It’s important to shift from a mindset of “using” social media to a mindset of adapting and thriving in an ecosystem where a highly connected, social, empowered consumer is now the norm, and traditional econometrics and data are no longer adequate to measure and track the success of content and campaigns.
Social media is a shrinking piece of a much bigger digital pie that requires rethinking consumer’s sociality, and relationship to brands.
Though the number of consumers who can be reached through social media channels may be shrinking, the digitally-enabled “sociality” that characterizes today’s connected consumer is expanding.
Social media marketing is dead. Brands still need to use social media to listen to consumers but marketing TO consumers on sites like Facebooks has all but vanished. In fact Facebook’s grip on people’s time and attention is slipping. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””] Compared with a year ago, time spent on the social network has fallen by almost 7%, according to an analysis of new Nielsen data.[/inlinetweet]
The expansion of today’s connected consumer across multiple digital touchpoints means that ROI is no longer a reliable default for accurately assessing campaign success. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]Marketers need to move beyond ROI and adopt metrics that are more sensitive to the complexity, ambiguity, and dynamism of the consumer journey correspondent to the category in question.[/inlinetweet] Without this sort of approach, it’s impossible for brands to identify their particular challenges and to develop targeted strategies for overcoming them.
In short, rather than measuring each digital tactic brands need to encompass all digital tactics as view them in conjunction to the customer journey from awareness to purchase.
What really burns me up is that all the experts and people who enhanced their personal brands via talk about social media marketing are still out there like fish floundering out of water. You would think that they would at least have the courtesy to apologize for their buy-in to the hype around social media.
Brands can still measure individual digital tactics, but what they should be required from their emarketing staff is a dashboard that quickly conveys results through the customer journey. Today’s consumers are overwhelmed with content on the web, and they don’t have the time or patience to have a relationship with a pizza brand on Facebook.
