“Social Media” is Dead. Long Live “Social Business”

In many ways, I think this was the week that marked a shift in the social media indus­try in the UK. We’ve had the excite­ment of Social Media Week Lon­don and I’ve been judg­ing of The Drum’s Social Buzz awards, look­ing at the best work pro­duced this year by some of the country’s top agencies.

All this week at Adobe we’ve also been mon­i­tor­ing every con­ver­sa­tion on Twit­ter using the hash­tag #SMWLDN, in order to see what every­one has been talk­ing about. After look­ing at the data and reflect­ing on every­thing that’s been dis­cussed, we’ve noticed some pret­ty impor­tant trends…

In pre­vi­ous years, con­ver­sa­tions across the social web dur­ing social media week have focused on just Twit­ter and Face­book, with a few nods to what­ev­er shiny new plat­form seemed most excit­ing at the time. Almost all the case stud­ies were Face­book cam­paigns, and top­ics such as ROI and buy­ing fans seemed to dom­i­nate conversations.

Three things seem to have changed this year:

1. Brands are not focus­ing on one plat­form anymore

In pre­vi­ous years, the most suc­cess­ful cam­paigns focused on just one plat­form. This year, many of the most suc­cess­ful social brands that we’ve heard from have been run­ning ful­ly inte­grat­ed cam­paigns across mul­ti­ple plat­forms at the same time. More impor­tant­ly, we are see­ing a shift towards data dri­ven con­tent. Instead of push­ing out con­tent that a brand thinks will get good engage­ment (like in years past the past), brands are look­ing to data sources to dis­cov­er what their audi­ences actu­al­ly want to see — and on which platform.

2. Social media pro­fes­sion­als have realised that you CAN mea­sure ROI

…and by ROI we mean Return on Invest­ment, not Return on Impres­sions, Influ­ence or Inter­ac­tions or any oth­er mar­ket­ing relat­ed term begin­ning with “I”. There were a few sighs when some­body said you can’t mea­sure ROI and we should talk about ROR instead (Return on Rela­tion­ship). That feisty debate was soon put to bed, part­ly thanks to the provoca­tive (if slight­ly offen­sive blog) Thi­sis­no­tanin­sight, which seemed to be respon­si­ble for many of the Tum­blr men­tions dur­ing the week.

3. Big dig­i­tal agen­cies have not only caught up with “social media” agen­cies but in many cas­es are now doing a much bet­ter job.

Many large agen­cies have been work­ing with dig­i­tal and tra­di­tion­al media for a long time, so it was refresh­ing to see talk of met­rics mea­sur­ing adver­tis­ing recall and brand pref­er­ence along­side engage­ment met­rics and sales fig­ures. Mea­sur­ing social media against tra­di­tion­al media such as TV and press is a huge step for­ward for our indus­try. The rea­son that this is such a big deal is because it feels like “social media” has evolved into “social busi­ness”. No longer push­ing out con­tent to an audi­ence (like tra­di­tion­al media such as print or TV), social is now dri­ving more two-way con­ver­sa­tions that are being proven to add real val­ue to a business.

This is an impor­tant shift because it high­lights that the most suc­cess­ful brands are not work­ing in silos any­more. They have start­ed to see proof that social con­ver­sa­tions have an impact upon the whole organ­i­sa­tion and there­fore teams are get­ting big­ger and more depart­ments are work­ing togeth­er. Not only is it great to see mar­ket­ing and non-mar­ket­ing teams work­ing togeth­er, but it shows a trend towards more brand bud­gets being re-allo­cat­ed from TV and press into social media pro­grams. Evi­dence of this is seen in our play­ful lit­tle info-graph­ic which clear­ly shows that Face­book hasn’t dom­i­nat­ed our con­ver­sa­tions at social media week Lon­don this week.

Plat­form Mentions

Look­ing into the data, Twit­ter only accounts for half of the men­tions (54%) and Face­book a sur­pris­ing 16% with just 1,066 men­tions. The fact that Tum­blr had more men­tions than Face­book also high­lights a trend we noticed back in Decem­ber when “Tum­blr” over­took “blog” as one of the most searched terms on Google. The growth of Insta­gram this year (now 140m active users) was also impres­sive with 673 men­tions. We expect­ed a bit more than 1.6% of the con­ver­sa­tions to be about Vine since it feels like it’s been around for ever, but it’s worth remem­ber­ing that Vine is still only 8 months old and has a pas­sion­ate user base amongst its 40m users. It will be inter­est­ing to watch this bat­tle devel­op over the next year, as we see more inte­grat­ed cam­paigns and even high­er mobile usage — with each plat­form fight­ing to prove its val­ue with­in the mar­ket­ing mix…

Social media is dead. Long live social business.

https://blog.adobe.com/media_6f44ab1a6ce58b25e293f469119111e79fb72a46.gif

#SMWLDN 2013

Jere­my Waite is Head of Social Strat­e­gy @Adobe and a pas­sion­ate evan­ge­list for @AdobeSocial. You can con­tact him on Twit­ter @JeremyWaite where he would be hap­py to con­tin­ue this debate.

For more infor­ma­tion about Adobe Social and oth­er Mar­ket­ing Cloud solu­tions vis­it http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/social.html