Major brands sceptical of social media

Anne-Marie Sheedy - 02 February 2010

I am not an expert but I am a little surprised by the above as I thought we were at a stage where we were looking to take a more sophisticated approach to social media....if you are a brand that needs guidance you may be interested in the following....www.brandrepublicevents.com

IanC - 02 February 2010

Not suprised at all about the confusion about which department it sits in. The old departmental structures are often an obstacle. Other examples include PR/SEO. Agency structures are also a bit behind the times. It's all based on silos which are increasingly obstructive \(very little is integrated even if you hear otherwise).

I think we'll see some new models emerging. It also raises the prospect of more in-house digital departments set up by the big organisation to fit their specific requirements in different media. I can see a time when people serve their apprenticeships in agencies then the top talent gets picked off to run internal digital departments.

Then again who knows...

IanC - 02 February 2010

And it would have been nice to see the figures broken down by brand category. Social media probably isn't massively crucial for all categories.

Michael Crade - 02 February 2010

Advertisers are right to be circumspect - social sites are not media sites, they are communication sites. The content on the sites cannot be guaranteed/vouched for, something that major advertisers need. They spend millions carefully curating their brands, and they wish to promote them in equally carefully-curated environments. It has taken some time to demonstrate that these environments exist online, with great strides made by organisations such as Yahoo, Guardian and Microsoft. But doubts will always persist around social networks, as you cannot guarantee your context or the focus/mindset of users, who arguably are all there to do something else.

Advertisers love the combination of scale and zero brand risk, which is why TV has historically always done well. Search has done well with the combination of scale and the surety of context - if you want to know where your ad will appear, just type in the search terms and see what comes up. This may not be what drives search for brands but as a marketer with experience over 4 top FMCG companies, I can assure you it is a consideration. The scale of social networks has prompted many brands to look at social networks, but the brand risk for many of them remains too great.

VOD is exciting - great content, proper environments \(C4/demandFive/SeeSaw) but the volume is not there yet.

tim harrap - 03 February 2010

Many would agree there are major cultural/social and economic changes taking place at the moment and for marketing departments the challenge of old corpatist mentality "sell,sell,sell" .v. a more inclusive social media provide a classic Jekyll and Hyde confusion for business managers. There is more to play out here but the basis of discussion must start from Communities Dominate Brands by Ahonen and More.

Michael Crade - 03 February 2010

Mark Ralphs - thanks for coming back on this. It's not that people are there to watch/see ads \(agreed) but that with "proper" media brands/channels you can get the context of the user mindset. If they are reading magazine, you know what they are reading, the type of publication it is, the approximate demographic. Same for websites sites as the Guardian or special interest sites, which are also curated environments. But not the social space. I am not saying that social media will not evolve - just that right now, it is not the place to place a large brand budget. It's ok if you want to shift some t-shirts with ponies printed on them \(buy text links targeted to people who like ponies), but not if you want to launch a new toothpaste. Social needs to be harnessed in a way that's measurable, enduring, and beyond novelty.

Greg Pipe - you are talking about CRM, which is different, and where social media can have a very important role to play. But those people, like you with Vodafone, are already customers.

Steve Roth - 03 February 2010

This result is hardly surprising given the narrow definition of social media among marketers. Social media is more than just participating in social networks - it is about how you combine your internal communication, content, community and commercial offering to create an ongoing relationship with users and a return on investment. Once you fall into the trap of thinking of social media as a marketing exercise and making it the responsibilty of one department, the whole point of the exercise is lost. At Sift, social media is a culture - it involves editorial, sales and marketing and defines the way we do business.

Michael Crade - 05 February 2010

Agreed. Social media is great and helping conversations initiated elsewhere e.g outdoor, TV, curated online media, viral.