Why Marketers Fail at “Social”

Leveraging social media for business purposes is centric to building trust and confidence with the markets you aim to serve.  If you haven’t noticed consumer confidence and trust in institutions, government and corporations has been failing for the last 35 years.

The word confidence reflects trust in the outcomes. The outcomes of buyers interacting with your organizations, on-line and off line, reflect whether the experience builds or tears down confidence.

Since the industrial revolution people have been considered “producers” of relevant activity that feeds a business objective. The business results have been the overriding objective regardless of consideration of confidence and trust from the people that help achieve the results. The people who help achieve a business result represent suppliers, employees and buyers. Confidence and trust must thread through all relations or results will be hampered, tampered with and temporary.

The days of managing by results are over and today unless you manage by building confidence and trust with people you will not reach optimum results.

The Social Factors

Most businesses jumping into use of social fail to consider the human factors that drive people’s interest, attention and behavior. Pushing out marketing messages without meaning, value or truths do not build confidence and trust with the market you aim to serve. Such tactics are doomed to fail because marketers primary objectives are to create business results.  The whole argument about ROI from social media has people consumed with satisfying their bosses demand for results. Such demands reflect management lacks an intent to understand how to produce results over and over.  When management tells their marketing people to get results from all this social stuff the reality is that the marketing staff tries everything they can to satisfy management demands. In other words play every trick in the book, measure anything that can point to a result and show how good we are at what we do.

From my post titled “There is No ROI from Social Media” a reader writes

“It is hard to ask anybody, especially business to invest in anything without some measure of ROI. I think the key is setting goals, creating a plan, and using common sense for what makes the most logical choice for the business and customers.”

“I’ve struggled with ROI and social media, the best I came up was it has to be fairly obvious it makes sense for your time and money.”

Another reader writes “Companies can write off social media expenses for now. But they want hard bottom line results. Shareholders and lenders will hold their feet to the fire on that.”

There are thousands of others writing post, papers, studies and creating tools that are being used to justify use of social media. Have we been brainwashed into thinking that everything must show production of tangible results because of decades of thinking this way? This behavior reflects management methods that stem from the industrial era where “production” was the driver of results.  We have become so obsessed with results that we’ve failed to understand what, besides production thinking, creates results.

The failure of social is centric to not comprehending the value of intangible things that create confidence and trust with the “people” who influence the “production” of things that create results. In a world of connected relations producing confidence and trust isn’t based on measuring a result. It is about “producing the right intents“, confidence and trust with people.

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