Social Media Headhunter

I Can Measure Social Media ROI. Why Can't Everyone?

Simon Salt, a specialist in location based marketing and good guy, points out that people measuring Social Media ROI tend not to understand it's a financial device. 

"Let’s clarify here, while I do not deny that there are returns to be made from making an investment in social media, social media ROI does not exist in the terms that it is usually couched in. ROI or Return on Investment is a financial term, usually defined in the following way:

"

Simon identifies a real problem, which is misuse of terms, but these types of measurements aren't difficult to come by.  In fact, I find Simon's title to be innaccurate, even though his reasoning is sound. 

Here's the Title:  Why There Is No Social Media ROI

Here's my response. 

• Count Likes on Facebook
• Survey Facebook Likes for money spent per sale/month/quarter/year. 
• Run Social Media Campaign to boost number of Likes 
• Survey Likes post-campaign for money spent per sale/month/quarter.year.
• Compare data on a per customer basis (recognizing a Likes campaign may dilute that share with fake likes). Contrast per person data for success of campaign inside social media (revenue per customer)
• Analyze email list, or in-store visit list for similar per-person data.  This is your control group. 
• Crunch data to find increase in per person sales during the campaign, based on the number of likes and the baseline data. 
•  Contrast to control group to determine if the social campaign was more effective than the email list. or general in-store customer. 

Problem solved? 

Back In My Day, We Didn't Have Experts, Just Moderately Experienced Marketers

Is it bad to call yourself a social media expert?  There sure seems to be a lot of anger about it. Hard to tell if the knee-jerk response to snort at a social media expert is honest derision, or a superstitious attempt to to ward off evil, the 21st century version of "There but for the grace of Google go I."

Given how big an area the definition of social media can cover, one can either throw up their hands and say it's not possible to be an expert, or one can accept that social media is a preference layer that has more to do with our target audiences than the discipline itself. 

And make no mistake, social media is a discipline.  It's not enough to call it a tool in a tool box.  It's a skill set that is distinct from marketing, PR, and customer service.  Do you know how we can tell?  Experts with decades of experience in marketing, PR, customer service, and sales are often completely clueless when it comes to using social media to bring value. 

If social media is as easy as taking a piece of bread out of a refrigerator, why do so many people foul it up on their own?  Why are there so few true examples of social media success, if it's so easy?

It's because it's not easy, and we're not driving it.  Social media is the public's way of learning. The mass communication and connectedness of our audiences is driving change that companies cannot keep up with, and they know it.  It's simple math. There are more of them, than of us.  Because there are more of them, they learn faster.  So why do they need someone who is an "expert" in social media?  it's the same reason they need a recruiter. 

Here's a dirty little secret about the recruiting industry. We're not that much better than internal Human Resource departments.  But we don't have to be.  We just have to be a little better, a little faster, than internal departments.  And we are, because we have structural advantages, from representing multiple clients to being sales-oriented to spending more time searching and calling candidates and less time on paperwork.

Some people hate recruiters, but the industry continues to do well, because the marketing of the industry says we're experts in hiring.  Some of use are, some aren't, but the industry has a reputation of solving problems a little faster and with less hassle than internal departments (on average).

Do you know what you don't say as a recruiter to a client?  You don't say, "I'm slightly better than your internal people." You say, "I'll do the job, with my massive database, and I'll be accountable solely to you because I'm an expert."

That's mostly true, but it's still marketing.  We're marketing ourselves to sell our services, just like every other industry.  Do you know what we call ourselves?   Headhunters.  Staffing experts.  Talent acquisition experts. National Account Executives.  It's title inflation, common to everyone from teachers (educators), to Senior Digital Communication Vice Presidents for Advertising and Messaging, International Markets. 

Thus, the social media expert, or whatever they call themselves, from consultant, to strategist, to connector, to integrated marketers, to social business analyst, is engaging in a form of marketing called personal branding. Everyone does it.  Everyone does it. 

Calling yourself an expert in an area is an attempt to convey the idea that you are worth paying for your advice.  It's a rookie move, when you can call yourself better terms like Digital Integrated Director, Social Business Communicator, but it's all the same.  And mocking it is disingenuous.  

There is no difference between calling yourself a "social media expert," and describing a product you sell as a "revolutionary step forward in household disinfectants."  It's just marketing.  We can complain about it, we can mock it, we can judge it, but let's not lie to ourselves that making fun of someone for marketing themselves is authentic criticism, if we ourselves do any form of marketing, or if others do it for us (so no ducking if your job is help desk.  Someone markets your services for you).  

We have nonsense titles in most companies.  We have training programs that have little value to anyone not sorting resumes.  We have college degrees for people who can't write or speak in public.  We have Master's and Doctorate programs for 2nd grade teachers who now call themselves "educators," but whose children can't read when they leave the classroom.  We all market, from fake hair and nails to car leases we can't afford in neighborhoods where are house payments are based on no interest loans.  

Social Media Experts don't get special passes because of their titles, but do we really think they're horrible people?  They tend to be small fish trying to sell (and often failing), but sometimes they are people who recognize that social media is sexy, and thus it gets attention.  When attacking social media experts, why is there so much venom?  Is it because we're mad about title inflation?  Or is there something else? 

 

Social Media Is More Than Marketing

Social media is a new word.  Yes, we have people trying to drag it back to early 2000 or the earlier days of the internet, but as a concept, you really have to start looking at it around 2006 before it caught on.  At that point, you could begin to say there was such a thing as social media marketing, and it was awful.  I know because I was there, and the only metrics we had at the time were SEO and PR metrics.

That's why everyone used to complain, and why "engagement" and "authenticity" was talked about at conferences.  It's also why so few people made money at it. 

Social media marketing, as we know it today, is an extension of digital marketing, which is to say the branding, promotion, and sales funnel activity of a product or service.  If you're in social media marketing, by necessity, you need to understand marketing.  That's because you're judged by the metrics of marketing - leads, conversions, and branding. 

That is not the full range of social media, and those who pretend it is do so because it's all they know. 

Here are some business aspects of social media that need their own definitions: 

• Social Media Recruiting: The use of social media to find, connect with and hire employees. 
• Social Media Sales: The use of social media in researching, understanding, connecting with, and closing a client based on their Social CRM profile
• Social Media Politics: The use of social media to build coalitions and messaging across likely voter populations.  Activities include fundraising, organizing rallies and protests, driving stories for reporters to cover and opposition research. 
• Social Media Public Relations: The use of social media to replace reporters with other voices that carry influence in a subject, as well as attraction of reporters to topics through proving their interest to the public.  This can include philanthropic efforts.  
• Social Media Customer Service: The use of social media to create an alternate channel for customers to offer positive and negative feedback.  Used to cut traditional infrastructure and personnel costs. 
• Social Media Training:  The use of social principles in internal organizational development that include communication, knowledge transfer,reward programs, and legal compliance. 
• Social Media Education: The use of social media for educational purposes, from schools to self-learning to target populations.
• Social Media Advertising: The use of social media in buying, selling, placing, tracking, and measuring ads on social sites, in addition to magnifying company creative through new social channels (pictures on Flickr). 
• Social Media Market and Product Research: The use of social media tools to improve the knowledge base of a company, from surverys, user groups, reputation management, and competitor research. 

To add to this, there is the social media of the public, which includes hobbies, personal connections, social networking, reviews, check-ins, social selling, interest groups, grassroots political activities, discussion, education, training, and anything else humans do. 

The metrics for each of these areas of social media are easy to find.  Take away the social media and use the metrics of the underlying discipline.  That's always been the case, even in the days before we called it social media.

 

Social Media Experts Come Under Attack By Social Media Mean Girls

I was going to title this, Attacking Social Media Experts without naming them is bullshit, but I didn't want to be so mean. 

A spiking trend in the social media world is for pundits, authors, speakers, and people whose careers have been elevated by social media to lash out at self-proclaimed "social media gurus" or some other version of the word rockstar, ninja, expert... giving the latest regurgitated hash about social media really being about solving problems/making money/learning to listen. 

It isn't new. Jason Falls writes about the bashing trend way back in 2009.

"While the harsh tone then and now will be interpreted incorrectly by some, I still feel that way. However, my frustration has turned more toward those whining about the 20-something trying to make his or her way in the social media world, hoping to ride the wave like other digital natives and put food on their table. I don’t fault the uninformed for claiming to be something they aren’t. We’ve all spit-shined our resume a bit much at one point in time, I’d bet. I hope brands and companies are smart enough to see through that."

So why is it still happening? It's a form of status elevation every teenage girl would recognize.

You attack a defenseless person with a strawman argument designed to show what you wouldn't do.

 "I may let a boy feel me up, but I don't tell everyone.  Only a slut would do such a thing."

 And then all her friends nod their head and talk about how awful, "those girls" are. Maybe it's my high school reunion coming up and maybe it's watching too many Glee clips on Hulu, but I'm hard pressed to come up with a defense of how bashing someone for what they call themselves isn't high school one-upmanship worthy of a Mean Girls 3 script. 

Trashing your industry, or better yet, trashing a skill set that has boosted your ability to make money is not speaking truth to power.  It doesn't gain you credibility, keep you real, or make your voice authentic. 

Especially when you talk about a problem that doesn't exist. 

One of the hallmarks of Mean Girls is they don't attack others in their social circle.  They don't attack peers, for fear of backlash.  They attack those lower on the social chain.  This is why you don't see social media pundits attacking each other by name.  They attack faceless, "self-proclaimed social media experts," and to prove I'm not a Mean Girl, I'll be specific.

I'm talking to you, Peter Shankman.     

Peter's website announces he's on Bloomberg radio discussing a post he wanted to title, "All Social Media Experts should go die in a fire."

"I was going to call this article “All “Social Media Experts” need to go die in a fire,” but I figured I should be nicer than that.

But my title stands. If you call yourself a “Social Media Expert,” don’t even bother sending me your resume.

No business in the world should want a “Social Media Expert” on their team. They shouldn’t want a guru, rock-star, or savant, either. If you have a “Social Media Expert” on your payroll, you’re wasting your money."

That's a very clever piece of writing, but it's not particularly helpful to anyone, from job candidates who put "social media expert" on their resumes to clients who supposedly are out hiring "social media experts" to their detriment. 

Let me go ahead and ask.  Does Peter Shankman have that many Fortune 1000 clients whose biggest problem in social media is they're so stupid they are tricked by people who put "social media expert" on their resume but actually have no experience?  That's a real question, because Peter felt the need to go out and write a bunch of words describing how stupid you have to be to put social media expert on your resume.  How many resumes is he getting that have this in their title?  Is it really that big a problem?  I get resumes with embellishments on them all the time.  It's fun to make fun of them, but it's not an industry wide trend that deserves some kind of special recognition.  

At the time of this post, Peter's post has been Liked 1000 times on Facebook, Shared almost 1000 times on Twitter, and has attracted 175 comments.  Did Peter write something groundshaking here, or are people piling on, Liking, Sharing, and whooping it up because they want to make sure they're with the cool kid? 

Are there hordes of companies spending millions of dollars wasting money on "social media experts?"  Or was this just an attempt to gain credibility stating the obvious?  And just who in the corporate world has someone with the title "social media expert" working for them?  

They're not of course.  The problem most social media consultants face is they're broke, and trying desperately to find some way to pay the bills.  Most of the people I speak to haven't taken a check for any consulting, and their experience in-house is limited to creating profiles online without any backup from their company.  These are not threats to the social media industry. They are just folks trying to make a living - marketing themselves.   

The problem companies have is the public is taking social media seriously for their own purposes, severely altering the balance of power between seller and buyer.  Companies know they have to do something, but they won't do it without proof it works.  Companies are dipping their toes into the water, but that means they don't have the budget to pay what Peter Shankman charges.  If someone calls themselves a social media expert to get their foot in the door, and that gives them access to a company that knows nothing about social media but wants to, how is that a bad thing?  Companies get what they pay for.   

What's worse is that Peter is on record talking about trying something new in social media as the secret to its success.  Who does he think is going to do that?  I've seen a lot of dumb ideas from small practitioners, but I've seen massive failures from major brands backed by million dollar a year agencies.  Maybe the companies should be spending $1000 for some local social media expert to brainstorm instead of paying $100,000 to a highly-sought after integrated digital and creative corporate marketing consultant, speaker, entrepeneur, and investor, as well as thought-leader, trusted friend, bacon and dog-lover. How is the second title any different than the first? 

You know what Peter calls himself?  A worldwide connector.  What exactly is that?  Is there a degree for that?  A course in the MBA curriculum?  Let me go ahead and say this.  If you're going to put worldwide connector on your resume, go ahead and don't send me a resume.

We know what the word means. It's a semantic device you use to elevate yourself above those nameless, faceless "social media experts" who never had a chance of selling your clients in the first place. 

You know the worst part of this?  Peter is right.  Companies should be asking how they can run campaigns that make them money, and most of the experience out there in social media lacks the ability to run integrated campaigns.  Oops, what I meant to say is that most of the peoplee in social media marketing lack the experience of running a campaign, the heft to drive solutions through a company over the objections of the employees, and the ability to then charge a fair market rate for it.  Maybe we should be doing more to hire and train young people, instead of simply insulting them and suggesting they practice self-immolation. 

Are Social Media Consultants Clowns? Or Heroes?

Gary Vaynerchuck made headlines recently with a statement that 99.5% of social media consultants are clowns.  In an interview with TechCrunch, he made the statement, and then explained it in more detail at his own site, at the link. 

 

I'm with Gary in some respects.  Quite a few people calling themselves social media consultants are clowns - I've oft repeated my personal statistic that 80% of the people I've talked to have never taken a check, and a large percentage of the others are taking piddling checks that amount to a few hundred or thousand dollars to do nothing.

Gary is trying to improve the industry, and he's right that failures and snake-oil salesman are a problem.

And yet, clown is a pretty strong word.  It suggests an unseriousness, when the problem is really a lack of experience in general business, and a lack of experience in how to get things done at the corporate level.  I've actually never met or spoken with anyone that is a snake oil salesman. I've read some pretty shady training bloggers who came from the affiliate world, buy that's as close as I've been.  Most of the unpaid or inexperienced are just naive, and hopeful, that what they've read on other sites will make them rich or famous or just give them a job.

So it's sad, but not clown-sad.  It's not intentional.  They really just don't know that managers and line workers and developers and designers have no clue what they're doing in social business.  And it's not just social business.  

How many web developers, of any language, understand SEO?  We're not talking about the abilty to be crawled by spiders - that's child's play. We're talking about building a site with an SEO strategy in mind to convert traffic to an action.  If you think it's more than 10%, I have a bridge to sell you.

How many copywriters understand what it takes to convince retail salespeople to speak up for a product or program? Would you call 99.5 % of them clowns?

How many VP's of marketing for billion dollar companies know what a hashtag is and have ever used one?  Clowns?  Or differently skilled? 

 

The disconnect between social business results and social consultants is a function of the marketing/PR/SEO/customer service/corporate world, not a problem with the social media folks specifically.  They only know where they came from.  Social media is so much bigger than their niche, is anyone surprised they are lost? 

We all know television advertising is overrated - why does social media come in for such scorn when television advertising is so much worse?  It's just hazing of a new discipline. 

So I applaud Gary for speaking the truth, but wonder how we can actually move forward.  I've got some ideas about how to judge someone.  We'll let you know later this week, no matter if we decide to do it or not.

 

 

 

My Two Cents On Flattr And Their Twitter Micropayments

Flatter is making news announcing a new micropayments initiative for Twitter users.  You can now give small amounts of money to the people you follow on Twitter, in addition to RT them, replying to them, or quoting them. 

It's laid out here at mediabistro, the program expansion that moves from users with a payment button on their blog to any Twitter user. 

If you find great, compelling content that you love online, you can still retweet it, like it, share it around. But now you can also Flattr it easily. As a Flattr-er, you simply enter the creator’s Twitter handle into your Flattr dashboard, and it will store you pending micropayment to that individual until they get their own Flattr account. You can tweet to that person to let them know that you Flattred them, and when they join up the pending payment will go through.

The problem is an old one - people purchasing content don't mind paying for content. If I'm willing to pay $.20 for a song, I'm willing to pay $1.00.  If I like getting the paper each day, I'll Pay $10 a week, and $12 a week won't change that.  If it's online, I have to decide if it's worth it to pay for something I can find elsewhere. 

Micropayments have been talked about for some time, and they assume the problem of the world is price.  The problem of my world is time. I pay for all manners of things that i could do on my own, but who save me time.  My whole business is based on this principle.  

Micropayments don't take into account the time people spend consuming, and try create a market out of the goodwill of others.  But we know what's going to happen.  It's called a TipJar. 

Really, this is what the tipjar on blogs was all about. If you like someone's blog, you give them some money.  The vast majority of people who did so merely pushed money around.  Small amounts between blog communities was moved around, but only a few people profited.  Those were the ones like Andrew Sullivan who launched full scale blegging campaigns, and netted tens of thousands, and sometimes over hundred thousand.  Of course, Andrew was already a writer with an audience.  How many people match his output and had his audience?  Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has a tipjar, and asks on occasion, but these are both top ten blogs. Glenn makes a little, but not nearly enough to compensate him for his time, and much less than he makes on Amazon affiliates. 

Micropayments to Twitter users is a natural extension for Flattr, but I'd be surprised if they make aas much as any decent Google adwords program or even a jobamatic job board.  It's a nice idea, but if you're good enough to get paid in micropayments, you're good enough to get paid in macropayments. 

Call it my 

Seth Godin, Selling, And SXSW Douchebags

Seth Godin is no douchebag, but he gets the fundamental disconnect between selling and marketing.  In an another post, I lamented the idea that selling at SXSW was like, so uncool. 

People who market at SXSW are douchebags.  There was even a whole panel devoted to it.  Being a douchebag covers all manners of sin, including looking at someone's badge to see where they work, spending too much as a company instead of participating in engagement, and even trying to get into a cool party or checking in too much on Foursquare.  Also, don't introduce yourself to people you don't know.  That whole meeting turning online contacts into real world contacts?  That's out of line, buddy!   

Seth pitches it differently, in that it's the difference between inviting and selling. 

If I invite you to a wedding, or a party, or to buy a $500,000 TV ad for $500, there's no resistance on your part. Either you jump at the chance and say yes, or you have a conflict and say no. It's not my job to help you overcome your fear of commitment, to help you see the ultimate value and most of all, to work with you as you persuade yourself and others to do something that might just work.

He ends with this comment, which is very important to social media marketers. 

But please... don't insist that the hard work be removed from your job to allow you to become an inviter. That's great work if you can get it, but it's not a career.

This is the fundamental disconnect most social media consultants have in generating results.  They've never had to sell, or alter internal habits, or cut costs using their tools, so they mistake social activity with business activity. This is one of the primary reasons I pound the drum on not hiring people with little business experience to do your social media.  If they don't understand how things get done, how can they understand social media's impact on how things get done?  That's why metrics can seem hard in social media - they're not tasked to what you're paid to do. 

But wait, there's more.  Someone I met at SXSW, and with whom I now carry on a Twitter conversation, gave me a fantastic idea for how to look at social media, that solves the essential problem of how to measure social media.  Felix Wetzel called social media a "preference layer." And in doing so, he opened up a new way of speaking about it without inducing a gag reflex. 

Look at it as a layer. 

Think of social media marketing as, well, marketing. 

Think of social media selling, as, selling. 

Think of social media customer service, as..okay, you get the picture. If we treat social media as a layer on top of other skills and departments, it loses its mystique, and also the negative connotations beginning to develop around the practice.  We can stop some of the silly squabbles, like, don't sell with social media, if we agree social selling is different than social PR is different than social branding.  Social selling is about selling.  Social recruiting is not. 

If we can narrow our focus to what someone as an individual is trying to do (get hired, increase mindshare of a product, selling tshirts through Twitter), then social becomes a tool to be discussed, tested, and then applied, and not a "new way of thinking."  

Is Social a new way of thinking?  Yes and No, but of more importance is that you can't get there, until you first walk through our current systems and connect social to their goals.  More to come, with visual displays and pretty graphs. 

 

 

How Would You Work With Social Media Talent?

Social Media Talent is a staffing firm for social media.  Our goal is to fill in the gap between social strategist and social intern with a long-term contractor dedicated to a single company. We believe that a dedicated presence is needed to drive social business through a company, and we have the experience to know that $5000 projects to test the waters won't ever bring value to the company past some limited SEO exposure. 

So what did we do?  We started a company that backs up social consultants with a backoffice, including training, managing and support, and we're rolling out different programs. 

1) Craig Fisher @fishdogs, and Jim Durbin @smheadhunter are out selling staffing, working our networks to find out what their needs are and who might fill them.  As we get requirements, we go to our personal database of over 5,000 business professionals with social media experience and place them at the client. 

2) We also work with social media consultants who are currently billing their clients, but would like a little more stability for insurance, payment (every two weeks), and employment paperwork.  You retain your clients, but we're helping your back office, and hopefully, working together to drive more business in the execution of your strategy (hiring people to serve on-site with you). 

3) We still have the retained search business, which is for clients who are certain they need a permanent presence, and understand that retained search is the only way we can contribute resources for their plan.  Retained search includes elements of social strategy, training, job description and hiring.  With over thirty years of staffing experience, and 12 years of paid social media experience between us, we can tailor a search in a way no internal or contingent recruiter can match. 

We do talk to lots of candidates, but by necessity, we're focused on selling the services first.  Your best bet is connecting to us, thinking very hard about how you want social media to alter the business you want to work for, putting it on paper, and then asking us to work with you to sell into the client.  More on that in later posts, but be sure to check out JobsinSocialMedia.com if you're a social media professional. 

For more information, check out the Social Media Talent website, Facebook page, and of course, the RSS feed for the Social Media Headhunter blog.