By Adam Proehl
Do you follow a brand on facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, or any other platform? Do you also suffer from information overload?
This week I had the pleasure of attending the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Summit (MIMA) in Minneapolis. I particularly enjoyed Gary Vaynerchuk‘s morning keynote. I’ve heard him speak before and he isn’t for everyone (if you are offended by foul language, you may want to sit out his presentations, but since I’ve been known to drop a few four letter words myself, it didn’t bother me).
As always, his morning keynote was lively, full of curses, references to the New York Jets (whom the Vikings are going to beat in a couple of weeks, BTW), and colorful anecdotes. Even with all of that, what I was most impressed with was his vision and his intelligence as a thought leader in the interactive space.
There was one thing in particular he brought up that struck me is something I’ve been giving some thought to lately as well. He asked how many of us remember how good click thru rates on banner ads were in 1996. He also asked how many of us remember email click thru and conversion rates from 1998. Well, I’m old enough that I remember both vividly. The click thru & conversion rates on both of them were fantastic.
For banners, we could basically paste them across the networks and people would click on them. Better than that, people would actually buy. My business partner, Mike McAnally managed network banner campaigns for a $20 software product that basically helped them speed up their dial up internet and they were enormously successful. There was no targeting, retargeting, segmentation, or any of the things we take for granted today. We just plastered them all over.
Email was slightly different. I’ve run email campaigns since 1997 and I think about how wildly successful text only “blasts” were then. All of our names were acquired thru proper methods and we never spammed anyone, but they were still just non-segmented blasts. You can’t get away with that now and expect to last too long. The inbox is too cluttered and most emails will get deleted instantly if the message isn’t relevant.
Still with me? That brings me to social media. As cool as it is, it still has some growing up to do, in my opinion. There are plenty of brands that I would be happy to “like” on Facebook (and I do “like” plenty of them) until I read their wall and see how often they post. If I “liked” them, their posts alone would take up all my newsfeed space (especially when on a mobile device, which I often am). So I haven’t “liked” them yet.
I’m on Foursquare, but really only so I can understand how it works. I have no interest in being mayor of my local McDonald’s. This platform is still very young (honestly, at this point most of the people I know on it are fellow internet marketers) and it remains to be seen what becomes of it long term with Facebook now in the “check in” game. One of the benefits to Foursquare is that if you “check in” to a place over a period of a relatively short period of time, you can become “mayor”. Now, when you check in near a business that is active on Foursquare, you can be presented with a special offer to view. Starbucks is great at this, but I don’t like coffee, so it doesn’t do me much good.
Where I’m going with all this is that brands as well as social media platforms will eventually need to step up their game when it comes to a “like” or a “follow”. Email is still very relevant (see my previous post below) when best practices are followed. Put simply, you need to segment your customers and provide them with relevant offers in a manner which they prefer. Banners still have a little way to go, but they’re getting better (although sometimes retargeting goes a little overboard to the point where it’s almost creepy – case in point I went to the Speedo site once to do some competitive research for an apparal client of ours and I couldn’t get away from them afterwards!).
For brands wanting to talk to consumers on social media platforms (which I’m all for, BTW), there’s going to need to be some technical as well as best practice solutions that present themselves. I’m not thinking of anything that’s rocket science – just best practices similar to what some of the best email marketers do. Specifically:
- What types of products are you interested in?
- What do you want to receive notifications on (news, specials, freebies, new products, etc)?
- How often do you want to receive messages from us?
- What format do you want them in (abbreviated or long post)? Some brand on facebook can put out some really long posts that take up a lot of screen space. I know plenty of people that find that annoying.
- Integrate it with email.
These are some of my thoughts. Thanks for reading. I welcome any questions or comments. Thanks.
Adam Proehl
adam@nordicclick.com
Posted by Adam Proehl 
