Print publications had this problem in the early days and so the BPA provided circulation audits. Yes media kits still whipped up the marketing spin, but as a planner you could lay those green sheets and yellow sheets side by side and make some objective baseline judgements.
This is not too much to ask from media companies today.
After BPA came broadcast and Nielson, boxes on sets reported back to the home office. Beyond that Nielson ratings were a bit shaky but overall, they provided a level playing field.
With perhaps the exception of Life Magazine, (and that is a stretch) no print publication ever came close to the monopolistic power of Google and now Facebook. Even Hearst, with all his power was puny by today’s standards.
And Broadcast bloomed and diluted into 200 channels in three short decades. But that was after the FCC came in and regulated local markets carefully limiting cross media ownership of local licenses.
Monopolies are bad for business.
Today we have ventured into far more dangerous waters. Marketers have become cheerleaders for the media monopolies that are frankly, stealing money from our clients — and frankly from all of us too.
Marketers have always tended to self-delusion and selling self delusion to clients. Those of us truth tellers in this business are truly misfits. But when you work with a mid-sized B-to-B operation. When you are sitting across the table from the guy who is pulling those dollars out of his own wallet, if you want to earn his trust you’d better speak the truth. You and your client are on the frontlines. If you and your clients play in this very large slice of the market, you’ve taken your knocks. You can smell BS from 20 paces.
And here is what we smell:
Social Media is NOT effective in many cases, Facebook has not provided any answers on true activity. Who will benefit? Why we should buy? They have provided so many reasons NOT to trust them, their “auction” pricing is the least of it!
Search is no longer right for many companies — increasing cost is a huge factor. Google could help by making its auction far more transparent. When you buy shares on the NYSE you know the volume, the last tick — that’s the least Google could do. Who is bidding, how much and when? Why should I trust Google?
SEO has always been smoke and mirrors populated by hyperventilating “experts” who jump tag any twitch of the needle as a Google conspiracy. And yet, marketers are fixated by it! I was at a pre-Bing meeting at Microsoft. The guys there were promising a different sort of search engine, far more open. I said, “Really? How long will that really last?” Not long. It ended when we left the room.
When media companies are making what Google, Facebook et al. are they will never succumb to a tepid third-party audit scheme. Say what you want about Hitwise and Alexa they are not delivering what only the horse’s mouth can.
The only way to get what we need is with swift and sharp government regulation — don’t hold your breadth.
In the meantime what do the truth tellers do? They find their client’s True North. Judiciously, with care, testing, analyzing, tweaking programs and never, ever, following the marketing lemmings.
Activity by Age No date range, no trending, no numbers. Essentially meaningless.
All charts about Men v. Women Ditto. And the claim that women “Get Talked To More” by whom? Other women or by men? By businesses? Those are completely different dynamics.
Facebook “Factbook” Facts? Hardly. Over the last six years people have spent 55 minutes a day on Facebook. That tells us nothing. What are they spending RIGHT NOW on Facebook and is it trending upwards or downwards (I strongly suspect the latter). And the only people who care about FB’s valuation are talking heads who want to see who’s in on the IPO. Consider it gossip futures.
As of August 2009 (ancient history in web time) 50% of users were active. How about fresh data and overlaying it with demographics: age, gender, location. And how about trending that data. Anecdotal evidence suggests that there are millions of FB deadbeats who sign on and never come back or comeback infrequently. We all have them on our accounts — no photo, two posts, five friends.
Facebook Users Like Food Pages OK Hubspot are you a site of real value or the cover of 17 Magazine? Where’s the beef?
Facebook Pages & Buzzwords Wow, let’s play Madlibs! How can any marketer with a straight face recite these to a client?
Facts about Facebook Infographic No dates, all hype and judging by the most popular FB pages more ancient history.
Most Liked and Least Liked Facebook Page Types Meaningless data based on averages. See yesterday’s post.
Facebook v. the United States Data so old its useless and again, nothing is trended.
I am a professional marketer who tells the truth, speaks with bell ringing clarity. I fight to give my clients the most clear, fact-based info possible, because their success and ultimately mine depends on it. It’s their money for goodness sake and they are paying me to advise them wisely.
Hubspot you are undermining our profession by purveying this vacuous baloney as gospel.
Here’s what we’d do: First we’d present the document to Joe and say, “Hey Joe, every member of the team has seen the document and likes it, how do you feel about it?” of course Joe would say, “well if everyone else thinks its O.K. I do too”. Then we’d go to Jane and repeat the process. At some point, the document achieved Religious Significance, no one had any more to say about it since no one else had anything to say about it and, well, then it was gospel, and we considered it approved. Amen.
Now here we are AB (AFTER the BUBBLE) and the Internet is providing that same experience on mass scale with a twist, I call it: Crowd Religious Significancing.
There is no better example than a recent Hubspot article: Least Liked Facebook Page Types.
It features a chart based on data from “a proprietary program”. Start worrying. (Who wrote it? What were the parameters? Has the program been tested?) And this program delivered these results: it counted and averaged the number of LIKES on Facebook Pages and organized them by category. Oh dear. There is not much there, there. Watch it unravel:
The first respondent to the article was a Christian group who was rightly up in arms about the results. It showed religious groups as part of the “least liked” pages chart on Facebook.
It all sounds very middle school to me: Who’s the most liked? Who’s the least liked? When in fact the chart simply shows the AVERAGE number of people who “liked” pages in a certain category. It does not show the number of pages in the category so the data is totally unreliable.
One person did note the data was hardly viable and cogently explained why. BUT that was ignored by the majority. Here is a typical response: “Thanks for this information. I am surprised that Religion is the least like facebook page. Anyways thanks Hubspot for this findings.”
Findings???? FINDINGS???? These are more like SCRATCHINGS. And here is where Crowd Religious Signficancing begins. Tissue thin “findings” are presented by self-proclaimed “experts”, then tweeted and retweeted (160 times at last count in this case) and suddenly it is gospel! And this is all because the folks with the REAL solid data refuse to release it to the people who need it most: their customers. (I’ve written about this “Basic Questions Facebook Must Answer”)
Facebook, Google et. al. are holding their cards so close that all that’s left is a world of sketchy experts scratching away at nothing to fabricate facts.
Well here is one fact for you: No one knows anything.
Start there, test with care and you’ll come to know some of what need to know – for you.
What’s the killer data in this chart? Social Media is a total time sink. Lots of effort, little return. It is no surprise that it disappeared from the EXCERPT, because it is pretty incendiary to all those Social Media proponents out there.
Thank you Marketing Sherpa for confirming what I have been saying for months on end — and teaching at Zebworks.com! Thank you! And here is the kicker, blogging — that old fashioned practice takes lots of energy BUT delivers much better return. This re-affirms the advice we have been giving clients for years. Center your social media program around blogging. Yes! Booyah! Bravo Sherpa! I hope the rest of the report is as compelling!
The result, as we all experience every day, is truly lousy software. Would you buy a car that crashed every time it hit a pebble? Why do we continue to buy Microsoft products? Why do we continue to run like star struck lemmings to Apple? Why do we continue to query Google when it can’t give us the answer to our query? Why do we share our lives on Facebook when they relentlessly leverage our dignity for their gain?
Why is it OK for companies to give us somewhat functional products that deliver a modicum of efficiency? Why do we give them a pass? Our monopoly laws only bruise these behemoths, none truly stop them in their path.
In the meantime, we all lose and we lose big. Competition is stifled so we pay too much for too little. Innovation is snuffed out and great new ideas never see the light of day.
I am really disgusted with Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft – but that does not compare to my disgust with our hapless, toothless government. All talk, no action while the marketplace delivers garbage and our lives, community and the world are gutted.
It is time to chose and to chose critically. Ask yourself: do I really need this software? Is free really free? What is Facebook really good for? Should I really be paying to advertise here? Will I really get the results I need for my business? Is what I am doing, right now, for me, my company, my community, honorable?
Question. Question to discover what will make our world truly more productive.
But beyond businesses buying Facebook ads, there is the question of whether or not to participate in social activity on Facebook: Where is the measurable ROI? A company can sink time and money and time and money and eventually maybe something happens, but no one is ever really sure. Gee, sounds familiar doesn’t it? We’re back to the good old days of Public Relations!
But in this modern age of being able to “measure everything” it is time for Facebook to cough up some basic information that would allow businesses to make educated judgments as to whether to spend time and money with the Facebook product. Here is my wish list:
These are simple questions for that Facebook can easily provide data. Not detailed personal data, but meta data – in the same way that print publishing historically provided circulation data.
This is not too much to ask.
1. Productivity (which they say is by far the most important) 2. Compliance, regulatory issues and concern over inappropriate messaging 3. Bandwidth usage (a distant third)
The question of productivity is nothing new. Telephones and “personal” calls or worse “personal long distance” calls caused the same productivity and cost concerns for companies in the mid 20th Century. Businesses had no ability to restrict access so, in the absence of tech tools, they exerted professional discipline on their employees. It was expected that people would stay focused and stay off the phone on personal business. And, in some firms phone bills were spot checked after the fact. Unfamiliar long distance calls were questioned.
Compliance issues do hold a special concern, posting inappropriate content or corporate secrets to blogs, Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook is an issue. But the sharing of confidential information is nothing new. Inappropriate memos and insider trading have been with us forever and there are laws and consequences for such behavior.
So if bandwidth is not an issue, why are CIOs playing Kindergarten Cop? Given other hugely important issues such as Security, shouldn’t CIOs be focusing more time on that and leave the issues of professionalism up to HR and management?
I was awe struck at how ineffective the CIOs were at restricting access to the Internet – people are simply using their mobile digital devices for Internet access – untraceable, available, personal. If ever there was a reason for HR to step in and set parameters for personal professional behavior, mobile access is it. Attempting to control employee Internet access is a total waste of precious CIO productivity.
Chatroulette Alexa Stats
The genre makes Youtube feel absolutely ossified. It is completely spontaneous and giddy because the next person could be interesting, or not.
I am sure it was more exciting a few weeks ago when relatively sane curiosity seekers were the majority there. Today, unfortunately, Chatroulette is over populated with guys doing in front of their webcam what they would be arrested for if they did the same thing in the park down the street. Chatroulette is an assault on the senses: it gets pretty awful, pretty fast.
Just the same the genre is compelling and I braved the assault to find a couple of interesting people to chat with. The massive uptick in traffic is unprecedented for one site. But the phenomena is not dissimilar to that of chat rooms in the 90s. Compelling, intriguing, they too, were quickly overrun by pervs. Still the concept of a chat room persisted and when corralled into topic areas and policed by moderators and users alike the pervs found other haunts on the web. I believe that this genre will follow the same path. It is just too giddy not to.
Yelp routinely highlights negative customer reviews unless business owners agree to advertise on Yelp.
“Lady Justice needs a lawsuit filter,” writes Yelp Co-founder Jeremy Stoppleman. PUHLEASE. The arrogance! Yo, Stoppleman: you are supposed to be the champion of small businesses. How about answering the way a small business has to answer: “Gee, that’s terrible. We are looking into it immediately. If anyone is doing this heads will roll, we promise you that.” He is nothing but tone deaf. (The tone deafness only a $100 Million in VC funding can bring!)
Small business people know that there will always be wing nuts who sashè into their shop with an ax to grind. AND consumers know that there are businesses out there who are schysters. Traditionally the Better Business Bureau served as the wing nut/schyster filter. Overall, they did a pretty decent job of it. Beyond being tone-deaf, Yelp needs a wing nut/shyster filter, but being a free-wheeling open forum, Yelp simply cannot provide that on the scale required by the millions of small businesses.
Yelp is most likely, voraciously burning through its $100 million. I can hear the VCs, putting pressure on Yelp to deliver. And why would small businesses pay for what Yelp is offering – which is essentially bupkus? Their businesses are listed on Yelp already. I have no doubt Yelp resorted to shaking down small businesses, because that is the only “value” they can offer.
If it happened to you, join the suit. Make it a class action. They deserve it!
SMBs whether selling B-to-B or B-to-C find themselves confronting two voracious converging online trends:
1. Intense flattening of our markets: regional enterprises go online to find they are now competing with other regional enterprises around the nation – and the world. Price wars ensue, in a race to the bottom. 2. Ever increasing customer expectations: first it was web 1.0, then web 2.0 filled with engagement mechanisms and video. Mobile is on the horizon, if not already here. With each iteration, SMBs find themselves having to spend more to keep up. Even though programming development costs are going down, the average cost of a full-featured web site has not changed much since 1995 – it costs to stay in the game.
An environment this chaotic is unforgiving. SMBs find themselves in the challenging position of having to out smart the web to succeed. Our new offering will help them do that. Stay Tuned!
