Since everyone is rolling our their predictions for 2013, here’s mine. Don’t worry, it isn’t that 2013 will be the year of mobile or Social TV, or that social media “experts” will finally figure out what R.O.I. actually means. (They won’t. They don’t want to.) I have only one prediction for you, and it’s basically this: there is a very good chance that 12 months from now, we will learn that 90% of CEOs have lost faith in marketers.
It should be said that there are tons of solid professionals in Marketing professions, and they will continue to do great work – ethical work – and kick ass. They will solve problems, innovate and teach to others what they’ve learned. Their work and real success will drive everyone forward. Look for new knowledge, new methods and new insights. Real ones. Also look for new software, platforms and products they will have helped design or improve that will help you get more done. You already know who these people are. Even if you’ve never met them, you know who they are inside of five minutes when you hear them talk or watch them work. You know the real deal when you see it.
But the flip side is that the same hacks and posers who faked it all through 2012 and 2011 and 2010 and 2009 and 2008 will continue to lie and sell bullshit in 2013. Why? Because it’s easier. Because they’ve gotten a free pass so far. Because there’s good money to be made, selling bullshit. Because there’s a business model behind it and an “industry” to drive it, complete with metrics and equations and conferences and publishers all lining up to make their buck off confused senior managers with budgets to burn. There’s no incentive for any of this to stop. None. Nobody who has spent the last five years selling bullshit and building a personal brand around it is going to wake up tomorrow and have an epiphany. They know what they’re doing. They’ve been doing it long enough. If they had a conscience or an ounce of professional responsibility, they wouldn’t have chosen that path. They won’t “self-deport” from their trajectory of made-up success and industry status. Not until the speaker invitations and the money dry up. We’ll have to wait until they get fired or move on to the next scam.
So here we are then: 2013. What’s changed? Nothing. As long as there are people who want to believe that President Barack Obama’s birth certificate is fake, there will be people who will want to believe that the “I” in social media ROI stands for influence or interest or insights. As long as some people want to believe that more guns in schools will solve gun violence in schools, there will be people who will want to believe that likes and followers are legitimate measures of brand awareness. As long as some people want to believe that the Earth is only 5,000 years old and came preheated and ready-to-serve, there will be some people who will believe whatever nonsense you want to sell them. An equation. An algorithm. A methodology. A marketing religion. A measurement scheme. It won’t matter that it makes no logical sense, that it is mathematically incorrect, that it is a complete fabrication. It will still sell.
Fact is that if you are willing to lie your ass off, there are people out there who will believe you. Tons of them. Out of stupidity, out of laziness, out of sheer incompetence, it doesn’t matter. They won’t bother to fact-check. They’ll buy the lie, hook, line and sinker, because they don’t know any better, or don’t care, or just don’t want to do the work. If you can sell them something that will deliver good metrics to their bosses with minimal effort or risk from them, you will find eager clients in these people. It’s a simple business arrangement: They need to score that next bonus or promotion. The next case study they publish might even be their ticket to a better job. Sell them a product or vehicle that will make that happen and you’re in. And as long as nobody complains, everybody wins, right?
Well no. The only people who win are the hacks who betrayed the trust of those they ought not have taken advantage of in the first place. The companies that get defrauded don’t win. At all. Their CEOs sure as hell don’t win either. And that’s the rub: every time a social media director or a CMO or a digital consultant repackages a pile of bullshit into a “win” for the executive suite, the already fragile trust between marketers and CEOs further erodes.
For some insights into how bad things are and why, check out this study of the current state of social business. Here are a few takeaways: Only 5% of organizations are highly satisfied with their social media programs. Most of them don’t even have the right goals in place. Almost 40% of social media managers surveyed don’t think that measuring the success of their programs is even important. A business background is only important to 3% of organizations in considering a social media hire.
No wonder hardly anyone in social media understand the first thing about how to measure ROI properly or effectively deploy a social business program across an organization. It’s a shambles. A house of cards. I’ve never seen anything like it.
If you have the time, go to some of the big social media conferences this year and listen to all of the awesome success stories being sold there. Let yourselves be convinced that most companies out there aren’t failing miserably in the social space. Ignore the fact that most of their monitoring practices are operationally disconnected from the rest of their organization, that their “engagement” strategy has slipped into flacid 3rd party content schemes that might as well have been devised by SEO robots, that the connection between social activity and business results is still at best a muddled abstraction, that most brand managers still don’t know that a chunk of the likes and followers they paid digital agencies to acquire for them are fake, or even that the guy they just hired to run their social media program emails and DMs me three times a day to ask me questions someone getting paid what they get paid to do the job they lied about being qualified for shouldn’t be asking in the first place.
Let’s keep pretending that everything’s fine and that those of us who shake our heads at damage being done by the social media guru industry year after year are wrong for demanding more than this giant stinking heap of bullshit.
Here it is again: Only 5% of organizations are highly satisfied with their social media programs. 80% of CEOs no longer trust marketing professionals. A year ago, that number was 70%.
So welcome to 2012, part 2: Bullshit vs. the real deal. Same people on either side of that divide. The tools have gotten better but no other progress has been made. The cause behind this industry-wide fiasco will be the same in 2013 as it was in 2012, and it boils down to a simple word: choice. We all choose to either know our shit or fake it. We all choose to do the work or pretend to. We all choose to report adequately on what is working and what isn’t, or just select pointless KPIs we can easily manipulate to tell the story we want to tell. None of our choices have changed, and none of us have changed either. In spite of all of our new year’s resolutions, we’re still the same people we were in 2012, and for a lot of organizations, that’s a serious problem.
So what will happen this year? Maybe nothing. Or maybe I’m wrong and things will turn around. Maybe a bunch of social media gurus will retire or go find something else to do with their time. Maybe this will be the year when they finally start to lose traction. We’ll see. I won’t hold my breath, but we’ll see. Looking around though, I won’t be surprised if 12 months from now, a study comes out reporting that 90% of CEOs don’t trust marketers anymore. From 70% to 90% in just two years? Is that where we’re headed? There’s a good chance, yeah. And that really bothers me.
I am usually pretty full of ideas, but I have to admit that this time, I am stumped. I have no clue how to fix this.
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I’m also blogging over on the Tickr blog these days too, so if you want more stats, facts, infographics, insights and less opinion, go check it out. You won’t miss the bite, I promise.
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And as always, if you are tired of bullshit and just want straight answers to real questions about value, process, planning, measurement, management and reporting in the social business space, pick up a copy of Social Media R.O.I.: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization. The book is 300 pages of facts and proven best practices. (Go to smroi.net to sample a free chapter first, just to make sure it’s worth the money.)
And if English isn’t your first language, you can even get it in Spanish, Japanese, German, Korean and Italian now, with more international editions on the way.
CEO-Read – Amazon.com – www.smroi.net – Barnes & Noble – Que
Brand Building and Online Marketing Blog 
This is a huge problem and as we feel the effects of the cliff breaking deal, spending will slow down since people will have less disposable income. I recently posted that the only way for the CMO and his team to regain the faith of the CEO is to start speaking the language of business, become business performance focused based on reporting to financial statements not to like, impressions, etc. You can see the framework I laid out here – http://www.bryaneisenberg.com/the-cmos-marketing-analytics-optimization-framework/. There is room for social but only when we stop measuring it with the same yardstick we use to measure traditional media.
I view the current marketing landscape like a huge train depot with lots of tracks going all over the place (OK, I’m picturing Thomas the Tank Engine if you must know). Each conductor can opt to choose the tracks his or her train will run on, and there are signs indicating the condition of each of those tracks. The folks who are following the “guru” type have been warned that their tracks lead off a giant cliff. However, it might be, sadly, the kind of thing you need to experience before you really believe it. In the meantime, other trains are chugging along, maybe not as glamorously, maybe with not as much flair, but they will reach their destination and will far outlast the trains that falter. It’s sad and gratuitously unnecessary, but there it is.
I’m happy enough to be one of the lowly trains that just keeps chugging along. I might not have caviar in my dining cars, but I’ll get folks where they need to go. The crashing trains and the people they follow? Eh. Just landmarks to check out while we pass on by.
All of that to say I am not sure these problems are fixable. I think that’s banging your head into a brick wall. The way forward is to go the path you know is right and to be ready when companies who have encountered disaster are ready to do things right. They’ll find you.
It’s an interesting perspective. I left the corporate world after 15 years (in ’04), becoming tired of trotting out the company line like a dog and pony show. But it gave me clear insight into what works and what doesn’t. Relationship building makes a ginormous difference in sales, as does knowing your customer/demographic.
Always a writer, I’ve now self-pub’d 3 books on Amazon and found social media to be a wonderful way to connect with my readers, book bloggers, and reviewers in a targeted way.
Does it sell books for me? Sure. But it’s only one SMALL part of the work. There are ads, newsletters, private emails, promotions, guest posts, regular blogging, optimized websites and on and on. That’s why it’s called a ‘platform,’ right? To expect an even exchange ROI — effort vs return — is a mistake IMHO only because it’s a slow build.
I do help other authors — giving free advice on my blog and stream. Sure, I’m for hire also, but the point is to share the wealth. And the best advice I ever received about how to sell my book?
Write another.
No, no tell us what you really think. But seriously – I’m right there with you. I’ve been writing about social media snake oil for years…and yet the flim-flammers keep selling the stuff and people keep buying. Could we designate 2013 the year of “Cut the crap?”
While important, social remains still a tiny piece of the overall job of the CMO. A smart CEO won’t bother taking a CMO to task over it. More likely, he or she would say “don’t invest too much time and effort on social — nail it down the best you can and move on. What I *really* want you to focus on is the fact that last year’s ballyhooed product launches are mostly crashing around our ears and we don’t have much in the way of great new products in our pipeline.”
I’m going to disagree with you there. Social is becoming as ubiquitous in the org’s communications as email and the telephone, print, and mass media. A CMO who looks at social as a tiny piece of the marketing pie is still operating in a 2005 bubble. The fact that so many still think that way is reflected by the systematic failure by most brands to effectively leverage their media ecosystem and drive new business from it. This is precisely the mentality that’s holding us back: Small = not important = I don’t need to learn this = I’ll just hire someone who claims to understand this = I won’t waste money on it = I won’t really bother to use it properly.
Olivier, where I differ is that ubiquity is not the same thing as impact, scale, or importance. I think one reason social has struggled to earn a seat at the “grown-up table” is that the world revolution gets thrown around entirely too often. For the most part social — like all things digital — has not yet been properly integrated into the total marketing picture. (I should note here that a few marketers — notably American Express and Ford — are inspiring exceptions to the rule.) In my opinion, the real path for social and digital progress is to abandon certain of the founding mythologies and embrace the very real and important roles as part of marketing overall. Social doesn’t need to be *everything* in order for it to make important contributions. Thanks for listening.
Great post – completely agree. However, I do feel that if less ethical social media marketers start seeing the ax, there will be some sort of collateral damage for honest ones.
You have to market and measure ROI. Make a case for your cause and it’s effectiveness.
Trust in marketing has been dropping for a long time… sadly most marketing firms have adapted the “head-in-the-sand” approach.
Positioning yourself for success in today’s market requires a thorough understanding of the players, environment and “rules” of the game. Most marketing firms fail before they even start to play the game – they don’t understand the rules. The most common symptom of their flawed approach is the all-too-common assertion that the client “Doesn’t get it!”
Reality check: The client “Does get it!” The client understands the game they are playing – a chess match where the stakes for companies and individuals are high, with little time and few clearly distinguished options for trusted-partners (players) in this competition.
Positioning yourself and your agency as a viable business-building partner is vital – to do otherwise relegates you to mid-level management as a production resource.
Social is just another tool in the box… unless you change the game the rules will stay the same and marketing firms will be trusted less then used car salesman.
The level of incompetence in the marketing community is, as always quite monementual in certain areas and companies and it is partially the CEO fault for not forcing the people to show return on investment and keeping everything in silos for the longest of times when it comes to sales, marketing, finance, pr… Social was just the next hype so… Not crosspollinating competences and measuring success in hard figures with clear objectives is always the CEO’s responsibilty, not the charlatans… 😉
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I think that the issue of CEO’s not trusting marketers is less of a problem than the fact that consumers are becoming less trusting of marketers. Some may argue that what I just said is a “chicken or the egg” type scenario, but I think there is a distinct difference. CEO’s are more concerned about the bottom line, and the fact is that marketing expenses are becoming bigger and bigger because consumers require more transparency and information than ever before. Consumers are running the show, not the salespeople you portray here. Also, I don’t necessarily agree that people will buy anything that is being sold- consumers are smarter than ever before, and thanks to the social media phenomenon, that is only going to keep evolving and growing, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.
Very little that we are talking about is new, or fundamentally different. Have consumers *ever* trusted marketers? Arguably, the reason brands exist is because consumers learned that they couldn’t trust the promises of many manufacturers. Have CEOs ever *not* been concerned about the bottom line? In my experience this happens only when a product is such a monumental hit that it’s a no-brainer to spend more on marketing. Lastly, the notion that “consumers are running the show” and are “smarter than ever before” overestimates the involvement that consumers have with most products and most categories. For the most part, consumers simply want to buy a product that does the job it is asked to do at an acceptable price. Marketers would do well to focus on getting the product right first. If the product is right (which I readily agree is easier said than done), the job of promotion and advocacy becomes radically simpler. There’s a reason we don’t see enormous social media campaigns for the iPad: to a great extent, it sells itself.
Olivier, I have followed you on Twitter for a long time. When I came across your book on Social Media ROI I downloaded it immediately via Kindle. I loved it. Perhaps it’s actually more accurate to state in present tense that I love it because it is something that I continue to go back and look at. My days centre around social media and making it effective. I have to say though, that it is nice to read what you have said about the people that should pack up and go. They actually make my life a little difficult in a way – they use social channels for broadcast and not to build engagement or relationships. Social is not TV or radio and it didn’t grow in popularity so that people could just push all the messages they want. And when it comes to ROI I stand by the notion that there are many many ways to measure ROI, it depends on how granular you need to be. And yes as far as people pushing a bunch of crap that doesn’t work, I’ve spent far more time than I imagined looking for two platforms that will help us achieve engagement in the way we intend. One platform is for listening and one for engagement. Many vendors proclaim to do both but nobody seems to do both particularly well. I am baffled by the number of times I stump vendors with questions and at the same time have great hopes for the few vendors out there that really understand the social media space and how it works. I think its an exciting to time to aspire to be in that 10% that are focused on the marathon and who know how to sprint along the way. My prediction is that the agile marketing technologist who can patiently adapt and devise ways to accurately measure what is working – will be the successful marketers of the future. Olivier I hope to shake your hand one day. You rock. @kimberlymccabe
That was super kind of you. Thank you so much. 🙂
We’ll shake hands someday. No worries there. Have a great day, Kimberly.
As an upcoming marketer and college graduate, reading this article disappointed me. Social media is a crucial point of a company’s marketing strategy these days because everyone is using it. Learning the proper way to measure ROI of social media and reporting it correctly are very important as well. It is wasteful for company executives to keep tossing money into a social media guru if either are not going to be able to interpret results, let alone recognize a success or failure. I have to ask myself, is this a sign of the generation gap between old marketers and new marketers? Employing someone who did not grow up online and using social media has more to figure out when it comes to this online stuff, and how to measure it. I think work ethic + age definitely are playing a role in describing why marketers take different approaches to social media, and some not at all.
I believe there are multiple factors contributing to this inevitable fall in trust:
1. The sharp rise in the influx of foreigners in the Western market via email marketing and freelancing websites has reduced the barrier to entry and commoditised the industry. I was a web designer and i switched career path because of this same issue.
2. The current economic state means that business owners and companies are looking to spend less for more, hence why point 1 above is becoming a reality.
3. Innovation is happening quicker than marketers are able to master a new platform, therefore, marketers are compelled to experiment with clients’ needs i.e. whilst we are trying to understand Social media marketing, everyone’s now talking about mobile marketing. And the next one is on the horizon.
4. Customers also aren’t able to keep up with the trends, therefore, they are forced to trust anyone that has been able to establish his or herself as an authority in the industry.
5. A lot of companies are creating DIY tools, thereby providing the client with a false sense of expertise
As much as i detest this trend, i doubt that anything can be done. The field will eventually die and then become reborn as something else.
Interesting perspective. I’m always weary of any marketers that claim to be a “Social Media Expert” or “Content King” who has answers to everything. In the online marketing and SEO game, it’s a fact that NOT everything will work for clients. I fundamentally believe that making that clear to them lessens the possibility of confusion down the line.