Social Media Myths and Your Brand

Ad News published an interesting article by Paul McIntyre which has thrown a question mark around the hype of social media effectiveness...

The article states that  "A number of brand case studies and research papers are showing online conversations do not mirror what people are saying offline about products. In fact, human behaviour is entirely different offline to what the social buzz monitoring tools suggest. That spells trouble for an entire industry built on a belief that social media changes everything for brands. It's not a revolution but just another channel, say the social media contrarians."

The article runs off a paper from the 2013 edition of Journal of Marketing Research. The paper went on to say that "Social Media  does not reflect the types of conversations that people are having in the real world. And conversations about brands and products are skewed heavily to people under 30 and to three sectors: Media and Entertainment, Automotive and Technology . In fact 56% of all brand mentions online are related directly to these three sectors.

PayPals Head of Communications  Adrian Christie is not convinced that online word-of-mouth is up to the task of changing behaviour for specific communications. "If you have an conversation online about a brand that might score 3/10 but a conversation in real life will score 10/10. There is so much hype, so many people talking about filtering and finding and discussing online that one thing has been lost – consumers today are still human".

Social Soups co-founder Sharon Smith agrees "What you are measuring online is a skewed world, a small proportion of the population who are motivated by social signalling". The approach has to be about having a holistic view on the market. We know that Word Of Mouth is still the most powerful driver for behavioural change. What motivates people to talk about Brands or share a product, is more difficult that just buying impressions online or just looking at social media as a filter.

An Inkredible Thought:

Common sense prevails. Those who have been in business long enough see how these ' facts' resonate with what most business owners already know through experience. That there is no sugar pill for Brand or Products awareness. 

Build a business of worth and structure and 'people' (your target market) will see the value in it. Social media is not the messiah, it's but one tool. 

If you ensure that you have a brand that reflects the true nature of your business, then no matter which tools you use, you have something worthwhile to talk about and a resource to store that accumulated goodwill.