[Podcast] Defining Social Media, Part 1. Channels, Platforms, & Changing Rules

Defining Social Media Marketing, Part 1

Channels, Platforms, & Changing Rules

Long time friends Matt Bailey and Greg Jarboe are partnering on an upcoming book from Wiley, “Digital Marketing Fundamentals: OMCP’s Official Guide to OMCA Certification.” The core of the book is defining each area of digital marketing and outlining the critical skills and knowledge necessary to achieve the OMCA Certification.

As a major part of digital marketing, social media becomes the most difficult to define. Greg and Matt discuss the definitive practices in social media, and define the difference between core skills and changing tactics.

Of course, when Matt and Greg get together, there are no lack of stories, statistics, and sarcasm. Enjoy part 1 of this delightful romp through our modern social media age.

Part 2: Defining Social Media; Content Marketing, Influencers, & Audiences

Part 3: Defining Social Media; Social Commerce, Advertising & Analytics

Transcript

[00:00:00] Greg Jarboe: And there are a lot of reasons why other kinds of organizations, charities may want to do that. So, content marketing in, in some ways, yes, it overlaps with social, uh, media marketing, but in other ways it’s different and broader and, and, you know, okay, fine. You know, there’s a lot of elbowing at the table when the people are fighting over budgets, but at the end of the day, you know, did we move the needle when it came to what our goals and objectives were?

[00:00:33] Bumper Intro-Outro: Welcome to Endless Coffee Cup, a regular discussion of marketing news, culture, and media for our complex digital lifestyle. Join Matt Bailey as he engages in conversation to find insights beyond the latest headlines and deeper understanding for those involved in marketing. Grab a cup of coffee, have a seat, and thanks for joining.

[00:00:55] Matt Bailey: Well, hello, dear listener, and welcome to another edition of the Endless Coffee Cup podcast. Today is something a little different. And I have with me Mr. Greg Jarboe. Greg, welcome back to the show.

[00:01:08] Greg Jarboe: Matt, I, I, I feel like I’ve never left.

[00:01:13] Matt Bailey: You know, as, as much of, I hear you in the background when my staff is making audiograms and going over past content, I feel as though you’ve never left, as well.

[00:01:24] Greg Jarboe: Well, let’s hope that we give the audience something new and, and doesn’t sound like the same old, same old.

[00:01:31] Matt Bailey: On that subject, Greg, of something new. We’re going to talk about social media and the hesitation that you and I have both talked about. When you talk about social media, it’s new right now. It may not be new when it hits the airwaves.

[00:01:50] Greg Jarboe: Well, yeah. Social media is a funny, funny term. I was actually in the room when the term was coined by Chris Shipley. Now, this is back in 2004 and she was planning to launch a new event called BlogOn 2004, it was held at the Berkeley, you know, the Haas School of Business at Berkeley. And she said, “You know, Greg, I’d like you to be a speaker at my first social media conference.”

And I went, “Chris, what’s social media?” And it was a term that she had made up. And I said, “Well, that’s fine. I don’t mind speaking at conferences, but if nobody knows what the term means, then why do you expect anyone’s planning to attend?” So, I was there when she defined the term the first time, and it included blogs and social networks and, oh, wikis and all kinds of things. And I got to be a speaker there.

[00:02:57] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:02:57] Greg Jarboe: But I, I will tell you that when people use the term social media today, there are two definitions that float around. One of which is I’m going to call the Facebook version of the world where social media includes Facebook and anything that they’ve acquired like Instagram or WhatsApp and does not include YouTube. Somehow or other, Facebook cleverly…

[00:03:24] Matt Bailey: Oh.

[00:03:24] Greg Jarboe: …defined social media as, “Oh no, no, no. They’re in a different category.” And that made sort of sense until, oh, 2015, when Facebook decided that it was going to become a video first platform and they basically beg, borrowed, and stole every idea that Snapchat or YouTube or Vine or TikTok had, had ever come up with and tried to cram it into either Facebook and/or Instagram, wherever they could.

And, you know, suddenly said, “Oh no, no, no, we’re still social media. They aren’t,” when it’s like, “Excuse me? They’ve got video, you’ve got video, and this makes you different how?” So, I, I, I, one of the things that you absolutely have to start off with in any discussion like this is, okay, what do you include in, and what don’t you include in? Because I’ve, I still see lists today.

[00:04:37] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:04:37] Greg Jarboe: There, there was one that was published just last week on, “The Top 10 Social Media That You Need to Be,” you know, “Using,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, and, and, and, and YouTube wasn’t on the list.

[00:04:49] Matt Bailey: What?

[00:04:50] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:51] Matt Bailey: Oh, wow.

[00:04:51] Greg Jarboe: It’s, it’s, it’s like, excuse me, how can you put TikTok in there and not put YouTube? It’s like…

[00:04:57] Matt Bailey: That’s right.

[00:04:57] Greg Jarboe: …how, how are you defining your term? What, you know…

[00:05:02] Matt Bailey: Hey, at the beginning of any good discussion, and, and, and it’s funny because, dear listener, here’s the setup. Here’s the background. And, and just take a, a quick aside, Greg and I are writing another book. We are coauthoring along with other coauthors, and it is the OMCA Guide to Digital Marketing Certification, and you should be aware we’ve had, we’ve talked about OMCA numerous times on the show, the Online Marketing Certified Associate. And I offer that training on my site. And Greg and I have both been a part of setting the competencies and standards of the OMCA over the years.

Part of the book is we’ve been asked to write a chapter on social media, and as we were going back and forth about how do we do this with something that changes so quickly? And I, I, I just tossed it out there, like, “Let’s make a recording of you and I talking about it, and let’s put the transcript in the book.”

[00:06:07] Greg Jarboe: And, and, and I said that was a brilliant idea, except I had one fundamental disagreement. Your shorthand for what it is that we are about to embark on was Socratic dialogue.

[00:06:21] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:06:21] Greg Jarboe: Now, Matt, Socratic dialogue assumes that what we’re going to be engaged in is like a rational discussion with deep insight and penetrating analysis and all that left brain stuff.

[00:06:36] Matt Bailey: Right. Yep.

[00:06:37] Greg Jarboe: He, he, here was the metaphor that, that came to my mind. I don’t know…

[00:06:41] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:06:41] Greg Jarboe: …if you remember it. I, I suspect that we have some of the people who will either listen to this podcast or read, uh, the book who are too young to remember, but back in the 1990s, there was a comic strip called Calvin and Hobbs.

[00:06:58] Matt Bailey: Yes. Yes.

[00:06:59] Greg Jarboe: And one of the things that they did in that comic strip, in, in that comic strip was play Calvinball. Now, Calvinball was the least organized sport ever invented, and it could feature all kinds of things like a babysitter flag or a boomerang zone or a corollary zone or invisible sectors, opposite poles, parameters of wisdom, pernicious poem places, time-fracture wickets, very sorry songs, and vortex spots.

Now, there was only one permanent rule to Calvinball. You couldn’t play it the same way twice. That made it a, a, a contest of creativity and adaptability rather than one of skill and stamina. Scoring was arbitrary, whimsical, and capricious like, uh, oh, Q to 12 or oogaty to boogaty. And, and, and the lack of fixed rules led to frequent debates between Calvin, the little boy, and Hobbs, his stuffed tiger, who, who had scored, because what was a score, where the boundaries were, ’cause they always shifted, and, and when the game was finished. You know, is it just when you get tired or what? And, and I want you to know that is the right metaphor…

[00:08:23] Matt Bailey: It is.

[00:08:23] Greg Jarboe: …for social media marketing because you know what? It is hard to learn, and then next week you have to learn the new rule and you have to adapt and you, if you adapt well, you have a chance of winning, and that’s hard to do. In fact, the only other player beyond Calvin and Hobbs, whoever picked it up quickly, was Rosalyn the babysitter. And, and so, you know, to the extent that we can explain the rules and you understand that all the rules can work the moment that we tell them to you, and then next week somebody will change them…

[00:09:01] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:09:02] Greg Jarboe: …then, then you’re in the right zone.

[00:09:05] Matt Bailey: Oh, it, uh, I love the metaphor because I can’t think of another industry where 99% of your effort is about influencing what a company shows other people, and that company makes all its decisions based on profitability. It doesn’t care what you’re doing. It cares about pleasing shareholders.

[00:10:00] And so, I, I love, you, you know, the, the, the rules are going to change because, and, and we saw something this just a short while ago when Instagram started favoring video instead of pictures. The rules were changed in the middle of the game. There were winners, there were losers, and there’s people standing there wondering what happened. And so, it has nothing to do with your skill or ability. There’s still these, these decisions that are made on high for the profitability of a company, and then it filters down into small algorithmic changes.

[00:10:08] Greg Jarboe: Oh yes. Oh yes. And oh, by the way, because the boundaries shift and change and, you know, one week it is not video marketing, that’s another category altogether, and, and the next week, “Oh, oh yeah. We’re video first.” One of the things that that does is it forces all the other elements of a digital marketing campaign to make sure they’re ready to redefine themselves vis-a-vis social media marketing. It’s like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What are you encroaching on now that I used to do? Or what opportunity have you just spotted that I need to go rush and, and, and, uh, imitate as well?”

So, it, it is probably one of the most fluid disciplines in digital marketing. It’s one of the reasons why, although it’s I think chapter six in the book, it’s the last chapter we decided to write because, you know what? If you write this too early, you know, half of it will be outmoded by the time the book gets published.

[00:11:11] Matt Bailey: Right. Right. Well, it’s also, I find, so when I’m at conferences and especially when I’m teaching analytics, one of the biggest questions that consistently comes up, especially in brands and, and, and other larger organizations, “How do I justify my time and spend on social media?” That has got to be one of the top questions that I am asked, because people are trying to rationalize the effort, the time, the media that they develop for social media, and they’re trying to show that this time is worth something, but obviously there’s a disconnect between the value that I’m producing and, and a measurable value, and I have to rationalize this time. There’s something missing there, and that’s a big question.

[00:12:05] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. The only historic analog that I’m aware of was the early days of the telephone where there were a lot of people who said, “Well, how do you cost justify, um, putting a telephone in my hotel?” And they said, “Well, if you call down for the bellhop to bring you a bucket of ice, you don’t have to walk down the stairs and the bellhop will come up the stairs with the right thing that you wanted the first time. He doesn’t have to answer a, a pull cord.”

And, and, and, and so, there are a lot of people who are still trying to cost justify social media marketing the way the early telephone was because it’s a communications medium. That’s fine. And some of that communications is person to person. It’s me to my friends, it’s me to my colleagues. And oh, by the way, somebody wants to sneak some advertising in there, or somebody wants to influence that conversation so that one of us mentions a brand. It’s like, “Excuse me? Why would I want to do that?”

So, yeah, it, it, it, it, it’s still a crazy place, but at the end of the day, measuring what matters will begin defining what is a waste of time or what is, you know, personal conversation versus a interaction that could lead to, uh, product sales or, uh, brand lift or whatever it is that, that, that you’re interested in actually accomplishing.

[00:13:36] Matt Bailey: Alright. I like that. We may have to move that section down to “Measurement” because that’s a good talk and we’re going to get into that. And what we’re doing is we’re, we’re basically following a script as we go through this and we’re going to be asking each other questions.

[00:13:48] Greg Jarboe: There’s a script? You have a script? Wait a second.

[00:13:53] Matt Bailey: You gave me the outline.

[00:13:54] Greg Jarboe: Oh, I gave you an outline. That’s not a script.

[00:13:59] Matt Bailey: Well, oh, okay. Let me start here. You started with defining the term or at least asking the definition, which in a Socratic dialogue, is where things start, is, to, by defining our terms. So, I love that you started out with your, your example, your story of where the term was first coined and, and the question of, “How do we define social media marketing?” And, and in your outline, I like how you added, “today.” “Today, how are we defining social media marketing?”

[00:14:37] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. There is a “Best if Used By” date stamp on everything that we say or write.

[00:14:43] Matt Bailey: Yes. Yes. Well, okay. So, I’m going to throw out my definition, and what is interesting, though, is when I was doing my master’s degree, just a few short years ago, a lot of content that had to do with social media was referred to, hold on Greg, Web 2.0.

And this is what’s happening in undergrad and in graduate content is, dear listener, you can’t see this, but Greg is wiping his brow and, and, in, in university level content, they’re still using terms such as Web 2.0, which is the, I would say precursor to what we now call social media. Here’s what I, I would say defines social media is content on a platform that integrates or allows community participation conversation.

So, you can post content or information, but if it doesn’t allow a public response, either affirming what you’ve done, it, it’s the addition of tools that allow sharing, communication, recreation, and, and it also produces things in a threaded view so that you see subsequent comments or shares or likes. You, you, you could see this organized view, and so it’s not based on the entire site or page, but it’s per post you see the thread that it generates, rather than entire website.

[00:16:31] Greg Jarboe: Yep.

[00:16:31] Matt Bailey: And…

[00:16:32] Greg Jarboe: Yep.

[00:16:32] Matt Bailey: That…

[00:16:32] Greg Jarboe: I, I, I agree.

[00:16:33] Matt Bailey: I would start with that.

[00:16:34] Greg Jarboe: I, I, I, I agree. And this is, this is what makes it different than let’s say the early days of the telephone, which was primarily a one-to-one communication channel, you know, one person to one person, or the mass media, where it was one to many. What you have with social media is, in many cases, many to one or many to many, or, you know, yeah. Somebody may kick off a discussion, but it may generate, uh, follow on conversations that go well beyond what the person who initiated, uh, that thread may have had in mind.

But, but that is both the potential of this, uh, new way of communicating, but it’s also what makes it a, a problematic for, oh, misinformation and disinformation, and certainly a threat to reputation management and, you know, all, all, all other kinds of the dark side of, uh, social media marketing.

[00:17:35] Matt Bailey: Well, and what I find interesting is use, using that definition, social media has been around long before the modern internet. That, like, my first interaction with the internet back in 1984, not as far back as you, Greg, but I got… inexperience.

[00:17:58] Greg Jarboe: I, I…

[00:17:58] Matt Bailey: Experience is what I, yeah.

[00:18:00] Greg Jarboe: I, I, I, hmm…

[00:18:01] Matt Bailey: Inexperience. Hey, I was a young kid doing, I, I was getting into news groups, bulletin boards, because they were very specific niches of information and communities online that were so helpful. It was, it was great to access that information, but anyone who says, you know, “I, I’ve been on social media since day one. I loved it.” Oh really?

[00:18:25] Greg Jarboe: Really? Really? Yeah, yeah.

[00:18:25] Matt Bailey: Yeah, when was…

[00:18:27] Greg Jarboe: Yeah…

[00:18:28] Matt Bailey: …was day on?

[00:18:29] Greg Jarboe: I, I, I was actually there in day one. So, I, I, I was creating, uh, content for CompuServe back in 1988.

[00:18:35] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:18:35] Greg Jarboe: I was a director of marketing at, uh, PC Computing magazine. So, we were as close to day one as you could get, but let, let me circle back to it’s been around a long time. It has been, only it’s gone by other names. So, uh, some people called it word of mouth. In fact, when I spoke at the very first social media conference back in 2004, the story that I told at that conference was about Paul Revere’s ride and how everyone thinks that there was this one guy on a fast horse who rode through every Middlesex village and farm spreading the word, right?

Well, it turns out there was not one rider that night. There were 40. They were networked. Revere would go into a town like Arlington, tell the captain of the Minutemen unit there what was going down. He, he, he would then notify, it, what was called an alarm rider who would then ride from Arlington over to Medford, and Revere would then ride to Lexington, spread the alarm some more, another rider would, uh, ride off to Bedford and then he never actually even made it to Concord.

[00:20:00] He got arrested in Lincoln before he finished the trip, but one of the guys he was riding with that night, Dr. Samuel Prescott, broke away from the British patrol that had grabbed both he and Revere and took the message to Concord, woke up his brother who rode to Sudbury, uh, Dr. Prescott rode to Acton. That’s how the word spread.

And the British had no preparation for social media because 40 riders got the message off to enough people that night that after blowing away the opposition in Lexington and setting the town of Concord on fire, they suddenly discovered everybody and their cousin who had a musket that day was prepared to make life miserable, and they drove them back into Boston where they never, they never got out. In fact, they eventually had to leave.

So, social media, the word spread, you know, back in more than 200 years ago. And all social media that we talk about today does, is put that kind of communications on steroids so that, okay, we’re not riding horses anymore. And we’re not saying, “The British are coming,” although they didn’t say the British were coming. That’s, that’s made up. They were saying, “The Regulars are out.” That was actually the message that was being spread that night.

But the, the point is, is that all we have done is now we use Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or Instagram, or, you know, you name it to send those messages and people either wake up, get out of bed, and go take action, or they roll over and go back to sleep depending on how boring your message is.

[00:21:30] Matt Bailey: I love it. You just keep going back further and further into history.

[00:21:33] Greg Jarboe: I know, I know. I’m so old.

[00:21:35] Matt Bailey: I love it.

[00:21:36] Greg Jarboe: My grandkids say I’m older than dirt.

[00:21:40] Matt Bailey: Well, I mean, you, you were there when they coined the term “social media,” so now I’m wondering how far back we’re going here.

[00:21:46] Greg Jarboe: Oh, oh, oh, here’s, here’s what’s worse. Here’s what’s worse. I tried to talk Chris Shipley out of it. I said, “Chris, don’t use a term that nobody knows what you’re talking about. Nobody will come to your conference.” And, and so I, I failed miserably. She coined the term anyway, and the rest is history. I was wrong. She was right.

[00:22:02] Matt Bailey: That is great. That is great. That, yeah, it took off and it took off quickly. So, let’s talk about next what areas do we associate with social media marketing? And, and this is a question I always like asking a business when they ask, “What channel should I use?” My response to them is, “Well, what do you want to do?” And there are activities that you do that are performed through social media and that’s the first question. What do you want to do, then let’s talk about channel, but let’s talk about how you’re going to use it, first.

[00:22:39] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. And I think that’s the missing ingredient. Too many people jumped into social media because it was the new, new thing. You know, “Everyone else is doing it. I got to go do it, too.”

[00:22:49] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:22:49] Greg Jarboe: “Well, what are you doing?” “Well, I’m trying to learn how to write in less than 140 characters.” It’s like, “Okay. Why?” And, and, and you’re absolutely correct. We, because it was new, we all focused on the quirky little features that we had to contort ourselves to use, to “communicate in” as opposed to, okay, communicate for what purpose, what reason? So, so you’re right. It does get messy. It’s great to define your goals and objectives ahead of time. And maybe social media will fit into them and maybe they won’t.

[00:23:27] Matt Bailey: So, how does that fit into content marketing?

[00:23:30] Greg Jarboe: Well, content marketing is actually overlaps with social media marketing because…

[00:23:34] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:23:35] Greg Jarboe: …there’s some of the content that you can create that you might post on Facebook you might upload to YouTube. You might, you know, put on another social media platform. In other words, you, you, you may have a message that you then tailor for the quirky individualistic nature of a particular platform. That’s fine. But guess what? You can also communicate your content posted on your website. This is then where the blog comes back. If you consider blog social media, then putting your content on a blog is part of a social media campaign. But again, the way Facebook has redefined things, there are a lot of people who not only forget YouTube is a social medium, but they also forget that blogs are the original…

[00:24:20] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:24:20] Greg Jarboe: …social media, even before Facebook came along. In fact, Facebook’s biggest challenger once upon a time was MySpace. So, Facebook was, wasn’t even the first social network that was out there. They just are the biggest surviving network…

[00:24:35] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:24:35] Greg Jarboe: …that, that is out there. So, so again, content marketing focuses on, are you going to create valuable and relevant content that can attract a clearly defined audience? And, oh, by the way, the purpose of attracting that clearly defined audience is to, you know, make money one way or another. And so, a, again, it’s, it’s what is my audience interested in that I can get them to visit my blog, visit my website, visit my social media platforms or heaven forbid my executives can given a speech in a room to an audience where there is, isn’t a, a social media channel in sight, and you know what? That’s part of a content marketing campaign, too. Events in person, in, you know, face-to-face events are, uh, a very, uh, effective way of content marketing.

So, again, if, if, if you start off with, “I’m, I’m trying to attract an audience,” and there are a lot of reasons why businesses will want to, and there are a lot of reasons why other kinds of organizations, charities may want to do that. So, content marketing in, in some ways, yes, it overlaps with social, uh, media marketing, but in other ways it’s different and broader and, and, you know, okay, fine. You know, there’s a lot of elbowing at the table when people are fighting over budgets, but at the end of the day, you know, did we move the needle when it came to what our goals and objectives were?

[00:26:10] Matt Bailey: Yeah. I kind of see content marketing as almost like a capstone activity because you need social, you need SEO, you need maybe some paid channels to get that message out to, for your distribution, that content marketing’s kind of that, it, it requires these disciplines to do it well. So, I see that more of a capstone than…

[00:26:35] Greg Jarboe: Well, it, it, it, it, again…

[00:26:36] Matt Bailey: …steals…

[00:26:36] Greg Jarboe: …it’s, it’s, it, it gets messy and…

[00:26:39] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:26:40] Greg Jarboe: …and at the end of the day, one of the things that I’ve seen in organization after organization is show me where your brightest leaders are, put them in charge, don’t worry about the name of the department. You know, if they’re, your content marketer is the director and your social media, uh, manager takes direction, you know, fine. If it’s the other way around, if it’s the social media director who’s telling the content, uh, marketing, uh, manager the kind of content that will resonate with an audience, fine. You, you know, that, that’s, uh, you, you know, tell me who is strong or weak in your organization and, you know, and structure it accordingly.

But, but yeah, content marketing and social media marketing are frequently confused, and people do need to define where they overlap, where they don’t overlap, and who’s playing the lead role and who, who’s following.

[00:27:41] Matt Bailey: Yeah. I, I think that also goes along with the, the next area that we have as part of the competencies is reputation management. And I see that in so many different areas. I see that in local companies, local businesses that, hey on Google, I can find your listing, but I can also leave a review. And so, maybe not being as active in social media, but monitoring what’s said, what reviews are added, what people talk about, that is part of reputation management, but also with the nature of social media itself, we’re allowing community participation.

And I, I, I, I forget who it was that says that if you allow anyone to say anything, someone’s going to start complaining. And that’s where social media has really, we’ve allowed people to comment now on anything.

Recently, we, we had a, an accident here locally and I went to the local paper online to see, I wanted, I wanted some details about it. And then I went to the bottom of the article and started reading the comments. And Greg, I have to tell you, I don’t know why we decided adding comments to the bottom of a well-researched article from a reporter who was on the spot. Why do we think it’s a good idea to let the general public comment on an article?

[00:29:10] Greg Jarboe: Oh, oh, I can answer that. As a former local newspaper editor…

[00:29:15] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:29:15] Greg Jarboe: …it’s because there are 50% fewer local newspaper editors today than there were 15 years ago. So, by and large, you know, it, it, it works well when there actually is a professional journalist in the room taking notes and writing, but more often than not, particularly in the little town I live in, which is a, a town of 20,000, the last newspaper gave up the ghost a couple months ago and we have no journalists turning up to cover a town meeting, the board of selectmen, you know, any, any of the official bodies.

[00:29:49] Matt Bailey: Wow.

[00:29:49] Greg Jarboe: Even the school committee.

[00:29:52] Matt Bailey: Wow.

[00:30:00] Greg Jarboe: Which brings me to the big elephant in the room that is filling this vacuum, and it’s not so much the public who’s asking questions and making comments and leaving reviews and, and, and whatever. That’s, that’s actually just a good, healthy conversation. What, what is more problematic is, is what I call disinformation.

[00:30:16] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:30:17] Greg Jarboe: This is not misinformation like I’m just not well-informed and I can be corrected. This is, “I, am, am out to sabotage your point of view.” You see this more often than not in politics, although frankly, there have been a lot of disinformation campaigns around, let’s say public health or other, other issues. So, COVID-19 has a lot of disinformation campaigns for one reason or another.

And, and one of the things that even Facebook admitted, of course, they were dragged before Congress in, in order to admit it was that in, I think it was in late 2017 they admitted that as many as 126 million of their users in the United States had seen content from Russian disinformation campaigns over the previous two years. So, from 2015 through to, uh, 2017.

Twitter, who, who, which was also dragged before Congress in, in the same hearing also said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we found 36,000 Russian bots that were spreading tweets, uh, related to the 2016 U.S. election. So, one of the problems about, you know, anybody can post a comment. Okay. Are, are they a real person or have they been hired?

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And then also, you can connect with us on Slack. Go to Slack. If you’re there, and look for us at endlesscoffeecup.slack.com. Connect with us, I’d love to hear from you, hear what ails you in the realm of digital marketing. Are there courses you need, information that you’d like to hear, or maybe some past guest that you’d like to hear more from? Thanks again for being a listener of the Endless Coffee Cup, and I look forward to hearing from you.

[00:32:38] Greg Jarboe: Are they a Russian troll or heaven forbid, are they a, are they a bot who’s just been turned loose? And that is a much more problematic area for social media marketers.

[00:32:50] Matt Bailey: Absolutely. It, it falls under the astroturfing label, as well, that we’re going to make something look like it is a ground swell of citizen demands, when in reality it’s a bot farm and it is creating a false sense of something that’s important and demanding a, an explanation to it. So, this is something, yeah, that’s, I mean, this, I, I hesitate to say disinformation is social media’s Achilles’ heel. It, it, I don’t know, I, I call it the, the great social experiment that we have done over the past 15 years of combining social media with a mobile device and let’s see what happens. And we’re, we’re seeing what’s happening and that’s our great social experiment.

[00:33:36] Greg Jarboe: Yep. And, and there were a lot of, uh, governments during the, oh, let’s say Arab Spring that saw what happened and all of a sudden, every dictator around the world discovered, “Well, okay, we don’t want that happening. Let’s, let’s see how we can set up, uh, countermeasures.”

[00:33:52] Matt Bailey: Yeah. Yeah. Well, the next stage of this, and, and we’re kind of going through these where any one of these could be a, a, a, probably a, a long discussion in itself, except for monitoring in conversations.

Some, I, I, I like to call these the businesses that haven’t fully quite invested in social media. They’re, they’re mainly using it to monitor what people say. So, they’re setting up alerts for their brand. They’re using it just to see, “What are people saying about our brand, our product, our CEO?” They’re using it more of like a, a crisis communications, that, “We want to make sure that everything is good. If someone complains, we’re on it.”

And then, and then kind of that next level then is actually participating in conversations where I’m not proactively going out and creating content, but I’m going to participate when the conversation rolls around. But the kind of the danger of that, and we’ve talked about this before, is I think it’s less than 10% of the content on social media is, or I believe less than 5% actually, less than 5% on social media actually create content. And probably another 5% actually engage with the content through comments, likes. The vast majority, I think it’s 90% or a little less than that, are simply the lurkers.

[00:35:18] Greg Jarboe: Yep.

[00:35:18] Matt Bailey: They’re just there to read and watch and they don’t engage. So, there’s a danger to using social media as a primary listening device to get the, the, the word of the customer or the, or the think in the customer’s brain to find out what they’re thinking. What you’re actually reading is the vocal minority. And you, uh…

[00:35:42] Greg Jarboe: And, and, and you can, you can tell pretty quickly that vocal minority is disproportionately male. So, a, a, a, again, you know, one of the things as you start digging into social listening, you’re, you’re listening to, uh, a, a, a bunch of loudmouth guys who somehow or other feel that they’ve got to express their opinion. And you’re, you’re not listening to the more reasonable guys or in a lot of cases, women who seem savvy enough to say, “I’m not going to get dragged into that mud pit. You know, I’ll read it, but I’m not going to add my name to the comments.”

[00:36:20] Matt Bailey: Yep. Yep. So, I think that’s important to remember is, yeah, it’s, it’s a very vocal minority that are actually creating and commenting. So, if you want to get the, the thinking of your audience, this is, as long as it’s not the sole method that you are using to acquire market intelligence. There are many other things that you can add to that.

[00:36:40] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. And, and, and make sure you, you also use some audit tools to discover if the people who are making the loudest noise are real people…

[00:36:50] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:36:50] Greg Jarboe: …with, with actual addresses, you know. Which, which, which brings me to the next area that often overlaps with social media marketing and that’s influencer marketing. And that’s primarily because most of the influencer that anyone tends to target are social media influencers. Now, influencers could be on other platforms. I would consider a journalist an influencer, but, you know.

[00:37:14] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:37:15] Greg Jarboe: Most, most people, you know, “Oh, that’s PR. That’s a whole different thing altogether.” But when they talk about influencer marketing, they’re talking about social media influencers. And there again, you got to be careful. The influencers learned early on that they got compensated better if they had more followers. So, guess what? They found a way to pump up their fake followers or, and, and, and then people who figured out how to, uh, detect fake followers said, “Oh, no, no, no. Now we’re going to, now we’re going to look at engagement. That’s our new metric.” And then the influencers figured a way to, you know, come, come, come in with, with fake engagement metrics.

And so, one of the things that you want to think about, particularly if you’re going to work with influencers in your social media marketing campaign, is to vet them. You’ve, you, you’ve got to double check that A. they’re real, B. and this is much more important, their audience is real because if you’re going to, uh, pay a, oh, mega influencer who has a micro influencer audience, you’re going to overpay. I mean, it…

[00:38:26] Matt Bailey: Yep.

[00:38:26] Greg Jarboe: …it’s, it’s that simple.

[00:38:28] Matt Bailey: Well, and, and I love the distinction that’s being made in the industry right now between the title “influencer” and the actual influence that they can create. That there, there is a, a distinct distinction. And, I almost like to call it a person of influence rather than an influencer, because now, especially, and, and I was in a, a crisis communications lecture just yesterday and they were talking about how part of your crisis communication is when you bring in an expert and that expert speaks to their level of knowledge. That is an influencer because…

[00:39:04] Greg Jarboe: Yep.

[00:39:04] Matt Bailey: …they have established authority, they speak to that, and that assists your credibility in the response. So, an influencer is not the wannabe fitness guru.

[00:39:17] Greg Jarboe: Well, it, it can be the wannabe fitness guru. I, I, I mean, let’s put this way, the influencer marketing hub, which tracks these things…

[00:39:25] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:39:25] Greg Jarboe: …uh, their latest number is at about $16.4 billion will be spent this year on influencer, spending big bucks, over three quarters of the marketers out there are using…

[00:39:39] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:39:39] Greg Jarboe: …influencer marketing. So, you know, they think it works. And again, you, you know, you got to be able to measure what matters to make sure that the influencer is actually influential, and that the influencer’s audience is actually even remotely interested in your product, your service, your, your cause.

[00:39:58] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:39:59] Greg Jarboe: You know, whatever it is.

[00:40:00] Matt Bailey: Absolutely. Absolutely. There, there’s so many more methods of measurement now that I think are assisting that and to measure the true influence that is wielded by an individual who has a following.

The next section is digital advertising, which is interesting ’cause again, now we’re getting the elbows at the tables again. We’re, we’re seeing a lot of, of crossover, but where I went with this is that just a few years ago, brands, and I remember even at some of the conferences that we were at, everyone is saying, “You got to get on Facebook. You got to build your, your audience. You got to put hours into your organic posting.”

And a few short years later, Facebook changes the algorithm, and they reduce the organic, “organic” reach so that if you are a brand or a business, you are not now reaching the same, if you have an audience, you’re maybe reaching 2% of that audience. And if you want to reach more of that audience, you’ve got to pay, you got to boost your posts, you’ve got to use their ad network in order to reach the same level of audience that you were reaching before. And this goes to what we were talking about before. The rules changed all of a sudden, and all that work that companies put into developing that organic presence on Facebook pretty much evaporated overnight.

And so now I, I like, I just say, hey, you know what? It’s the social networks being completely honest. They are money driven. And so, they’re going to make decisions that enable them to create more revenue. So, every platform adjusts their algorithms to favor certain types of content, reduce corporate content, and force you into an advertising model. Which is not bad. They, they have the audience and especially like a Facebook, they know all the demographic information. They know what you like. They know what you’re looking at. They know what groups you’re a part of.

So, you can actually be a bit more targeted by advertising on these platforms to people that follow certain hashtags, follow, uh, certain personalities that express that I like this content. And now you could target them based on that rather than just kind of, I don’t know, I call it the, the hamster wheel of content creation when you’re trying to build an audience on a third-party platform. I, I like the ability of, I’m just going to target who I want, focus my ad campaign, and they’re giving me the ability to do that.

[00:42:33] Greg Jarboe: Yeah, there’s just one problem with the targeting the people I want concept, it, which is a good one. Way too many small businesses, medium-sized businesses, even very large brands think they want, oh, a demographic audience. “I, I want women…”

[00:42:53] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:42:53] Greg Jarboe: “…who are 18 to 35.” “Okay. Why?” “Well, because in the television era, that was the only information I had was gender and age, and I used to be able to pick TV shows to run ads against based on those two factors. So, that’s how I’m comfortable targeting.”

Well, particularly as you’ve just said, it, when you get to social media, there’s a whole extra kind of information on people’s behavior, you know, what other sites they visit and, and if they’ve been visiting 14 sites in the last 2, uh, days looking at different cars, guess what? They’re interested in buying a car.

And, oh, by the way, you know, whether you’re Facebook or YouTube or, or, or any of the other social platforms, they can follow that, too. And they can serve up audiences based on their affinities. You know, I’m a motorcycle enthusiast, not a car driver, or based on their in-market behavior, I’m in the market for a car.

And so, if you are, “I only want to reach the people I want to reach, and they are based on a 20th century model of market segmentation,” it’s like, wake up, smell the coffee, which is, seems to be the right thing to say on an Endless Coffee Cup podcast, and, and under, understand that you’re not leveraging other information, uh, that’s available for targeting that you should be using instead.

[00:44:28] Matt Bailey: Absolutely. Regardless of demographic, people have needs. And when we understand the needs, we target the need. And I don’t care what their age or gender is. If they need my product, I’m…

[00:44:39] Greg Jarboe: Oh, I, I, I…

[00:44:39] Matt Bailey: …I’m selling it to them. So…

[00:44:40] Greg Jarboe: …I’ve even seen this in the baby formula category, 40% of the people who are…

[00:44:47] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:44:48] Greg Jarboe: …buying baby products, okay, do not have a child in their household. And it’s like, “Okay, who are you weirdos?” And the answer is they’re grandparents or they’re siblings of…

[00:45:05] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:45:05] Greg Jarboe: …a, a parent, or they are coworkers of a parent who’s, who’s buying something on the way home from work. Let’s put it this way. There are a lot of people who are in the market for a product category that go beyond the demographic stereotype. So again, if, if you are, are using the old two-dimensional thinking in a three-dimensional world, you know, surprise, surprise, you’re going to hit from, you’re going to get hit from below or, or, or above or behind or whatever the right direction is.

[00:45:40] Matt Bailey: Well, and on that subject. So, you talked about friends, family, coworkers, and, and there’s something I added here that was not in, it, it’s not in the competencies but I added it anyway.

[00:45:50] Greg Jarboe: You, you, you could do that? You can change things?

[00:45:53] Matt Bailey: I, I, I’m going to add here.

[00:45:56] Greg Jarboe: Ooh.

[00:45:56] Matt Bailey: Dark social. Ooh.

[00:45:59] Greg Jarboe: Ooh.

[00:45:59] Matt Bailey: Doesn’t that sound mysterious? I, just the majority of content that is shared is shared in what they call dark social. And what dark social is, it’s private messaging, chat, email, messaging apps, things that can’t be tracked…

[00:46:19] Greg Jarboe: And, and it’s not always dark.

[00:46:20] Matt Bailey: …by the platforms.

[00:46:20] Greg Jarboe: I, I, let’s put this way. You’re going to give it a, uh, bad reputation ’cause for some reason light good, dark bad. But let’s put this way. My kids have kids, so I have grandkids. That’s how old I am. One of whom thinks that I’m as old as the dinosaurs. Okay, fine. Got it. But the photos of the grandkids cannot go on Facebook. That’s just the edict that came down from the family.

[00:46:49] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:46:49] Greg Jarboe: Do not post any photos you take of the grandkids on Facebook. Why? Again, there’s too much dark stuff going on, you know, and, and that’s not even a dark social, right? So, we have a, a different social medium, and it’s called Tinybeans. And it’s the private. It’s where we can exchange with each other the photos that we wouldn’t put in a place where other lurkers might see them.

[00:47:18] Matt Bailey: Right. Yeah, and I, and I think this, this privacy is going to bring out a much more of this, I would say small community sharing of pictures, information, “I don’t necessarily want this published out. I just want, you know, I just want to send this to my brother.” I, I, I was looking at just my, my messaging, just with friends, family, those around, those types of things. It’s, you know, if I knew people were watching that, I, I wouldn’t say it naturally, necessarily would change anything, but it’s just one on one. There’s no reason to publicize it. And so, there, I, I think people need to understand that a lot of recommendations, a lot of word of mouth does not happen on the platform. Happens in more personal ways of communication.

[00:48:02] Greg Jarboe: Which is why, you know, again, social media marketers should all take a course in word-of-mouth marketing, because it is a nearby neighboring field where there are a lot of good lessons to learn long before social media, as we now know it, came along.

In fact, I, I, I once had to cover the 2010 parliamentary elections in the UK, and, because it was considered the first social media election. And Nick Clegg, who now works for Facebook, was doing “brilliant things on Twitter” and “Oh, you got to, you got to look at this. You got to report on that.”

And, you know, I, I was writing articles for Search Engine Watch about the campaign. And one of the social media marketers over in the UK who was, you know, giving me advice says, “You’ve missed the biggest social medium that we have here in this country.”

And boy, did that embarrass me because, you know, yeah, I’m an American and yeah, I’m, I’m probably missing some things. “What is it? What’s the social medium that I, I failed to report on?” He said, “Pubs.” He said, “There’s more conversation going on in pubs about the election, and you’re not covering that aspect of the story at all.” And he was right. He was right. That is, that’s a very social medium.

[00:49:24] Matt Bailey: Yeah. Absolutely. It’s the original social medium, everyone having a conversation over a drink. I think that’s when most people are free to share their opinion. As we said before, most will not share their opinion or comment. They maybe need to get to the pub and have a few drinks, then they’ll share. Uh…

[00:49:40] Greg Jarboe: Well, and, and, and, and when you can argue on behalf of your candidate or party while also playing darts, then you’ve mastered it. Now, now that’s…

[00:49:48] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:49:49] Greg Jarboe: …you know. Boy, I want, I want to put you in charge of the campaign.

[00:50:00] Matt Bailey: There we go. There we go. So, the next thing we deal with is the organizational structure. And I, I think, you know, very quickly going through this that how you deal with social media is going to be different based on the size of your team. You alluded to this before, who’s in charge? Does social media fall under content? Does it fall under marketing? Does it fall, where did those things fall under? So, for a small organization, maybe two to five people, Greg, what would that look like?

[00:50:26] Greg Jarboe: It’s going to look like one person. I mean, come on. And, and then you don’t have any organizational…

[00:50:32] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:50:32] Greg Jarboe: …structure problems at all. What you have is a really typical example of what’s actually going on in the real world out there. One person has to do it all and they have to make tradeoffs. I’m, I’m working right now with a, uh, woman who’s running for state representative in Massachusetts. It is a really tiny district. There’s 160 different state representatives. So, it’s, you know, it, it’s, it’s parts of four towns, but it’s, it’s small.

And, and, and her social media team, one guy. And he has so much bandwidth, and then he runs out of day, night, and sleep, you know? And, and, and so, the tradeoffs that that one person has to make is what matters most, ’cause that’s what I got to do today, and what doesn’t matter so much, well, it’s not going to happen.

[00:51:23] Matt Bailey: Yep. Yep. Once you get into larger teams, here’s where I think the Calvinball comes in really well because there’s not one method that’s going to work for everybody. So, even if I get into a team where I, it’s funny, the next designation is six to twenty. Like, well, we’re playing Calvinball.

You might see a bit more specialization. However, everyone might contribute, depending upon what type of organization you are, where everyone is going to contribute something that maybe is then posted under one name or one organization, or you might have one or two people, someone doing monitoring, someone content creation. I like to tell people if you’re getting in, into social media, this is probably the ideal team size.

[00:52:09] Greg Jarboe: It, it, it generally is. Yes.

[00:52:11] Matt Bailey: Because, yeah, you, you, you’re going to get some specialization where someone might be in charge of, depending upon how much you’re publishing, maybe someone’s in charge of each platform, or in charge of digital ads on that platform, or someone is just focused on content creation. So, with that specialization, you’re going to get some experience in, in different areas, but also, you’ll be able to work in different areas…

[00:52:38] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. And…

[00:52:39] Matt Bailey: …and see what’s working on there.

[00:52:40] Greg Jarboe: …and, and, and again, for a campaign, organizing your team by platform may make perfect sense. Over the long haul, I would hate to be the person who got assigned to, oh, let’s say Vine. “I’m the Vine specialist,” you know, or, “I’m the Google+ specialist.” Okay? Because when my platform…

[00:53:03] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:53:03] Greg Jarboe: …goes bye-bye, uh, so does my job. So, so cross-training…

[00:53:08] Matt Bailey: Yep.

[00:53:09] Greg Jarboe: …is something anybody on that team is going to want to seek out real fast because they never know when, uh…

[00:53:15] Matt Bailey: Absolutely.

[00:53:15] Greg Jarboe: …tomorrow’s change is going to suddenly say, “What? Organic reach on Facebook,” you know, “is down to under 2%?” You know, “Pfft.” You know, “Time to downsize that team.” “Well, I don’t, I don’t want to be on that team.”

[00:53:28] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:53:28] Greg Jarboe: “I, I’m also pretty good at Instagram.”

[00:53:35] Matt Bailey: Well, and that gets to, you, you know, I, I love the next one is organizations with more than 20 marketers. Now we’re talking brand size.

[00:53:41] Greg Jarboe: Oh, now, now we’re talking turf battles, too.

[00:53:42] Matt Bailey: We’re talking…

[00:53:43] Greg Jarboe: Urgh, urgh, urgh.

[00:53:44] Matt Bailey: Yes. Yes.

[00:53:45] Greg Jarboe: And, and what you are also talking about, which will make your organizational matrix even more creative is you’ve got outside agencies. So, it’s, “What do I hire an outside agency to manage? What do I have on staff to manage?” And my best advice in these search, circumstances is if it is crucial to your success, you better have someone on staff. If you’ve got something that’s seasonal…

[00:54:14] Matt Bailey: Yep.

[00:54:15] Greg Jarboe: …that you want to dial up and dial back then, you know, an outside agency’s actually pretty handy to have.

[00:54:21] Matt Bailey: Yeah. I, I find an agency is helpful because typically they’ve got all the tools in place. They have people who know how to use the tools. And, as you said, it can ebb and flow with the business, and it’s a great way to get experience very quickly up to speed and running. The downside is they also have 20 other companies they’re doing this for. And so, you’re on a budget of time, of what they can do for you. So, the, there’s the, the ups and downs of using a consultancy or, or an agency.

[00:54:52] Greg Jarboe: Well, there’s another downside, the other downside of the agency, and this what actually gets us to the, to the next section in the outline that I thought we had agreed to stick to, even if we do deviate from it because that’s, we’re deviant people. We know that.

But one of the other metrics that you should keep in mind is if you hire a person in-house, generally you’re going to have to give them an annual salary. That’s normally, if you can figure out how to get Uber drivers to do work for you, then fair enough. But in the meantime, you probably need to give them an annual salary, which means you take their salary multiplied by 2 and you’ve got the fully loaded cost of a, of a staff member. Okay?

If you hire that same person, but they’re at an agency, you got to take their salary multiplied by 2.7 because in addition to the agency having the overhead that they have to cover, the agency also has a profit margin that it’s targeting. And I know this because I’ve worked it both ways.

I, I was the director of marketing at Lotus when I hired away one of the women at an agency who worked for me, and I was told by the agency, “You can’t do that.” And I said, “Why not? I like her. I hate you.” And I discovered that the agency was, charged of me 2.7 and my fully loaded cost was 2.0. I could give her a raise and still come in less expensive, but that only works if you’ve got 12 months, a year…

[00:56:21] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:56:21] Greg Jarboe: …of work. If you’ve got 8 months of year, of work, then suddenly, you know, the flexibility of the outside agency is a little more useful. So, again, the, the number is 2 versus 2.7. That’s, that is the difference between having the person in-house and, and paying for the same person at an outside agency.

[00:56:44] Matt Bailey: That’s a great metric. I love that. I love that. Yeah, and, and you can bring in an outside consultant to maybe help give your strategy structure, of, you, you know, and they can bring in some additional data. Maybe they’ve got a wealth of information that they can show, but ultimately, it’s, it’s, “How are we going to set our own Calvinball rules?” I think is what that, and, and an outside consultant can show you what other people have done, “Here’s what I think you should do.” It, it’s a way of getting that outside…

[00:57:16] Greg Jarboe: Yep. And…

[00:57:16] Matt Bailey: …third party opinion, I think, and, and also to validate, or maybe challenge some, some assumptions.

[00:57:21] Greg Jarboe: And, and heaven forbid we hit things like a recession or, you know, another surge in a global pandemic, or, you know, a, a war in Ukraine, something, something unexpected comes along and bump in the night happens. You know what? It’s easier to dial back your agency than it is to lay off people. I’ve had to do both. Laying off people is, is…

[00:57:43] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:57:44] Greg Jarboe: …the ugliest part of the, and, and so again, having a little mix, particularly if you’re at this big organization with more than 20 marketers, a, a mix gives you a lot more elbow room.

[00:57:56] Matt Bailey: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. That’s never a fun part of, of the deal. And then there’s social media platforms and, and Greg, I think by this, are, are we talking about like monitoring tools, publishing tools…

[00:58:08] Greg Jarboe: Well…

[00:58:09] Matt Bailey: …scheduling tools?

[00:58:10] Greg Jarboe: Tools. Let, let, let’s…

[00:58:11] Matt Bailey: Tools.

[00:58:11] Greg Jarboe: …put it this way. One of the scary things that, uh, keeps me up at night is that I can be replaced by a machine learning algorithm. And there are increasingly platforms being developed that use artificial intelligence or machine learning or whatever you want to call the buzzword de jure that say, “We can identify the influencers that you want to work with,” or, “We can tell you which social media marketing campaigns worked better than, or which element of the search engine marketing campaign put it over the top so you can adjust your budget next time around.”

They’re, they’re coming. They are in development now. Some of them are still not ready for prime time, but I will tell you, keep your eye open because what you can afford to do will, will shift. And whether you hire people to do it, or agencies to do it, or you find a platform that can do the mind-numbingly repetitive parts of it that nobody wants to do, but you still need done, you know, it’s fluid. So, keep your eyes open. Don’t make any long-term commitments, but yeah, they’re coming.

[00:59:32] Matt Bailey: I, I think in, here’s my prediction for the future, Greg, in, in a very short amount of time, I think AI is going to create the bulk of content in social, and then people will be using AI curation tools to sift through the content that other AI has created. And so…

[00:59:51] Greg Jarboe: Well, it, it, it already, it already is what, if you consider chatbots, you know, you know…

[00:59:56] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:59:57] Greg Jarboe: …if I use a chatbot to answer questions, commonly asked questions, boy is that inexpensive, although you have to develop the chatbot, but once you deploy it, it’s really inexpensive. It’s a lot less expensive than hiring interns who, who used to be the cheap laborer that you thought you could get away with.

[01:00:00] But again, they’re, they’re nibbling at the fringes today. They are in development, they are a, a, attacking the biggest problems that have the least amount of creativity and, and that’s, you know, part of that is, is actually useful. So, I, I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand.

[01:00:34] Matt Bailey: Yeah. I just think it’s going to be, I just think it’s going to be, most content’s going to be created by AI and it’s going to be read by bots…

[01:00:41] Greg Jarboe: Well…

[01:00:41] Matt Bailey: …and that will be our, that will be our future.

[01:00:42] Greg Jarboe: …my bot will call your bot and then we can do lunch.

[01:00:46] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[01:00:46] Greg Jarboe: Oh yeah.

[01:00:47] Matt Bailey: It’ll be automatically put on our calendar. It, it won’t even…

[01:00:51] Greg Jarboe: Oh god help us.

[01:00:54] Matt Bailey: So, okay. So, we’re, we’re moving through here and it’s funny ’cause I’m, as I’m looking at the outline, I’m like, “Man, we, I think we’ve talked about this,” because we’re going in a circular approach, it seems like, because strategy and planning is the next section of describing a social media strategy. And I, I we’ve, we’ve, I, we’ve brushed up against this many times. And you were going to describe how social media impacts business goals.

[01:01:25] Greg Jarboe: Well, it should. Way too often it doesn’t. So, again, one of the things that a strategist should do at the beginning of any campaign, let alone any ongoing program, is to say, “What are we trying to accomplish? What will move the needle? If I take this to top management and say, ‘Look what we did,” do they care that we had 47 tweets this week?” No, they don’t. And, and so the asset question that I, I ask some of, uh, the people I work with is, “Okay, so how many social media followers do you need before you sell a car?”

[01:02:13] Matt Bailey: That’s a good question.

[01:02:14] Greg Jarboe: And there’s no answer. Okay? Because there’s no correlation. And, and that’s why you want to…

[01:02:21] Matt Bailey: Exactly.

[01:02:22] Greg Jarboe: …start with, “Okay. My objective is to sell a car,” or, you know, pick a different product, a, a different service, you know, “I’m, I’m going to launch a new online graduate program that people can take online.” Fine. What, whatever it is that is your objective, but then work backwards, you know? So, is social media going to help you do that or not? And if it does, great. Then what was the return on investment for the money that you put into that social media, uh, campaign or that social media advertising or that influencer marketing campaign? What, however you slice it and dice it, you know, “Here’s how much I spent.”

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