The Social Media Conundrum

I just finished reading the Forbes article - Marketers Have It Wrong: Forget Engagement, Consumers Want Simplicity, and in the article the author makes the argument that marketers are:

"...trying too hard to engage with consumers via social media, marketers are generally pushing out too much information, causing people to over-think purchase decisions and making them more likely to change their minds about a product"

The author also uses statistics to show there is a disparity between what marketers believe consumers want out of brands in social channels (to be part of a community) and what consumers actually want (to get discounts). 

This speaks to a point I made in an earlier blog post, The Danger In Forming Brand Relationships, that the relationship consumers want with a brand is based on three basic premises:

1.      Provide me a quality product that meets the need it promises to meet

2.      Provide it at a price that is competitive

3.      In some instances provide me with a self-image boost derived from the cache the brand provides

The challenge I have with the author is in his dispute of a popular marketing theory that the best way to engage people is via social media. My challenge is not so much with the dispute itself, as I do think there are other, non-social media tactics that are incredibly powerful in engaging people. Instead my dispute is with the fact that in providing a solution to the overly complex, message inundated dynamic that the author says marketers are creating, two of the three tactics he lists as solutions are social media tactics.

How can social media be both, not the most useful tactic to engage people with, and two-parts of the solution of how to better engage consumers?

The author's point of view highlights what I think is a common issue in social media; that many marketers and people in business have a only a surface level understanding of the depth of social media and how it should best be navigated. This in turns leads us to three errors:

1.      Marketers enter social channels with the wrong assumptions of what consumers want - e.g. They see people forming relationships with like-minded communities and assume that in turn those people want to form similar relationships with their brands

·      Dave Trott calls this phenomenon a Category Error and you can read his deeply insightful post about it here

2.      Marketers often view these communities as a way to deliver a message vs. a way to add value to them

3.      Marketers often enter social channels simply because they don't want to be left out vs. identifying the business goals they think social media will help them to achieve

It is not so much about marketers being wrong in thinking social media is an effective tactic to engage consumers with. Instead it is about marketers making the wrong assumptions about what consumers want from brands in social channels (it is value, and that doesn't necessarily mean discounts). To Mr. Trott's point - as marketers we are making a category error in how we approach social media.