Traditional Media Is Social's "Rock in the Pond" - Ed Keller

Imagine you have an important marketing investment decision to make and you have what you think is clear and compelling evidence Then you subsequently learn that in fact you are overestimating the impact of your investment by as much as 40 You39d be pretty upsetThis is what may be happening today as marketers seek to understand and quantify the impact of their social media investments according to a new analysis by MarketShare It is one of several thought provoking points put forth by Pat LaPointe EVP at MarketShare in a recent piece in the Journal of Advertising Research JAR about the relationship between quottraditionalquot and quotsocialquot mediaBusiness investment in social media is on the rise a statistic most recently reinforced by a survey released recently by the ANA Association of National Advertisers But how should marketers look at their social media investment visamp224vis their investment in traditional media Should spending on social media come at the expense of investment in traditional media forms That is an issue that is not so well understood yetLaPointe calls quottraditionalquot media the quotrock in the pondquot of social media By this he means quotWhen the message delivered by traditional media is either very good or very bad the media message reverberates throughout the social spectrum like shock waves through a still pond hit by a rock This ripple effect can add substantially to the overall impact of traditional media and boost the financial payback significantly Modelers regularly miss this insight if their methods are set to read the impact of the social media alone or are looking only at the online tactical elements In both cases the digital tactics get far more attribution than they really deserve This in turn can cause many marketers to underestimate the real value of traditional media and overestimate the digital elementsamp8212sometimes by as much as 40 percentquotLaPointe further notes that campaigns which rely on social media alone tend to be either unexpectedly expensive in that they succeed due to discounting to abnormally low levels to encourage engagement and virality or they have a very low probability of success quotoneinamillion perhapsquot says LaPointe because they are attempting to catch quotcreative lightening in a bottlequotThese insights shed additional light on a fundamental finding that readers of this blog will know what we at the Keller Fay Group espouse namely the importance of an integrated approach to social marketing Online voices are important but offline still accounts for the overwhelming majority of brand conversations And while a positive customer experience is a critical driver of positive brand advocacy advertising and other forms of marketing play a key role too Our research shows that about half of all consumer conversations include references to mediamarketing led by paid advertisingFurther we have written that when it comes to quotsocial valuequot all media are social and that in several important ways quottraditionalquot media have a far more compelling story to tell than the leading social networking sitesWhat do we mean by this The audience for social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have appealing qualities for marketers They have larger quotreal worldquot social networks than the average American they talk more about brands each week and they are more likely to make recommendations about products services and brands across a range of categories But when compared to the audiences for quottraditional mediaquot Twitter and Facebook do not stand out as leaders When it comes to which audiences have the largest social networks wsjcom is the leader by a wide margin neither Facebook nor Twitter is in the top 10 When it comes to which audiences have the most brandrelated conversations per week Vogue39s audience is the leader again neither Facebook nor Twitter break the top 10 The same pattern holds when it comes to which media audiences are the most likely to make product recommendations or which have the highest concentration of influencers amp8211 Twitter and Facebook frequently are in the middle of the packThe MarketShare analysis provides important additional evidence of the important relationship between these traditional media and social marketing Strategies to deploy social networking platforms should not be put in a silo and asked to perform a solo act particularly if performance and profitability are your goalsEd Keller CEO of the Keller Fay Group has been called quotone of the most recognized names in word of mouthquot The publication of Keller39s book The Influentials has been called the quotseminal moment in the development of word of mouthquot Ed can be contacted at ekellerkellerfaycom You can follow Ed Keller on Twitter kellerfay Read all Edamp8217s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at WOM MattersCheck us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggerscomFollow our Twitter updates MediaBizBloggerThe opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaBizBloggerscom management or associated bloggers MediaBizBloggers is an open thought leadership platform and readers may share their comments and opinions in response to all commentaries

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Traditional Media Is Social's "Rock in the Pond" - Ed Keller

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