Tag Archives: social media

February 4, 2012 · 11:06 AM

Is Social Media Addictive?

Has this ever happened to you?

You would have finished a current work project a long time ago, but you just couldn’t ween yourself away from your Twitter feed long enough to concentrate.

You’re kind of depressed that you don’t feel as happy as all my your Facebook friends seem to be.

If the answer is “yes,” perhaps it’s time to admit powerlessness and get yourself to a meeting of Social Media Addicts Anonymous (SMAA), a new group for folks addicted to all things social and unable to manage their lives, careers and relationships.

If this sounds ridiculous, check out this post from Erik Sass at The Social Graf, or this December 2011 article from Danial Gulati in the Harvard Business Review.

In the former, Sass cites a recent study following 250 social media users (ages 18 to 85) in Wurzburg, Germany. As reported in the journal Psychological Science, when asked to give up all social media, subjects reported:

“…social media was harder to resist than a gamut of other behaviors: ‘In contrast, people were relatively successful at resisting sports inclinations, sexual urges, and spending impulses, which seems surprising given the salience in modern culture of disastrous failures to control sexual impulses and urges to spend money.’ Likewise, the subjects’ reports for alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine marked their desires for these substances at relatively low levels compared to social media.”

Social media more addictive than alcohol, caffeine, tobacco and sex???

Wow.

HBR’s Gulati, author of the book Passion & Purpose, observes three major trends emerging among heavy Facebook users:

A tendency to compare their own personal situation unfavorably to those of their “friends.” In other words, people read the happy posts and see the smiling photos of their online friends and begin to feel that their own happiness and worth are wanting when compared to others’. (I wrote about this Facebook-depression link in a previous post.)
Time fragmentation. We’re so busy checking our Facebook pages or Twitter feeds that we’re not able to fully concentrate on our work or everyday tasks. “Multitasking” has taken on a life of its own, to the point where people are switching back and forth between “real life” and social media on a minute-by-minute basis.
A decline in close personal relationships. Why get together with your girlfriend for lunch when you can get caught up with her via Facebook? Connecting via social media is just like having a real relationship without all the mess. You can share what you want and you can quit listening at any time.

Just as the addict seeks to fill the void in his life with drink or drug, a person addicted to social media crave the “connection” these technologies provide as a way to fill the holes in his life.

As marketers, we talk about using social media as a way to “connect” with consumers and how companies can use Facebook, Twitter, etc., to “humanize” themselves and “become more authentic.”

But are we really accomplishing these goals, or merely contributing to a global addiction that ultimately will leave us all distracted, disconnected and depressed?

At this point, no one knows.

As someone who sits at a desk the majority of the day, I know it’s hard for me to get out and actually have a real conversation with a live human being (which means listening as well as talking) as often as I’d like.

However, I have found through my professional experience that it’s that face-to-face interaction that enables the type of trust and personal connection that makes business work.

If you want your company to behave more humanely, consider the interactions between the humans who work for you and the humans who buy from you. Is technology helping or hurting?

Are you doing all you can to foster true connection? Or are you merely trying to seduce and sedate your audience into an unhealthy relationship?

See you at the coffee shop.

1 Comment

Filed under Listening, Social Media

Tagged as addiction, Facebook, Harvard Business Review, relationships, social media, technology, Twitter

May 5, 2011 · 8:18 AM

Social Media As Customer Service #Fail

Peter Himler, aka The Flack, has a great post today on the gap between how companies should be using social media to enhance customer service, and the reality of their continuing failure to do so.

Himler picks up a thread from TechCrunch co-editors Erick Schonfeld and Paul Carr took American Airlines to the cyber woodshed for issuing Tweets promising to resolve a customer service issue and then failing to deliver on the promise.

As I reported a while back, social media works best when marketing and customer service departments are able to share information and resolve complaints in a timely and satisfactory manner.

Few companies have mastered this feat, which is understandable considering the challenges involved in “hearing,” evaluating, routing and resolving every single complaint that hits the Internet. Especially if you’re a corporation the size of American Airlines.

Carr lambastes Corporate America for hiring “19-year-old, disaffected, invent-your-own-job-title millennials” to manage their social media programs, whose mission is to get complainers to take their issues private and out of the public’s view.

Out of sight, out of mind…until an aggressive complainer, whose problem is still not resolved, decides to call out Company X for not only its lousy customer service, but also its failure to make good on the promise to fix the problem.

The time has come for marketing and customer service to divide the labor and share responsibilities for social media. One should focus on promoting the brand and the other should be responsible for responding when the brand fails to live up to the promise in the eyes of an angry customer.

How this would work in a garden variety multi-billion dollar corporation, where different departments are often housed several floors apart, or in different buildings or in different hemispheres, is a major challenge.

Especially when social media responsibilities are deemed unimportant enough to be placed in the hands of someone who could—oh, I don’t know—drop a curse word into the corporate Twitter feed.

Social media can be a powerful tool for marketing and customer service…if you have the guts to make the investment and integrate these important functions through one seamless interface.

Good luck.

When Who You Are Matches Who You Say You Are

I’ve puzzled over the value of social media for a long time, vacillating between “snake oil” and “the next big thing.” So far, the only concrete conclusions I’ve reached are:

Social media is a time suck.
Social media can elect a president.
Social media is a powerful branding tool if you have an unlimited amount of time and money.
Social media is nearly impossible to quantify using traditional ROI measures.

But leave it to Brian Solis to point out the true value of social media.

I think Solis is under the impression he gets paid by the word, and one has to sort through the psychobabble to get to the meat, but the point is clear: honest engagement in social media enables a brand (or an individual) to demonstrate that you truly are who you say you are.

In his April 8 post, “How do you increase social influence? Don’t think about the score,” Solis states that one should not mistake “influence” (the number of connections, posts, “likes,” retweets, friends, etc. one acquires) with “social capital,” defined by Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam as, “[the] collective value of all ‘social networks’ and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other.”

“[Putnam] believes social capital can be ‘measured by the amount of trust and reciprocity in a community or between individuals’.”

In other words, your ability to influence action is in direct proportion to the amount of trust you engender from those in your social community.

“Influence is not measured by a score, but instead by the culmination of resulting actions…If you invest in the value of the community and seek to improve the experiences of those to whom you’re connected, your influence and presence is in turn symbolic of something that escapes a number. Your investment then pays off in the form of self actualization [emphasis mine], reaching higher potential without any attachment to success or reward.”

Capitalists (myself included) will have a difficult time grasping this altruistic philosophy, especially if our number one goal is to sell stuff.

However, when paired with more traditional marketing communications, social media efforts over time build trust and demonstrate a commitment to the well-being of those you value the most—your customers.

#BrianSheehan Taken to Woodshed for Social Media Column

Poor Brian Sheehan. He’s taking a real beating for his column in Ad Age last week on how big brands are beating the little guys in the realm of social media.

Sheehan cites campaigns such as the Ford Fiesta and the Old Spice Guy as examples of how big brands have leveraged social media to connect with consumers.

To date, he’s attracted 21 comments, the majority of which read like this gem from pedels01:

“Do many small brands have the budgets to locate and enlist 100 major influencers and hand them all cars? Do they have the resources to create one of the most popular ads of the year and THEN create a series of viral videos that people go wild over? Do ANY of the small brands have the kind of brand name, awareness and connection that gains instant attention, awareness, and engagement?

This isn’t a crisis of imagination–it’s a crisis of resources. Sure, you have some small brand outliers who do clever things, but reality is, more resources, more people thinking at your behest, and more agency support yields more buzz, and that’s final.”

There’s no doubt that both Ford, Procter & Gamble and others have done a masterful job of leveraging social media to drive awareness and sales, but consider that the Fiesta launched involved giving away 100 cars to socially connected millennials and Old Spice invested millions in mass media advertising to drive its social media campaign and his argument falls short.

The best-ever example of the little guy using social media to get ahead is BlendTec, with its “Will it Blend?” video series, which remains the all-time most-watched viral video series, and in my opinion, does what any good marketing campaign should do—it showcases the superior features and benefits of the BlendTec blender.

If their blender is good enough to pulverize an iPad, it can probably handle a frozen margarita.

As I see it, social media works and can work well, provided you abide by the tried-and-true principles of marketing communications. If you can answer four basic questions, you dramatically improve your chances for success:

Who are you?
What do you do/what are you selling?
How is your product/service better than your competitions’?
Why should I care?

Sheehan’s not wrong; he’s just comparing apples and oranges.

Subscribe

Tags

Categories

The Author