Status Quo No More

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I own a TV that my dog watches more than I do.  Talk to anyone in their twenties and younger and the story rings the same.  On one of the rare occasions during the Super Bowl that I was watching TV it hit me just how flat TV ads are these days when compared to the branded consumer experiences being delivered through social channels.  Don’t get me wrong, some of the ads were funny and entertaining, but they just can’t live up to consumer experiences being deployed through Facebook.  Social experiences win hands down both from a consumer and business perspective on various accounts: engagement levels, entertainment value, ad targeting ability, analytics, measurement, and sheer audience size.  On February 10th, Sarah Personette, Facebook US Head of Agency Relations had a telling slide that foreshadows the massive shift in ad dollars in her Facebook State of The Union presentation.

Facebook State of the Union | Stuzo

Media dollars are flowing to digital and more specifically social in a big way this year.  Large organizations are realizing the power and business value of engaging consumers on Facebook and other social channels and are putting large sums of money to work within these channels.   With media buys becoming larger there also comes a shift in the scale and types of consumer experiences associated with the media.

Two distinct camps of thought are forming in relation to what the best solution is for companies when engaging consumers through social channels.  One camp is preaching the mantra of SaaS and tools.  This camp is gaining a lot of traction and attention as of late.  Most of the incumbents in the advertising and PR space have adopted the tools model with arms wide open.  It makes business sense for them.  SaaS can be up-sold with ease to clients, templated solutions require minimal technical chops, and when a creative refresh that takes less than a day can bring in $15k it’s hard to go against the model, whether it is the solution that delivers the best results for the client, or not.  Now, by my tone you might think that I’m against tools.  Quite the contrary, tools are very much needed, however they are not the secret elixir to solving business problems and delivering results.  Let’s look for what tools are and are not a good fit:

Day-to-Day Community Development & Management
Tools are a perfect fit for effective day-to-day community management.  They drive efficiencies throughout the organization that could not be had without them.  With tools, one community manager can do the work of 5 without tools.  Everything from workflow for approvals, to moderating and curating content, to publishing is streamlined with tools.

Always-On Presence Development & Management
Depending on what a company is trying to solve, tools can be a good solution.  CMS type platforms such as the ones developed by Buddy Media, Involver, and Vitrue work well for the deployment of presences with a set of standardized apps in circumstances where the brand is looking for customizable landing pages.  In general, companies need to be mindful of understanding when a custom solution is optimal for achieving business objectives.

Social Experience Development & Management
This is where off-the-shelf tools just don’t cut it and never will, which is not a bad thing.  As noted above, tools have their place and no one platform can be the end-all-be-all for everything.  Just as brands have been producing top-tier TV commercials and seeking award-winning talent for the production of those commercials, so will brands produce exceptional social experiences and seek exceptional creative technologists to concept, develop, manage, and measure these social experiences.  And like Zynga is leaps and bounds ahead of the incumbent players in the gaming space, so are the new breed of companies built from the ground up with a mix of technology and creativity flowing through their veins better prepared than the elder players in the advertising space.

The days of creative folk coming up with the “big idea” in a silo are on their way out.  It takes a mix of serious technical and creative chops to concept and deliver compelling social experiences.  More and more, I am seeing social technologies driving the big idea behind large-scale integrated marketing programs.  This trend of technology being in the driver’s seat of the concepts behind multi-channel programs is here to stay.  Traditional advertising and marketing are in the midst of a monumental transformation.  Status Quo No More!

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