A Gartner report that half of all “social media campaigns” will fail generated a lot of buzz on Twitter last week. My two cents: Of course social media campaigns fail. But the problem isn’t the medium, or even the message. It’s the campaign mentality.
Social Media: Campaign, or UN-Campaign?
Campaigns are well-orchestrated affairs meant to impose the will of the campaigners on the…er…campaignees? There are military campaigns, aimed at crushing foes, and political campaigns, aimed at winning your vote. Even ad campaigns seek to persuade you one brand is superior to another.
Most campaigns are also short-term. Military campaigns end in victory or defeat, electoral campaigns end in November, and ad campaigns have well-defined budgets and timelines.
The best uses of social media, I would argue, are decidedly UN-campaign. They eschew deadlines and ROI. They’re subjective, fluid, constantly evolving. They have loose objectives, rather than “Mission Accomplished.” Yes, you need to blog with purpose, a la Jason Katzenback. But don’t let predetermined outcomes constrain you. The best uses of social media are driven not by numbers, but by values.
Some of the best social media “campaigns” weren’t campaigns at all. Rather, they were happy intersections of circumstance and preparedness. The EA Sports “Tiger Woods Walks on Water” video is a recent, well-publicized example. It’s the ability to respond to and engage with the user community — to go off script — that is distinctive to social media.
Why “Campaigns” Fail
Unlike traditional media, social media are driven by the audience, not the guy with the megaphone. The Roman orators had their Rostra, Gutenberg had his printing press, FDR his fireside chats, and Rupert Murdoch his television network. Each could control the message in his time, but none of them could dictate the agenda in a social media landscape.
Honesty, transparency, authenticity get most of the attention in social media, as Chris Lynn explores over at the SocialTNT blog. But the term that best describes social media denizens to me is unpredictability. Even with a genuine approach to social media, it’s difficult to predict how the public will respond.
Is this a testament to the instability or arbitrariness of social media? Or is it, rather, a reflection of the relative infancy of the medium? Advertisers and marketers make calculated decisions about words, images, placements, budgets and audiences using the reams of data at their disposal. The behaviors of those who use new media are harder to anticipate, by comparison, due in part to the lack of historical data to analyze.
Social Media Marketing: Ditch the Campaign
Gartner is right about one thing: social media campaigns will fail. But I think the reason they’ll fail isn’t poor campaigning, it’s the assumption that a campaign is the right approach.
The marketing industry needs to move beyond its interpretation of social media as a channel for indoctrination. It is a tool, yes, but a tool used far differently than the tools our profession has used in the past.
Let’s stop launching social media campaigns. Let’s look instead at social media strategies, at best practices in communication and in engagement philosophies. We should ask questions like “Do the ideas of our customers matter to us?” instead of “What’s the ROI?” Once we get off this “campaign” way of thinking, we’ll be far more able to capture the value of social media.