Over the last few weeks, TMAI Premium editions have focused on storytelling with data. We are surrounded by data pukes, partly because it is what is expected. Using a framework I'd shared, Care-Do-Impact, you can shift from data pukes to telling stories that'll transform your influence and impact on the company! You can upgrade to TMAI Premium here. All Premium revenue is donated to charity. Traditional Organic Social initiatives rarely survive simple analytical scrutiny. [Traditional Organic Social definition: Posting on company Facebook pages, TikTok channel, etc. Posts include product news, sales/promotions, “gen Z tone content,” attempts at humor, videos, and generic replies to negative comments or frenetic requests for tech support. Paying an Influencer to do all the aforementioned activities for you on their channels is also “Organic” Social.] To assess the business value of your company’s Organic Social activity, instead of looking at Impressions, “Engagement Rate,” “Earned Media Value,” or other valueless vanity metrics like Followers, look instead at the best social media metrics: Each is an outcome. The first three are outcomes occurring on the Social Media platform, and the data is public. The fourth, a measure of the longer-term outcomes for your business. [Note: Let me save you time, and anxiety: Never measure short-term revenue (STR) of Organic Social. It will be very close to zero. STR is also not why you do Organic Social.] For your Organic Social activity, the results of the four metrics will show you a very small number. Something in the range of 0.0001% or so. [A lot of key Social data for any company is public. Ex: Visit the FB page for M&S, calculate the social metrics for yourself.] One last nail in the coffin: Compare any of those numbers, to metrics for your Email program. Or Affiliate. Or your website’s blog. Or, pick something randomly. The comparison will show your Organic Social performance to be insignificant. Here’s an example: It is not an apples-to-apples comparison. I’m simply prompting you to compare the scale of impact from a business perspective, and get context about the value of Organic Social. One last variable to consider: Organic Social is not free. You have people inside the company, one or thirty, whose job it is to do all this posting. They cost money. You likely have an external Agency who is doing all this posting for you. They cost money. You have, or your agency has, purchased tools, there are numerous meetings to discuss performance, people have to get paid to build creative. All this costs money. When you reflect on the 0.0001% or Economic Value of $100k vs. a cost of $1m or $xm... Organic Social initiatives rarely survive simple analytical scrutiny. [Note: Measuring incremental Brand Lift delivered, the incremental long-term sales driven by Organic Social are both superior measures of impact. Not necessary for this analysis.] [Bonus Read: Engagement is not a metric, it’s an excuse.] Organic Social | Purpose. Before we go on, this is important to state: The reason some companies choose to invest in traditional Organic Social activity has nothing to do with creating measurable business value. In some instances, a CMO chooses to invest in Organic Social to appear cool to their peers in the industry and/or as an internal company PR campaign. In other instances, the CMO is pushing for more and more Followers on their Social pages because the CEO has shared that the “board is very interested.” Or, variation, the push for Followers is because the company’s “fame” is being measured on that metric by VCs. You can imagine other scenarios. If the purpose of your Organic Social strategy falls into the above categories, you can stop reading! Go for a healthy walk, smell the roses. :) Organic Social | Why Impact So Tiny? Still here? Since your company/agency is investing in traditional Organic Social with the expectation of business value, let’s get to the causal factors guaranteeing poor business results from Organic Social investments. It is not entirely your fault. There are two seminal events that have crushed the dreams of Organic Social. 1. A decade or so ago, Social Media (SM) companies, like FB, had two concurrent realizations: The outcome was a massive restriction of organic reach. If you have 1,000,000 followers, now less than 1% of those Followers will organically see anything you post. If you are lucky. SM participants – you and me – saw fewer self-aggrandizing posts of companies, and the platform’s revenues went through the roof (as companies bought Ads to reach people on SM). 2. This was massively impactful: As SM platforms shifted from the Social Graph model to a Content Graph model, reach plummeted! [TMAI Premium members, see TMAI #344: Bye Bye Social Graph – please email me if you can’t find it.] Everyone’s emulating what TikTok started. To get any reach, EVERY piece of content by your company has to hit some levels of virality and mass relevance. Since that is challenging to do, especially for a corporate entity, your company’s numbers shrunk. Ergo the Organic Social reality: 1 + 2 < (Internal Social Media Marketing Team Compensation + External Agency Fees + Creative Costs + Organic Social Analytics Resources + Your special extra fees.) Not less than, significantly less than. : ( And look, it is not your fault that you came to play Snooker with your Organic Social efforts, in a couple of years it turned out the game was Cricket, and a couple of years later it was Kabaddi. Your mistake, if any, is that you are still playing Snooker. Organic Social | Recommendations, 7th June 2017. I made two recommendations: 2. Social Media platforms contain millions of humans who likely overlap with your desired audience. Participate in SM by purchasing Paid Social ads. And, measure their business impact just as you would any other paid media activity. Simple. Pragmatic. Instant ROI. End of the story? Organic Social | Opportunity, 2024. A healthy human keeps learning, keeps experimenting, and keeps seeking patterns across all of their work. It is the only way to remain relevant and impactful. Since making the above recommendations, I’ve accumulated three life lessons: A. CMOs continue to invest in Organic Social (and in the Influencer type). Possibly as so many Organic Social initiatives are just for internal PR. Possibly because there are high-level conversations to experiment with new Marketing on Organic Social. Possibly because Agencies pressure Organic Social spend. B. The audience on Organic Social continues to be large, of value, and young. Facebook is for older people now. (Even I am not on it!) TikTok and Twitch are well on their way to middle-aged audiences. Discord is where what we consider the traditional young are. The super young are on Roblox or some such thing, you and I will hear three years after the super young leave. C. Off Organic Social platforms, TV, OOH, NYT, YT, Hulu, Amazon, etc., Brand Marketing initiatives continue to perform poorly. Among other things, I lead the Strategic Consulting practice at Croud. The tagline of our practice: Incredible, Incremental, Marketing. [Please reach out if you are looking for transformative impact.] As the focus of our Strategic Consulting is to prove to the CFO that Marketing’s results are truly incremental, I've taken the three lessons above to create solutions to transform business value from Organic Social. AND, have an impact on all other Marketing activity! Organic Social | Recommendations, 2024. To take advantage of C and B above, I’ve activated new uses of Organic Social. Each of these has proven incremental, material, business impact for our clients. I believe they’ll do the same for you. Let’s look at four of the use cases. UC #1. Experimentation engine for Creative, Internal. 60+% of the success of all campaigns comes down to the Creative. #omg The rest is smart Media Weight. Companies, with absolutely well-intentioned efforts, often build Creative that connects with the Creative Directors, with the CMO, and, often, numerous company Employees. The problem is, these, often complex layered stories, fall flat in the real world. AKA, no brand lift. Root Causes, in order of importance:The Creative fails to connect with the audience the media is delivered to. The Creative is delivered via ad formats that are sub-optimal. Ex: 3-minute movies in a world of 1.6 sec attention span. Ex: Display ads, a format that has underperformed since 1997. The Creative never achieves wear-in (lacks media weight). The Creative is tone-deaf/disconnected from the zeitgeist. We solve three of these problems with Organic Social! Brief the Social Media Agency/internal SM team at the genesis of the Creative concepting stage. Take them along for the ride as you consider purpose, brand values, the creative campaign’s goals, etc. etc. Take the SM Agency’s input as you finalize the Creative concept. [If they are good...] They have a wealth of insights into concepts optimal both for the audience you crave. You’ll identify mismatches early. Fantastic. At the Creative execution stage, set your SM teams free to build their own execution of your Creative concept. Let them use all their experience and insight to talk to this audience, unencumbered by the burdens of your corporate creative agency, and internal group think. Measure results. Done well, this will bring massive amounts of reality into your company, your Creative, about connecting with your real audiences. And. You can execute this strategy at significant scale – which is very hard for any Creative pre-testing program to deliver. [Note: Make no mistake, any Creative that will command a large investment of your media budget Should Be pre-tested. The upside is astronomical.] Work closely with your Creative team/agency to incorporate results into Creative assets being used by all other Paid Media tactics [TV, OOH, NYT, YT, Hulu, Amazon, etc.]. For delightful digital results, ensure that no less than 60% of the media weight is put being these SM proven creatives. Measure results. You’ll discover, as we repeatedly have, that there is almost unhealthy ROI from leveraging Organic Social investment to solve for building better, more relevant, shorter-span, high-frequency, Creative. The ROI will improve results across your entire Marketing portfolio! And, teach your old dogs new tricks. Getting this precious outcome will require breaking two deeply ingrained habits: 1. Organic Social teams and Agencies nearly always live in their own little bubble – isolated from other Marketing teams, and, often, business reality. Organic Social is so often a hobby (even if the budget is not hobby size). 2. Your corporate Creative agencies, your internal Creative leadership, would rather have a root canal than come out of their little bubble and be challenged about everything from ad length to concepts to attention to, even, testing. #2 is hard, but solvable. #1 can be bigly challenging with some SM Agencies. But solve we must. The upside is too immense. Start by solving for this use case for your next new campaign. Over time, as habits change, take deliberate cultural steps to incorporate it into run the business operating mode. Next Week. 2 + 5 more Organic Social use cases that deliver exponentially higher business value. Each requires a fundamental rearchitecting of the present strategies. I’ll share the watchouts and the make sure you do xyzs to accelerate your journey. The outcome is immense value for your business, and for you at a personal level. [Note: It has been the OMG COOKIES ARE DYING, THE SKY IS FALLING time. Again. In two weeks, TMAI Premium will share my continued position that the sky is not falling, and the five analytical strategies you should already have in place for brilliant measurement – cookies or no cookies!]