell me how many people actually read my message. That’s something that click stream data is just not going to give you.
Jay: Yeah, it’s interesting and I wonder if at some point that data will be revealed. It is theoretically possible to get at if the proprietors of that information, Facebook, Twitter, etc. wanted to do so. They could cookie set, they could do some other things to make that information available, but perhaps it’s not in their best interests to do so.
Tom: Yeah, maybe not. Even then, they could make available that I had the opportunity to see it, but not necessarily that I saw it.
Jay: Right. Exactly. Speaking of data, what is the social media stat of the week?
Social Media Stat of the Week: 44% of Americans See Tweets Mentioned Nearly Every Day
Tom: Well, I’m going to give you one. An entirely self-serving one, but it’s one that just completely surprised me when we uncovered it. It’s a piece of data that I wrote about on my blog, BrandSavant.com. Plug. Slash plug.
It’s a piece of research that we did again based on this data set we’re going to reveal about a little bit about the disparity between the number of people who are aware of Twitter and the number of people who actually use Twitter. That’s been a significant disparity for several years now.
This year, the number of Americans 12 plus who use Twitter is about 10%. The number of Americans 12 plus who are aware of Twitter is actually 89%. It’s an enormous disparity there, and that’s been the case for the past three years.
We got at that with a number of questions. The one that really stuck I think was this. We asked people, “How often do you see tweets talked about or mentioned or shown on other media? On traditional media, such as television or radio or newspapers, or on other websites?”
The answer that came back actually shocked me, and I’m well nigh unshockable as you know, Jay. The answer that came back was that 44% of Americans 12 plus reported that they see tweets mentioned on other media nearly every day. Nearly every day.
80% of Americans 12 plus, again that’s all Americans, even offline Americans, which about 15% of Americans don’t have Internet access. 80% of Americans said that they have at least once seen tweets mentioned in other media. This, to me, up ends a little bit of how we think we use Twitter and what we think we’re doing when we use Twitter.
A lot of the people who use Twitter frequently may use it conversationally, but what this data suggests is that most Americans, and again, that’s the majority of Americans 12 plus, view Twitter as a broadcast network. They’re getting information broadcast from them. They’re not interacting with it, they don’t even belong to Twitter.
But tweets have reached, tweets have power. I think what that means is that if you’re famous, you’re a lot more famous thanks to Twitter. That’s another broadcast.
Jay: Especially in certain categories, right? In sports, how often does ESPN report on tweets? Hourly, by the minute. Entertainment business, same thing. Celebrity musings on Twitter are reported via television and in print every single day.
It is a symbiotic relationship, because the other group, celebrities, athletes, the other group that uses Twitter disproportionately are the media. So it all works together.
As a long ago journalism major, however, I have railed against this in the past. I don’t think on the podcast but in other places. To me it’s the epitome of lazy reporting, though. Instead of actually getting your notepad and getting on the phone or emailing somebody even, to actually get a quote for your story or get a real perspective, it’s, “Well, let’s just copy and paste their Twitter feed and we’ll call that a quote.”
Number one, you’re taking somebody out of context in some cases. Number two, you’re not actually doing any reporting. I have twitter.com myself. Why do I need your journalism organization to tell me what somebody else said when I could read it for myself on Twitter or in an RSS feed or any other number of places?
Tom: Well, but I’ll give you the flipside of that, Jay. You have a journalism background. I happen to be a celebrity athlete.
I absolutely appreciate the opportunity to have a platform like Twitter where I can get the word out about my new album, about my autobiography that’s coming out. I think it’s some of my best work. As a celebrity athlete, my opportunities have never been greater.
Jay: My problem is not with the celebrity athletes or the gin-soaked market researchers. It’s more that the media are taking Twitter reporting and calling it journalism. That I think is not only doing a disservice to the practice of journalism, but also bodes poorly for the nature of real investigation.
If we’re not going to actually ask any questions, we’re just going to copy and paste statements from people in 140 characters, we don’t really have that fourth estate anymore, do we?
Tom: No. That’s an excellent point.
Jay: But you know what? If that’s our biggest problem, that’s a high class problem. If journalism reporting tweets is our worst possible depth of despair, I’ll take it.
Tom: I think it hurts journalists to lose the curation aura and to cede it to other people, I think. I don’t think they’re all like that, but we’ve certainly seen enough indications of tweets being put uncurated, seemingly randomly selected tweets, on national news networks during significant events. I can do that myself, just as you say, and I’m merely a celebrity athlete.
Jay: Speaking of Twitter and the confluence of Twitter and politics, I wanted to ask you about your thoughts. I don’t think you and I have ever discussed this. Your thoughts about the seemingly faux accounts that Newt Gingrich and other members of the political establishment have run up, and they’re crowing about the number of Twitter followers that they have.
Some research suggested that a disproportionate share of those followers were robotic or fake. How do you feel about that?
Tom: I think it’s a useful case study for everyone listening to this podcast, to think about how easily those things are gained. To think about how influence can be gained, to think about how followers can be gained.
Because, and I’ve written about this in the past, the attempts so far to predict the results of some of the primaries that we’ve looked at, the caucuses and the primaries in the GOP selection process on social media, have ranged from awful to exponentially awful. There’s very little correlation between how a GOP candidate seems to perform in terms of mentions and sentiment with the number of people that actually walk to the polls and flip the switch or fill in the bubble.
That’s a fact. You can go back and look at that. If you are a brand manager and you’re watching this, and you’re seeing how easily these things are gained and you’re seeing how they potentially don’t have correlation with real world behaviors, replace politics with breakfast cereal.
Replace politics with whatever your brand is and consider that for a moment. That what you’re getting raw, what you’re getting unfiltered from social media, may not be what you think you’re getting. Doesn’t mean it’s useless, it means you’ve got to do some work to make it useful.
Jay: That is a really interesting point and I think a fantastic segue to bring in our special guest for this week, Mr. Ryon Harms, who’s the Director of Social Media for Farmers Insurance. Ryon, thanks very much for being on the show.
Special Guest: Ryon Harms of Farmers Insurance
Ryon Harms, Farmers Insurance @thesocialexec
Ryon: Thanks, Jay, for having me. Happy to be here.
Jay: Tom was just talking about this notion of big audience, and does big audience translate into big business results. Farmers in particular has really been well known for some pretty aggressive tactics, especially on Facebook and now recently on Twitter as well.
In particular, I think you still have the Guinness Book of World Records record for most likes on Facebook accumulated in a 24 hour period. Is that correct?
Ryon: Yeah, we got two million friends in 24 hours.
Jay: Two million likes in 24 hours. That is, and no offense, Ryon, intended, but when I think about what brand could I possibly rush to Facebook to click a button for, Farmers Insurance or any insurance company for that matter, is not high on that list.
Ryon: No, absolutely. It’s a really interesting.. part of what we do and what we try to do is to try to do things differently, try to differentiate ourselves, try to position ourselves in places where not only where our competitors are not but potentially even where other companies are not, other companies or brands haven’t really been.
The two million fans actually came from a campaign that we did within the game Farmville. If anybody’s ever done any sort of advertising or marketing inside of Farmville, they understand this firehose effect that can come from the participation, engagement that happens within that network.
The big goal wasn’t so much to get these two million people to come and like our Facebook page. In fact, we were a little surprised by how big a number that actually was. It was to be in a place where people are highly engaged, it was a great demographic for us, and it was an opportunity to be the first financial services company to do anything within Farmville, one of the first companies in general to do it. It was a great way for us to really try to make a big impact in a new space.
Tom: Much respect for that, for two million fans. I know hard it is to get a Guinness World Record. I have one in goulash eating. How much did you actually beat the old record by, or was it a brand new record?
Ryon: No, it was actually an existing record. I think the previous record was held by Frito Lay, and I believe it was for about 1.5 million fans. I believe that the majority of those fans actually came from a Farmville promotion they did as well.
Jay: We’re going to have them on the show and see how bitter they are about this whole development.
Ryon: Yeah. It’s a Guinness World Record and it’s two million fans. But I think what you’re trying to get to is really, we did this big thing and truly what is the business value out of doing something like this?
We saw a lot of value from a lot of different things. The exposure that we got, the millions and millions of people. I think at one point our Facebook page was getting about 16,000 hits a second or something like that. We had millions of people come in, great exposure. We were able to provide them with something within the game that was really useful for them.
I think as much as we put… I think sometimes social media gets a lot of slack for the ROI issue. We have seen very significant ROI in other things that we’ve done. When I think about what we did in Farmville, I think it’s much more akin to advertising, more like what the advertising team might be doing.
When we think about TV commercials, a small percentage of them are probably very successful in actually achieving what they want to do, but people continue to do it and spend hundreds of millions of dollars doing that. I think it’s interesting how social media gets put into this special place when people think about business value when a lot of marketing is approached this way.
Jay: Well said, and I really liked the way you framed that. The most recent campaign that you did was perhaps not a Guinness World Record, but another first. That was a Twitter hashtag on the back of a NASCAR Sprint Cup series race vehicle. Kasey Kahne’s Number Five Chevrolet.
You used the hashtag “#Farmers5″ during a race just last weekend or the week before.
Ryon: Yeah, we did it last weekend and we did it the weekend before. It was a really… they sent me down to Phoenix to check out the racetrack and see how it all works. It was really exciting.
One of the first things that I noticed was that we’re not NASCAR sponsors, we sponsor this driver. I started to look and try to figure out where is the canvass here. What can we use in this offline space to create an experience that’s online? How can we take our main asset, which is a race car, and make it into an interactive experience?
Furthermore, I didn’t want to go and put our Twitter handle to be the main thing that’s on the car. Essentially that’s one of those pet peeves of mine where I see a link to someone’s Facebook page or their Twitter account. Why? Why would you want to do that?
When I looked at the car, I also heard lots of great stories about how NASCAR fans are heavily engaged through Twitter itself. I thought why don’t we, as a company, try to create something that connects people with each other as opposed to trying to connect us as a company? Once we connect them with each other we can listen in and try and figure out ways to contribute to that conversation.
Putting the hashtag on the car was I think a great way to actually do that. One, is to let everybody know hey, this is the channel that you use if you’re a Kasey Kahne fan and you want to talk with each other and find each other online and trends connections, which a lot of those actually happen.
We put it on the car. A lot of the real engagement happened leading up to the actual race itself. Once the conversation got started, I was looking for ways to interject Farmers and figure out how we can maybe give away a couple things, just some random acts of kindness or whatever, and really start to listen in on conversation, participate in the conversation.
Though I’m fairly new to NASCAR, just in that experience of immersing myself with the fans, I actually became a huge NASCAR fan and Kasey Kahne fan. More than anything I really became a fan of the fans if you will. The passion that they had.
It’s truly amazing how in NASCAR, how the fans can be almost as passionate about the sponsor than as they are with the driver itself. It’s huge. Right?
Jay: Yeah, it’s amazing. That’s really impressive. You don’t really see it in any other sport like that. It’s a pretty unique situation. Did your team interact with fans in real time during the race and foster that conversation, put gas on that fire?
Ryon: Yeah. Like I said, a lot of the gas that we put on the fire came leading up to the race. A lot of the conversations that were happening. By the time we got to the race, it was actually interesting if you want me to tell the story here.
On Friday morning, I’d already been interacting with them, I’d already started building our relationship with some of the hardcore Kasey Kahne fans on Twitter. I realized that this #Farmers5 thing was really taking off, so that gave me the idea what if we could get this to actually trend on Twitter? That would exponentially grow the exposure for us.
I put out a tweet and I said, “Hey, what do you guys think about trying to make #Farmers5 a trend?” Someone was like, “Yeah, we should do that. Let’s all tweet at the same time.” I said, “When do you suggest that we do that?” and somebody else chimed in and said, “Why don’t we all tweet #Farmers5 on lap five, because it’s the five car and it’s #Farmers5.”
Jay: There you go, now you’re talking.
Ryon: Everybody started jumping in like yeah, that’s a great idea. Really, even though I sparked it the fans came up with the idea and that was fantastic. By the time that Saturday came around, everybody was talking on Twitter about we’ve got to make this thing trend. #Farmers5 on lap five.
Then it actually, as people were talking about it on Saturday, it started trending for people. In the act of trying to make it trend it actually started trending for some folks in certain places. It was really fun and people started tweeting out screenshots of it trending for them. We grabbed some of those screenshots.
By the time the race came there was this high intensity of what we’re going to do. I really felt like us as a company were a part of the team here, trying to make this happen. Jeff [Hammond] right before the race, he came in and he talked about, he’s like, “‘NASCAR’s all about Twitter and hashtags. You don’t believe me, here’s Kasey Kahne’s car.”
He showed the #Farmers5 on TV, and everybody on Twitter’s going crazy. They’re like, “Oh, they showed the #Farmers5.” Then came to lap five and everybody was tweeting and it was really taking off. We had several, I think it was like 4,000 or 5,000 people that were tweeting #Farmers5.
I forget, there were 14,000 tweets that actually mentioned it. In any case, we couldn’t get it to actually trend on lap five, but everybody was doing it, everybody was super-excited about it. A lot of it is just Twitter has its own algorithm of when the tweets come in and when it was earlier. It was difficult to do anyway. And we didn’t have a plan to do it.
It went off. In the middle of the race, Kasey was doing great so I put out a tweet to really rally the fanbase, like, “Hey everybody, this is a rally tweet, everybody tweet this, let’s go.” It started taking off and Kasey started doing better. It was a really exciting thing to be one of the fans.
We built a lot of, I would think, a lot of credibility with the fans. We’re just there to try to give them the best possible experience.
Jay: Yeah, it wasn’t a sales pitch, right? It wasn’t like, “Hey, two for one flood insurance on lap seven.” It wasn’t that kind of come on. Make sure you send us a good photo of the car, we’ll put it in the podcast notes. That’ll be awesome.
Ryon: All right, sounds good.
What did happen was there were a lot of spontaneous tweets started coming out. I was with State Farm for a long time, or I’m sorry, with a competitor for a long time, and I’m going to switch over to you guys now, you guys are so engaged and this is awesome.
Somebody’s like, “I just bought three policies” and did this and did that. That was without us asking them, it was just because I think that they saw that we were really just about the fans.
Jay: Nice. You know what’s really interesting, and last question for you before we get into the shout outs. That you have a lot of these big brand programs where you’re reaching a lot of people at once, Twitter, Facebook, etc. But yet operationally, you have this network of 15,000 local agents who are all doing their own social media program as well.
It’s really fascinating. You’re hitting on both of those. How do those tie together, and how do you keep 15,000 local agents in line when most of them have Facebook pages as I understand it?
Ryon: A good percentage of them have Facebook pages. I wouldn’t say that most of them do. Actually at the agent level is the most exciting part of what we do. I think we really see our agents as these 15,000 points of light in these local communities.
When I was brought on, it was because I totally supported the fact that what we should be doing is leading with our agents. For the simple fact that people on Facebook want to connect with faces, not with logos.
Jay: That’s where they buy, right? They buy from the agents. You don’t buy from Farmers Insurance.
Ryon: Exactly, that’s where they buy, the majority of our policies come from being sold by the agents in local communities. These are real people. I spent the last year or so traveling around the country, speaking to the agents, basically teaching them how to be themselves. How to be authentic, how to come across, how to find their voice on Facebook.
You read that blog article today that said that small businesses shouldn’t be trying to build up their Facebook pages or whatever, but in fact that’s where we see many thousands of policies actually be sold through Facebook is through our local agents. That’s actually where we actually are able to track direct ROI with policies written and revenues coming in from agents assigning those leads within their CRM tool.
I would have to disagree with that blog post. I haven’t read it, but just from what you said about it, which is that absolutely, the small business owners I think have a huge advantage over big companies like ours. We’ve got to take advantage because we’ve got all these small business owners.
Jay: You use Hearsay to manage all those folks?
Ryon: Yeah, exactly. We use Hearsay. It’s a way for us to… I wouldn’t say manage. It’s really more about supporting and suggesting content out to them, and providing them with tools they can use if they want to. We don’t force anything out to their Facebook pages, because then it would completely take away from our message that this really needs to be about them.
Jay: But you allow them to syndicate things locally. You put content out there that they can pull down to their local page if they want to?
Ryon: Yes, exactly.
Jay: Then Hearsay’s built in so that individual agents maintain FINRA compliance and things along those lines?
Ryon: Yeah, exactly. There’s a whole compliance layer that’s behind it that archives things, that does the best that it can to keep track of all the compliance issues and things that we do. In that sense, it’s an indispensable tool, because we get both the marketing part of it which is the part that gets me excited, that gets me interested in it and gets the agents excited, and then the compliance part which is the base…
Jay: Which gets compliance excited. Yeah, I understand.
Ryon: Yeah, which gets the compliance excited, precisely.
Jay: Send us a couple links to agents that you think are representative of that initiative. We’d love to drop in a couple of screenshots of the things that they’re doing.
Ryon: Absolutely. I’ve got a couple agents, I think their Facebook pages are more sophisticated than the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies, including ours.
Jay: Hey, we’re always hiring here at Convince & Convert. If those guys want to get out of the insurance racket, you just let me know.
Ryon: I think I might have a couple for you.
Jay: Fantastic.
Tom: Hey Ryon, really quick, when I think of Farmers I think of JK Simmons. I think of that great TV campaign that you guys continue to run. Is he part of your social efforts at all? I think he’s a pretty compelling spokesperson for you.
Ryon: JK, not directly. We have used the Professor in different places, like for instance in the Farmville campaign. He was a part of that campaign as far as, we had a Farmville-ized version of the Professor that was in it. We did some crossing there.
I think that you’re right. I think that’s a huge opportunity and something that we’re looking to do. We don’t want to just rush into it, we’re looking for that great idea, that great opportunity to actually be able to do it. I think that’s absolutely on the horizon for us.
Jay: Ryon, do you have a Social Pros shout out for us?
Ryon: Yeah, I’ve got a few actually. I think there’s always the great social media bloggers like yourself and Jeremiah, which I read fairly religiously. To be honest, I think the biggest inspirations to me have become, over this last year, agents for one.
There are agents out there that are just killing it out there. They allow me to see their insights and things in the back end, and their virality and things like that are just killer. Ten times the amount that I think most corporate pages have. Every day, the agents help each other. We’ve got an internal social network where the agents are sharing ideas.
From there, I get some of the best practices. They inspire me to continue to get better, and they challenge me to come up with better content, better things for them. They’re a big inspiration.
I think the other inspiration that I have is a lot of the people that I work with are co-workers. Over the last year we’ve built a lot of trust with each other. Because of that, they give me a canvass that’s so much bigger to work with. The fact that I could put a hashtag on the back of a race car is so amazing. I think three or four years ago when I started using hashtags on Twitter, it was a little bit of a geek thing to do. It made me smile to see a hashtag on the back of a race car.
Things like that can only happen when you’ve got the whole support of the people around you. The agents and my co-workers I think are definitely probably the biggest inspirations that I have right now.
Jay: I completely agree. It’s like we said in the book, and I know Tom agrees as well. Without corporate culture, without everybody believing in being in social, none of this actually works.
Ryon: I couldn’t agree more.
Jay: Thanks very much for being here. Fantastic story, you were a great guest. We appreciate your time and all the exciting things you’re doing. Please keep us posted on other exciting stuff that you have rolling out.
Great show today. Thank you very much to my man Tom Webster for stepping into the breach. Also thanks as always to our sponsors, Eric’s company, Argyle Social who we use for all of our social media stuff. Our friends at Infusionsoft who we use for all of our email stuff. And our buddy Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch.com.
We’ll be back next week with more exciting stuff on Social Pros. Real people, talking about real work in social media.
Our Dangerous Addiction to Social Media Case Studies
Posted on 15. Nov, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media analytics, social media case studies, social media case study, social media ROI, tom webster
The two most important words in social media should be “so what?”
As Tom Webster eloquently put it in his recent Blogworld keynote, when research wears the cloak of content marketing, it’s a recipe for the incurious to pull a fast one on the masses, disguising pointless data as gospel.
Tom was referring to data-dredging and the spate of statistical “best practices” that bubble up in social media like something in Jed Clampett’s back yard. But it applies equally to the basket of case studies that are left for us each day by the sites that chronicle social’s advance. It’s like Moses in the bullrushes but with “math” instead of blankets.
The Recalcitrant Social Media Cheerleader
Point Less
Too often, we try to wield these case studies as a crude evidentiary weapon, trying to persuade ourselves or our superiors that our belief system around social media, social business, social CRM and all that jazz is in fact correct. But in almost every case, you’re bringing a knife to a gunfight. Or maybe even a limp noodle.
Case studies should be used for ideation, not ratification. Even in the best possible scenario, where the case study in question is extraordinarily applicable to your business goals, social media situation, KPIs, budget, timeline, customer personas and more (which is a rare alignment indeed), you are placing significant influential value on ONE outcome. That’s anecdote-driven decision making at its worst.
If you only need to hear one story that you find persuasive, I can convince you of ANYTHING if I get to select the parable.
Beyond the fact that case studies are often strategically irrelevant because the company profiled is in a different industry, with different goals, competitors, and customer expectations (among other variances), perhaps the biggest problem with most social media success stories is that the measures of that success are largely without real merit.
Social Media Case Studies – The Crack of the Stat
My favorite example last week was the glowing report on ClickZ of Louisville Slugger‘s scavenger hunt promotion. Evidently, the erstwhile manufacturer of wood and aluminum bats launched (with agency help) a one-day promotion on October 29 in St. Louis. They hid 45 commemorative World Series bats around STL and posted clues on their Facebook and Twitter accounts as to their whereabouts.
I’m no baseball manufacturing expert (but I do adore the Louisville Slugger Museum in downtown L-ville), but I’m guessing they ultimately need to sell bats to kids and weekend warriors to maintain/expand their business. The MLB buys what they buy, and the Twitter acumen of the company has a zero percent impact on whether Derek Jeter swings their wood.
Strategically then, the question becomes “does hiding and giving away 45 bats and talking about it in social media ultimately sell more bats to amateurs (either current or new customers)?”
And the simple answer is that we do not know. This case study appeared 10 days after the conclusion of the promotion. Is 240 hours enough time to determine the true impact of this promotion? Of course not. November is hardly peak season for bat sales anyway, and any bottom-line impact of this campaign would need a while to germinate and flower.
But that doesn’t stop the agency (presumably), the company, and ClickZ from proclaiming the unmitigated success of the effort. On what basis? Evidently, Louisville Slugger saw a 834% increase in the “talking about this” metric on Facebook, which purports to measure total number of Facebook users referencing the brand in any capacity whatsoever.
Well, if you go to 45 locations around town in one day and give stuff away, a goodly portion of the people angling to be the recipient of free goods will be updating status, location, photos and so forth. It’s what we do now, and our proclivity to shout from the status rooftops about the awesome thing we’re engaged in at this very moment is exacerbated by three factors: deviation from the hum drum norm; a crowd; and free stuff. Wisely, Louisville Slugger designed a program that hit for the cycle, and St. Louis residents choosing to spend a portion of their Saturday chasing after free baseball bats responded on Facebook en mass.
But does a 834% increase in people “talking about you” on Facebook achieve business goals like sales, retention, average order size, advocacy, etc? Again, in this instance we do not know yet. Before this initiative (and I give them credit for divulging real numbers) Louisville Slugger had 755 people talking about them for the week. Afterwards, it was 7,049.
The brand spent considerable time and effort to drive a short-term spike in conversations about it on Facebook. So what? You might argue that because they also saw 100%+ week over week increases in Facebook fans and Twitter followers, that this campaign was a smash. Again, so what? They have 21,000 Facebook fans, and their best posts (announcing a second giveaway) show an engagement rate of .03. They have 3,200 Twitter followers, and the account essentially parrots their Facebook status updates.
I’m not suggesting this is a flawed campaign or wholly without merit. We simply do not know whether it has strategic or financial merit, and I’d love to see a case study that tracks sales and customer retention in the St. Louis market on a 60-day trailing basis. Now THAT would be a case study.
I am not irked by the idea, or the effort behind it. I am irked by the near-instant reporting and self-congratulatory reach around that content repositories, agencies, and corporations are engaged in every time they find some statistic that allegedly proves that their idea was a big success. And I’m irked that we fall for it every time, retweeting and sharing and printing it out for our boss to read on Monday.
We can do better than that, can’t we?
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Quipol is totally free, with advanced functions rolling out for small add-on fees. Check it out.
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Social Media Success is About the Wizard, Not the Wand
Posted on 28. Sep, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, foursquare, location based services, mobile, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media marketing, social media tools, tom webster
Thoughtful research genius Tom Webster wrote an interesting post a couple weeks ago about where the location-based business could head, moving beyond the momentary check-in toward more nuanced and relevant customer interactions, using location data as the raw materials.
His example was his local watering hole, where he figures by the time he’s checked in 10 times, the offer they make on Foursquare should encourage his evangelism, not just offer a discount on an item he doesn’t order.
And he’s absolutely right. Businesses could – and should – be doing so much more with location-based services like Foursquare, unified social log-ins like Janrain, custom landing tabs on Facebook, video, Google Analytics, mobile, ad retargeting with Fetchback, multi-variate testing, and about 100 other things. But you know why they aren’t? Because they are trying to run their core business, not maximize the value of Foursquare.
Pointing the Finger in the Wrong Direction
I think Tom (and others) are misplacing the blame. We have all the tools we need to do amazing digital and social marketing right now. The problem with advanced social marketing isn’t the wand, it’s the wizards.
We have so much crazy and amazing stuff at our disposal that it’s hard to fathom the days of not-so-long-ago when the big corporate decision was what size to make the direct mail piece.
Businesspeople (especially small business), and even professional marketers cannot possibly keep up with the pace of social media innovation. It’s wholly and completely unsustainable, and instead of learning to swim in this river of invention, it’s making people scared of getting in the water.
Whose fault is it that Klout is widely misused? Klout’s or the companies that use it? Whose fault is it that most companies utilize about 10% of Google Analytics’ capabilities? Google’s or the companies that don’t have time to learn how to use it better? Whose fault is it that for many companies Twitter is still just a tiny press release machine? Twitter’s, or the companies that use it that way?
We don’t have a technology and tools problem. We have an understanding and adoption problem, which is driven primarily by confusion and lack of time. In fact, I think we genuinely would be better off as marketers if we had a six month moratorium on EVERYTHING. No new Facebook features. No new social networks. No new YouTube functionality. No new Instagram or Foursquare or Viddy or mobile apps or near field communications or QR codes or the hot new skywriting app somebody is cooking up as I write this.
I am fortunate enough to do social marketing for a living, and it’s still challenging to keep up with it all. I can’t imagine how somebody with a “real job” doesn’t feel constantly overwhelmed.
Let’s focus on doing just a few things better, and worry less about doing everything that’s possible.
The Real Reason Your Customers Don’t Like You on Facebook
Posted on 26. Sep, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, edison research, exacttarget, facebook, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media research, tom webster
In addition to the controversial redesign of the news feed, and announcements from the f8 conference about the new Timeline profile and app-fueled Graph Rank, was another very interesting Facebook-related development last week.
My friends (and client) ExactTarget released part 10 of their social media research series. This one is called “The Meaning of Like” and analyzes the psychology of consumer use of the “like” button.
(Note that the study was done before Facebook announced that the “like” button would be multiplying like a pair of rabbits on Red Bull, with new “want” “own” “drink” “watch” and “shopping” buttons being spawned).
Although I can see the wisdom (although I use that word in connection with Facebook very loosely) in giving users and companies more specificity in their one-click declarations, #winning with the “like” button alone is pretty damn hard – much less after a severe case of button creep.
How hard is it to win the “like” button game? Data in the free “The Meaning of Like” report shows that 32% of users have never liked a company on Facebook, and 23% of those that have liked a company in the past don’t do so any more.
The Magic 9.8
The average Facebook fan currently “likes” just 9.8 company pages. Nine point eight! I’ve come into contact with (or at least thought about) 50% more brands than that just while authoring the first five paragraphs of this post:
- Apple
- Pro-Form treadmill
- Trekdesk treadmill desk
- Bic pen
- Books from Que, Wiley, Pearson on my desk
- Moleskine
- ExactTarget
- Red Bull
- Spotify
- Audio Technica headphones
- rabbits (not a company, but should start one, and I nominate “the general” from Watership Down as CEO)
How many of those do I currently like on Facebook? Two (and I’ve liked a LOT more than 9.8 company pages in my day).
Likes Don’t Equal Subscriptions
Companies sometimes ask me why they have so few Facebook fans, in comparison to email subscribers and overall customers. If we have 100,000 customers, why don’t we have 100,000 Facebook likes?
Firstly, not every customer is on Facebook. Tom Webster from Edison Research says 52% of Americans are on Facebook, and when Tom Webster talks I listen. So that brings your potential like base to 52,000.
And 32% of users have never liked a company, bringing your theoretical maximum number of Facebook fans to 35,360 (52,000 x 68%).
In most cases, companies aren’t fully committed to promoting their Facebook presence at every turn, meaning that some portion of that 35,560 doesn’t even know you’re on Facebook.
Perhaps most importantly – as underscored by the 9.8 finding, a bunch of your customers – even satisfied ones – don’t think you’re worthy of a like.
Assuming that even your best and most loyal customers will “like” your page is a fallacy, considering you have to battle it out with hundreds of other brands to make it into that “magic 9.8″ likes for the average Facebook user.
Maybe They’re Just Not That Into You
That’s a tall order for every company. Consider: I own two iphones, three ipads, three ipods, and two Mac computers yet I’ve never liked Apple on Facebook.
This defies current conventional wisdom, but the prime objective for your Facebook efforts should not really be to grow your like base, especially through aggressive “like” buying and special offers. Shoot for steady expansion, but recognize that you simply will not be in the “magic 9.8″ for most people.
Instead, you should be redoubling your efforts to activate and encourage the customers who have already liked you. Because while a “like” is just one click, putting you in the “magic 9.8″ is pretty special.
And don’t abuse that vote of confidence. The report shows that 39% of Facebook users do not interpret their own “likes” of a company to equate to permission for that company to deliver marketing messages to the news feed – potentially bad news for the revamped style of applications Facebook announced that will automatically deliver hyper-targeted info to your feed.
I’ve said in the past that the “like” is essentially digital bumper stickering. And now we now just how many stickers will fit on the cars of most Facebook users… 9.8. Our bonds between our Facebook fans and our companies are about to get even more complicated with the announcement that non-fans will now be allowed to post to the Wall, removing one of the rationales for putting you in the magic 9.8 in the first place. Yikes.
5 Reasons Social Media Measurement is Making You Lie to Yourself
Posted on 07. Aug, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, edison research, mack collier, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media marketing, social media measurement, social media metrics, tom webster, top 10
Social media measurement causes unsavory (and ineffective) marketing behavior because unlike the rest of our marketing key performance indicators, social media metrics are out there for anyone to see.
Was it a surprise last week when Presidential wannabe Newt Gingrich was (allegedly) busted for having 1.3 million followers on Twitter, most of which were bots and fake accounts? Not really. It may have raised an eyebrow that someone applying for the most important job in the world would (allegedly) stoop to fakery to boost follower counts. But despite some initial reluctance, politics has embraced the social media Egosystem as much or more than any other industry.
(Nice analysis on it from Ian Lurie over at Conversation Marketing)
Being a former political consultant myself, this kerfuffle got me pondering about social media measurement and the bigger lessons of key performance indicators. I see five.
1. Visibility of Social Media Metrics Drives Behavior
How much do you think we’d be talking about twitter followers or Facebook likes if how many you have wasn’t attached to your public profile like a goiter?
If on every website you visited you saw a number in the corner that showed how many email newsletter subscribers they had, we’d be putting a lot more emphasis into our email programs. We care about twitter followers and Facebook likes disproportionately not because of the power of the medium, but because we keep score in public.
There was a time when there was a lot of news coverage of comparative website “hits” but largely that kind of “story” went away with the fortunate exit of hit counters pinned to the footer of your site. Everyone knows that data from Nielsen, Compete, Quantcast, Alexa and their ilk is only semi-accurate unless the site chooses to report actual numbers, so we’ve mostly accepted the fact that website traffic is a dull topic not worth our curiosity or bile.
2. Our Belief That Bigger is Better Makes It So
Every legitimate social media consultant in America will tell you that it’s not about how many twitter followers or Facebook likes you have, it’s what you do with them. (and good job by Kellye Crane and Mack Collier on that in the CNBC.com coverage of Newt-gate)
In terms of driving measurable behavior, conversions, revenue, loyalty and advocacy, etc. they are of course correct. Number of twitter followers doesn’t mean a thing, right? Wrong.
The reality is that social media measurement is a very public dick measuring competition, and we buy it hook, line, and sinker. Why would Newt not only (allegedly) pay to build a following that dwarfs the other candidates, but then have the audacity/stupidity to brag about the advantage?
Because it matters in the court of public perception. Twitter is used monthly by just 8% of Americans 12 or older, according to Tom Webster and Edison Research, yet the penetration rate amongst “thought leaders” “celebs” and “media” is damn near 100%, and that drives its role as an arbiter of popularity and fame.
We may not like it. We may not even choose to admit it. But it’s disingenuous to suggest that number of twitter followers has no impact on how you or your organization are viewed by the vox populi. It’s not a key performance indicator, it’s a key popularity indicator.
3. You’re Not Much Better Than Newt Yourself
Yes our fascination with the public nature of social media measurement causes some issues. But the bigger problem is that the whole system is a house of cards.
Guess what? While most of your Twitter followers are probably real people they probably don’t see your tweets, much less respond to them. It’s stunning how many marketers – even in major companies and agencies – don’t understand (or choose to ignore) the massive difference between twitter followers and actual twitter reach.
If you have 10,000 followers, do 10,000 people see your tweet? Absolutely not. Many of those people do not use Twitter any longer (abandonment rates have been reported to be as high as 50%), may not be logging on to Twitter today, may not be logging on at a time where your tweet shows up in their timeline, or may use Twitter as a “social telephone” paying attention primarily to @replies.
The reality is that we do not know how many impressions each Tweet generates. We can determine engagement rate via clicks and retweets (I use Convince & Convert sponsor Argyle Social for social communication because of their incredible metrics). But, we cannot determine impressions, because Twitter will not show them to us. Hmmm, I wonder why?
Think about it from an email perspective. Twitter followers is the number of subscribers you have. Twitter reach (impressions) is your open rate, and that’s not available.
A bunch of Newt’s followers are (allegedly) robots. But the net effect of a robot and an actual person that didn’t see your tweets is exactly the same.
4. Facebook Likes Is Just As Bogus
To their credit, Facebook at least shows us actual impressions in their Insights social media measurement console.
But the reality is that in our zeal to accumulate as many “likes” as possible for our fan page (largely comprised of people that already like us, so we’re putting forth extreme effort to preach to the converted), we mostly neglect to notice that a very small percentage of those fans see our carefully crafted status updates.
A report from Pagelever (fresh out of beta, and the best Facebook analytics package available, by far) studying 400 million fans found that just 7.49% of fans (on average) see the status updates from any particular brand. This is because of Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm that sanitizes your news feed based on you and your friends’ propensity to interact with status updates from each brand and person to whom you’re connected on the platform.
Using our email analogy then, we can say that on average (your results may vary), the “open rate” for Facebook is 7.49%, and the “click-through rate” (the interaction rate shown in Insights) mostly ranges from .25% to .9%. Much, much lower than even a middling email campaign.
I’m thinking you’d see a lot less crowing about your 50,000 Facebook likes if you had to report and talk about it using unsexy but true numbers: “3,750 active Facebook likes.”
5. Play Your Own Game
Despite the gold rush, social media is still a nascent industry. One symptom of immature markets is an overwhelming fear of doing it wrong. Nobody wants to lose their job as CMO of a major company because of some newfangled medium that didn’t exist five minutes ago.
This creates a culture of comparison, whereby instead of spending the requisite time and effort crafting a bespoke social media strategy that uniquely fits our company and its culture, we instead yearn to do it just like the other guys.
Share of voice. Comparisons of twitter followers, Facebook likes, and YouTube subscribers. An over reliance on case studies. Even social media competitor audits (and I do many of them). All of these are byproducts of our collective fear about playing our own game.
Should you learn from your competitors and other companies “doing it right” in social media? Sure, but don’t lie to yourself. Realize that the numbers we proudly toss around like silk sashes are often fictitious hair shirts. Proceed accordingly. And with caution.
9 Surprising New Facts About Social Media in America
Posted on 27. May, 2011 by Jay Baer in arbitron, Blog, edison research, facebook, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media research, social media statistics, The Social Habit, tom webster, Twitter
Social media is growing up fast. No longer a niche plaything of the digerati, social media is firmly entrenched as a societal game changer of historical importance. For many, social media and social networking are so ubiquitous and pervasive that we presume we have it figured out, that we have a finger firmly on the pulse. But we don’t. Data about how social media really works, who uses it and how, continues to surprise.
This point was driven home in The Social Habit II, a new report from Edison Research and Arbitron that follows up on their landmark study in 2010 (and their 19th study about the Internet overall).
My friend and the architect of the study, Tom Webster, was kind enough to give me a preview of the report (I also very much recommend Tom’s blog BrandSavant), and here are my personal highlights – the pages that made me say “hmmmm”.
I encourage you to peruse the entire report, which you can access for free in a day or so. Tweet me or Tom (@webby2001) to get the URL. It’s a 50+ page orgy of data based on 2,020 telephone interviews of Americans ages 12 and up, conducted in February, 2011.
9 Surprising New Facts About Social Media in America
1. More People Are Active on Social Networks Than Are Not
52% of Americans have a profile on Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace or elsewhere. This may be a tipping point for social adoption overall.
2. Twitter is a Tiny Sliver
As discussed in “Is Twitter Massively Overrated” a few weeks ago, Twitter’s cultural impact is not driven by the size of its user base, but by its real-time nature, and the types of people who use it. Twitter is used by just 8% of Americans (compared to 51% for Facebook).
3. Twitter is Incredibly Diverse
Just 55% of Twitter uses are White, followed by 22% African-American, 15% Hispanic, and 3% Asian. This is of course substantially more diverse than the population overall, and markedly more diverse than Facebook. I have read that African-Americans use the mobile Web at a much higher rate than the population at-large, and given the propensity of Twitter users to participate via mobile device, I wonder if that’s part of the correlation? Or perhaps I’m confusing cause and effect? Either way, I found it to be a very interesting statistic.
4. The Emergence of the Super Socials
One-third of Americans with a profile on a social network, use those sites several times per day or more. This group of “super socials” (my label, not Edison’s) numbers 46 million, and increase of almost 20% in one year.
5. Super Socials Love Twitter
Partially an explanation of Twitter’s popularity and role in the culture despite it’s relatively small user base, 23% of the “super socials” use Twitter, which is almost triple the rate of Americans overall. (98% of super socials use Facebook, and 45% use MySpace)
6. Super Socials use and Worship their Smartphones
56% of the super socials use smartphones, compared to 31% of the U.S. population surveyed; and when presented the choice of abandoning their smartphone or television, 64% of super socials would choose to keep the phone.
7. Super Socials Interact with Brands
Among habitual social networkers, 43% follow companies on social networks, compared to just 25% of all social network users.
8. Brand Interactions Occur Predominately on Facebook
Among the 25% of respondents that have followed a company in social media, 80% have done so via Facebook. Just 6% have done so on Twitter. This raises an interesting question about companies’ efforts to attract followers on Twitter vs. similar efforts to acquire “likes” on Facebook. Based on this data, it would seem that consumers are perhaps most interested in that type of interaction via Facebook, reserving Twitter for customer service issues (as other research has suggested, most notably from ExactTarget – a client).
9. Facebook is Where Consumers are Influenced about Buying Decisions
72% of respondents said that no social network has influenced their purchase of products and services. Personally, I doubt the veracity of that statistic, as people routinely overlook the subtle ways in which their friends and family (to whom they are probably connected on Facebook and elsewhere) influence their purchases. However, among the survey participants who acknowledged social media’s role in this regard, they cited Facebook overwhelmingly as the source of that influence.
Which of these strikes you as the most interesting? What do you take away from these findings?
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