The Social Graph – or Net­work – or what­ever you want to call it – should be the sin­gle biggest oppor­tu­nity in mar­ket­ing his­tory. But mar­keters are stub­bing their toes by the mil­lions in try­ing to step over the thresh­old into the golden glow of the online social party. It seems it’s incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult to fig­ure out.

Search, on the other hand, was eas­ily pigeon­holed as a direct mar­ket­ing chan­nel. Search was so easy to “get” for mar­keters that Google turned it into a self serve model and became the fastest grow­ing com­pany in his­tory as a result.

For mar­keters, I sus­pect, the very ease of search has caused it to be con­sid­ered a lim­ited oppor­tu­nity. Social, on the other hand, seems vir­tu­ally lim­it­less. It expands into hun­dreds and thou­sands of fas­ci­nat­ing, if some­what cloudy, oppor­tu­ni­ties to con­nect with cus­tomers. Like I said, in the­ory, social seems like a marketer’s dream come true. But in prac­tice, it’s an unwieldy ani­mal to wres­tle to the ground.

Here’s just one exam­ple of the chal­lenges inher­ent in map­ping the online social land­scape.  Pit­ney Bowes felt there was tremen­dous poten­tial in social to fos­ter deeper engage­ments with their cus­tomers, build­ing long-term loy­alty. But rather than jump head­long into it, Pit­ney Bowes decided to test their assump­tions through a sur­vey of those cus­tomers first. The result? Social may not be all it’s cracked up to be:

“These find­ings will give decision-makers pause for thought,” the report (from the sur­vey) stated. “Busi­nesses can be for­given for get­ting swept away by the hype of sur­round­ing social media and want­ing to invest in such activ­ity as soon as pos­si­ble. … But results show that those busi­nesses tempted to lead with such tech­niques will quickly find them­selves out of step with cus­tomer thinking.”

So why is social so awk­ward to lever­age effec­tively? I sus­pect it’s because the exact same things that make social so promis­ing also make it incred­i­bly unwieldy to man­age.  It’s part of our lives, which means we’re engaged, but what we’re engaged with is rarely what an adver­tiser wants to talk to us about.

We get caught up in the con­cept of par­tic­i­pa­tion rates and usage. Face­book has one of the high­est reaches of any online prop­erty, sec­ond only to Google. Alexa esti­mates that almost half of the total Inter­net user pop­u­la­tion (about 49%) uses Google reg­u­larly. Face­book is just behind at 43%. But if we look at time spent on site, Face­book comes it an about 25 min­utes a day, com­pared to 13 min­utes a day for Google. If we were using engage­ment as an indi­ca­tor of mar­ket­ing poten­tial, this would have us sali­vat­ing like a St. Bernard over a fresh bowl of kibble.

But the rea­son I don’t trust engage­ment as a met­ric is that it doesn’t con­sider intent. And intent is the key dif­fer­ence between social and search. The rea­son search excels in mar­ket­ing is that it’s all about intent, and what’s even bet­ter, it’s about iden­ti­fied intent, neatly labeled by the search query. In the his­tory of mar­ket­ing, it’s never been eas­ier than this to inter­cept a moti­vated buyer. I don’t mean to min­i­mize the value of a well-managed search cam­paign, but com­pared to other chan­nels, it’s pretty dif­fi­cult to com­pletely flop on a search cam­paign. The same is not true for social. To illus­trate, let’s step back and look at this from another point of view – one that removes some of the hyper­bole that sur­rounds online social.

Let’s say you’ve just decided to sell your 2007 Honda Civic. As you’re back­ing out of your dri­ve­way, your neigh­bor flags you down and asks you how you like your Honda, and if you know where she could buy a good used one? From your per­spec­tive, this align­ing of the plan­ets seems too good to be true, but it’s sim­i­lar to what hap­pens on a search engine mil­lions of time every day. It’s the power of align­ment with pur­chase intent.

But let’s take a dif­fer­ent tack. Let’s imag­ine that as you drive down the street, you see that one of your neigh­bors is hav­ing a party. In front of their house, there are at least 12 cars parked, includ­ing 4 Hon­das. “A-ha, “ you say, “a per­fect gath­er­ing of poten­tial Honda buy­ers, with at least 33% of them show­ing a pref­er­ence for Hon­das” (note: if this is what your inter­nal dia­logue actu­ally sounds like, you should con­sider an extended leave from work). You ring the door­bell and begin to work the crowd. The only prob­lem is, no one came to the party to buy a Honda. Not to men­tion the obvi­ous ques­tion on everyone’s mind, “Who the hell invited you?”

If your goal is to unload your Honda, I know what sce­nario I’d be bet­ting on. It almost seems ludi­crous that we’re even con­sid­er­ing Sce­nario B as a sub­sti­tute for Sce­nario A. Yet, every 3 months, I get that sur­vey ask­ing me if I’m think­ing about it.

I know – it doesn’t make any sense to me either.

Orig­i­nally pub­lished in Mediapost’s Search Insider Decem­ber 1, 2011


Biography / Resume : Gord Hotchkiss is the founder and senior vice president of Enquiro, now part of Mediative. He is renowned in the industry for his expertise when it comes to understanding online user and search behaviour. He and the Enquiro team have built a solid reputation for being the leading experts when it comes to understanding what happens on a search portal and why. Before Enquiro, Gord was chairman and director of SEMPO (The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization), he worked as a columnist for MediaPost and Search Engine Land, and he was a regular speaker at industry conferences and events. Gord is also the author of The BuyerSphere Project: How Business Buys from Business in a digital marketplace.