BusinessWeek recently published an article titled “Beware Social Media Snake Oil” about self-proclaimed social media experts who don’t deliver on their marketing promises or, worse, actually do more harm to their clients than good.  The article has prompted a number of responses from the social media blogosphere, including those from David Armano and Mitch Joel and Jordan Kasteler.  A while back, I wrote my own list of questions for companies looking to evaluate social media marketers and avoid the snake oil salesmen.  However, I wanted to make a few points defending social media marketing gurus, who I think were unfairly critiqued by BusinessWeek:

1. Measuring the ROI on traditional media is just as, if not more, difficult than with social media. BusinessWeek writes, “Consultants often use buzz as their dominant currency, and success is defined more often by numbers of Twitter followers, blog mentions, or YouTube (GOOG) hits than by traditional measures, such as return on investment. This approach could sour companies on social media and the rich opportunities it represents.”  The implicit argument is that traditional marketing has great ROI tools.  In many cases, however, this simply isn’t true.  During my fourteen year stint in the broadcasting industry, I worked for five different radio stations (and four different broadcasting corporations) across the country.  I can assure you, the radio industry does not have an accurate way to measure the number of listeners it has, let alone measure what those listeners might be buying and why.  Radio’s Arbitron ratings system is riddled with problems, starting with the fact that the sample size is so small that a single person can wreak havoc on the measurements for an entire market.  Considerable effort has been made in recent years to adopt a more “scientific” ratings system with the introduction of a tool called the Portable People Meter.  This has been so fraught with problems that radio companies refused to use it at first and the FCC launched a probe into the new system.  The same is true of television.  Likewise, how do you measure the amount of people who purchase your product because they saw it on a billboard or in a newspaper?  The direct mail industry has increasingly turned to the internet through the use of tools like Personalized URLs in the hope of demonstrating ROI, to some avail.  Every industry has its own set of measurements, and with very few exceptions, these metrics actually measure various forms of “buzz” but are deeply flawed as a tool for determining real ROI.

(See this article on comparing traditional media measurements to social media measurements.)

2. Any marketing and media can be misused. BusinessWeek cites a number of examples where the use of social media has resulted in negative consequences, from a poorly written Motrin ad to a comment about a town being racist.  But to blame the medium for bad content is literally blaming the messenger.  Is there any reason to believe the Motrin ad would have been received better if it had been aired on television instead of the web?  Certainly caution should be taken with social media; you should always think twice before broadcasting any message out on behalf of your company.  And yes, it is much easier to broadcast out a message (bad or otherwise) with social media than it is with traditional media, but that’s the trade-off: The upside to social media is that any idiot can do it.  The downside is that any idiot might do it.

3. All social media experts are self-proclaimed. Let’s face it, this is a new field.  I’m a self-proclaimed social media expert and so is everyone else out there.  This field is so new that there are no university degrees offered in it; there are no certification program; there are no standards.  Yet.  That’s not the fault of the the industry or the people in it, it’s simply the nature of the beast.  Over time, this will change.  In the meantime, that’s not an indictment of the industry.  Einstein didn’t have a degree; that doesn’t mean he wasn’t an effective scientist.

4. Social media tools are very new. It is, as the article states, like the Wild West.  Frankly, that’s what’s so exciting about it.  Twitter was introduced to the public only two years ago.  Facebook fan pages for business have only become truly useful in the last year or so.  WordPress plugins that allow content to spread over the internet, such as SexyBookmarks or the TweetMeme button, are very new.  One of the main reasons there are no great metrics of the media yet is because it’s changing all the time.  As soon as a case study is written using one tool, a better tool is introduced.  But the fact that this marketing method is rapidly improving is not a reason to dismiss it.

5. Social media gurus are very new. Because the rise of these tools gave rise to the the gurus, social media marketing companies are very new.  Case studies may help separate the wheat from chaff, but many may not have built a portfolio of case studies yet, or those case studies may quickly become outdated due to emerging technologies.  It may be more useful to look at the background of the social media marketers.  BusinessWeek dismisses most gurus as “refugees from the real estate bust” – a claim which they failed to substantiate or qualify – as if we had gone from flipping houses to giving Facebook seminars.  I suspect many gurus actually have backgrounds in either technology, marketing or media (like myself).  In any event, it does not logically follow that by indicting somebody’s background you thereby also indict their ability to produce results.  Social media is new, so naturally these people were doing something different five years ago.

6. Social networking is like networking in the real world. At my seminars, I am constantly asked about the ROI on social media marketing, and my response is always the same: Social networking is like networking in the real world.  Is there a direct correlation in sales?  No.  But the more you do it, the more you get out of it.  It’s impossible to tell if today’s conversation will lead to a sale from a friend-of-a-friend six months from now (and thank God! How boring would life be if our every action could be reduced to a numeric formula?).  But the fact that it can’t be measured precisely doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have an effect.

At the end of the article, BusinessWeek warns of a backlash against the budding social media marketing industry that could kill it off just as it is becoming truly valuable.  Ignoring the fact that the author just spent the last sixteen paragraphs perpetuating this backlash, the blame is laid at the feet of the social media experts.  They need to “shift the focus from promises to results” and “flush out the snake oil.”  Implicit in this statement are two premises which I reject: 1) the focus is currently on promises and (2) the industry is rife with ill-intentioned snake oil salesmen looking to scam people for a quick buck.  In fact, many social media experts rose to prominence precisely because they railed against the lack of results delivered by traditional forms of marketing.  Yet here is a call for the social media community to turn against its own.  While I think that a certain degree of self-policing is valuable, I don’t think inciting people to ‘root out the traitors in their midst’ is particularly healthy for a fledgling industry.  In short, social media experts should aim to raise the standards amongst their peers by helping each other and spreading knowledge, not conducting witchhunts.

Every form of media has a noun used to describe the people it claims to reach. Radio has “listeners,” newspaper has “readers,” television has “viewers,” and so forth. New media follows the same linguistic rules. On Facebook, you have “fans” and on Twitter you have “followers.”

Given the linguistic similarities, it’s easy to assume that having a follower on your Twitter account is the equivalent of having a viewer of your television station, and that a page with 100,000 fans has the same power to reach people as a radio station with a cume (cumulative audience) of 100,000 people. In short, it’s easy to assume that:

television : viewer :: Twitter : follower
radio : listener :: Facebook : fan

Upon closer scrutiny, however, these analogies fail to hold up.

Let me preface this by saying that the ratings systems for television (Nielsen) and radio (Arbitron) are horribly flawed measurement tools that, at best, only give you an estimate of the actual ratings and, at worst, fluctuate wildly because the methodology is deeply susceptible to error. For the purposes of this blog post, I’m going to put that issue aside for the moment.

When a person is labeled a “viewer” of a television show, it is because they have actually watched the show; the same is true of radio “listeners.” These ratings systems are after-the-fact measures of past events. In the case of television, a box on your television set records what you watched; in radio, a Portable People Meter records the signature frequencies of the stations you hear.

The same cannot be said of Facebook fans or Twitter followers. A fan (or a follower) is not defined as a person who has actually read your posts, simply as someone who is able to receive your posts. It’s the television equivalent of ordering HBO – just because you get the channel doesn’t mean you actually sit down to watch True Blood every week. (I use HBO as an example because the channel can be ordered individually.  The analogy doesn’t hold up as well for basic cable bundles, because you have no idea whether a person ordered the package due to interest in Spike-TV, Lifetime or another channel.  Facebook and Twitter do not have comparable bundles.)  The closest radio analogy would be saving a station as a preset button: it’s now easier to receive the station, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you listened to it.

The analogy becomes even less accurate when you consider that radio ratings track individuals, while television ratings track households.  You must be an individual with a profile to become a fan of a Facebook page (some companies have profiles, but Facebook frowns upon this and sometimes disables such accounts).  Twitter, on the other hand, makes no distinction between account holders who are individuals and those who are organizations (companies, bands, groups, etc.).  A person could easily have multiple Twitter accounts for the different roles they play in their life, but he or she unlikely that they have more than one Facebook profile.  In this regard, Facebook is the most similar to radio.  I would also argue that a Facebook fan is also more valuable than a Twitter follower because you know a fan is an individual, whereas a follower may not be, and several followers could in reality all be the same individual.

Print offers a closer analogy, if only because the industry has its own misleading terminology. The words “readers” and “subscribers” are often used interchangeably, even though they are not the same thing. Just because the paper arrives at my doorstep every day does not mean that I actually open it up and read it. Back when I used to subscribe to the daily paper, it would often pile up, untouched, when I was too busy to find the time. Of course, there are also “readers” who are not “subscribers” – people who buy the paper on the street or pick up a used copy on the subway seat or in a waiting room. Conveniently, the publishing industry uses statistics which account for readers who are not subscribers, but not subscribers who don’t actually read, thus artificially inflating the number of people they claim to reach.

Having a follower or a fan is like having a print subscriber – somebody who can receive your messages, but may not actually choose to pay attention on any given day. Like Twitter and Facebook, newspapers and magazines cannot measure how many people actually digested their message after the fact. In short, these analogies hold up:

newspaper : subscriber :: Twitter : follower
magazine : subscriber :: Facebook : fan

while these analogies do not:

newspaper : subscriber :: newspaper : reader
magazine : reader :: Twitter : follower
newspaper : reader :: Facebook : fan

The subscriber analogy holds further with regard to Twitter, because neither the print industry or Twitter draw a distinction between subscribers who are individuals and subscribers who are organizations.  I may receive the paper at home, my workplace may have a subscription, or both.  Likewise, I may have a Twitter account for personal use, professional use or both.  In both cases, one person may account for multiple subscriptions, inflating the gap between “subscribers” and actual “readers.”

Finally, traditional media like television, radio and print is one-way while social media like Facebook and Twitter is two-way.  Normally, I crow about the big advantage that this fact represents for social media because it allows companies to engage in actual conversation with customers.  However, it can also add to the gap between “subscribers” and “readers.”  Why?  Just because social media can be used to send and receive messages doesn’t mean that people actually do use it for both.  In fact, there are a significant number of people on social media sites who have no interest in receiving your message, they are simply interested in blasting their own out.  They’re called spammers, and we spit on them at parties, but they do exist.  Just because somebody follows you, it does not necessarily mean that they are interested in hearing what you have to say.  By contrast, we know that print subscribers have at least some interest in hearing the message offered by the medium, because they pay for it and they can’t use it talk.

To make a long story short, don’t assume that having 100,000 fans or followers is the same as having 100,000 viewers or listeners.  One measures (or at least attempts to measure) the number of people who have actually received a message, while the other measures people who are capable of receiving a message.  They ain’t the same thing.