Companies who believe that having millions of “Likes” on Facebook is important to their bottom line have it absolutely wrong.
“Liking” Coke or “Liking” The Avengers on Facebook isn’t going to make a person drink more Coke or see The Avengers more times – it just means they’re going to get nothing but product blasts for the rest of their lives.
I would argue it might actually make you drink less Coke because you’re so fucking annoyed with the relentless marketing from the Coca-Cola Company.
Social media would be incredibly valuable if companies would just leave it alone, make products people really like (not “Like”) and stay out of our faces.
People talking with each other (real people) and texting and emailing and chatting, etc. is the greatest marketing tool ever invented (and it wasn’t actually invented by anyone – save God). And companies are figuring out new and clever ways to fuck that up.
If you mention in your status that you are running out to Starbucks – there is really good chance your Picture and Status Update will appear in one of your friends News Feed as ads.
So, you are now, unwittingly, a Corporate Shill for Starbucks. Most people don’t like to be Corporate Shills. The term “Corporate Shill” is not a term of endearment. It makes your real friends hate you just a little bit more than they did before you pushed a product on them.
I did a little experiment over the past month. I decided to accept everyone who requested to be my friend on Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/jill.kennedy.5095
I had my own little circle of work colleagues and college friends (around 30) – but decided to accept all comers in the hope that I could expand the number of “Likes” on my newly-created Company page – http://www.facebook.com/MankaBros
So I accepted and sort of went begging for “Likes” as so many people do. “If you ‘Like’ my page I’ll like your ebook or Erotic Blacklight Art Page in return…'” etc. etc. etc.
This was an eye-opening and humiliating experience – I now have 768 Friends (and counting) and not many “Likes.”
But, surprise, suddenly there was pornography in my News Feed.
There was every kind of racist Poke imaginable. Scary sexually advances. (And, to be fair, a few genuinely nice people.)
But, in general, a stunning display of what’s really out there.
Not pretty.
Are these the people Coke wants to “Like” them?
The marketing world’s latest buzz phrase is “Big Data” – gathering everybody’s information. Seriously, there are people out there whose information should never be shared except with some type of law enforcement.
Personally, I can only speak for big media companies (and myself), but I can imagine it applies to every company (and person) out there – be careful what you wish for when you start your social media campaigns because once people “Like” you, they never leave you alone.
Jill Kennedy – OnMedea
P.S. – “LIKE” ME ON FACEBOOK!” – http://www.facebook.com/onmedea
While this is true, is there a certain level of truth to companies/investors looking at your social media reach to use as a barometer of whether or not you are “big” enough to be a real investment? Everything that I was ever taught (and it could very well be wrong) says that if you look the part, then in the eyes of those who make decisions, you’re doing something “right” Personally, I try to draw attention to my work and my projects the old fashioned way: Word out of mouth (and more recently, social media)
You see a lot of companies that for a price, will get you likes or follows on Facebook and Twitter, respectively. If numbers don’t matter, how do companies like this exist?
“You see a lot of companies that for a price, will get you likes or follows on Facebook and Twitter, respectively. If numbers don’t matter, how do companies like this exist?”
Companies like that exist because everyone is afraid of being left behind. In a few weeks or months, when everyone realizes their results didn’t really go up or down based on FB Likes – everyone will move on to something else. You can’t really fault anyone for trying but it’s just such a nasty business.
Thanks! I’ve been tempted to go ahead and bite the bullet to purchase likes but something kept telling me not to. I’d much rather attain attention and “fans” of my craft organically, because like you mentioned, it’s the only true to way to gauge and grow your business.
Being a social media pro myself, I have raised three pages from zit to well over 5k users. This may not convert to immediate revenue, I have seen a genuine interest in what I am doing.
I even know of a cartoonist who was able to launch a book using the power of facebook alone. He started out a comic just as a hobby, but there was an immense pull generated by social media. (310k likes) https://www.facebook.com/garbagebin
Not to forget justin beiber is a product of social media. Not all is lost with facebook and social media.
But that’s exactly where the problem is. Bieber and likes of him being popular because of SM, and not by real hearts, eyes and ears of music lovers! That’s why popular music now is so F-d! It’s a chain reaction. On personal level (for Bieber) SM is fantastic, but for millions of teens it’s “allowing someone to shove really bad music down to their throats”! For comparison: in 60’s no recording company could have forced any music to anyone in any possible way, no matter how much they might have advertised the piece! There was a certain pride among young generation. Pride of knowing, ability to distinguish bad quality from good one. I’m guessing, but what’s happening now has to do with changes in education and overall attitude. Young generation now celebrates mediocracy, because they’ve been told it’s OK! Professionalism, respect to higher quality products and services is no longer subjects of interest! Have you tried calling major company (a service provider) with some type of complaint you might have? I personally noticed their representatives are no longer polite and they don’t even try! Why? Because you may have no other choice but to stick with them, as monopolies flourish these days and none of us are doing anything to stop them. In Europe people stand up against giant corporations if they notice any unlawful move. Here we no longer are capable or willing of doing that. Example: tv/cable internet service companies here went completely crazy. They now increase service fees without even notifying (or notifying but with completely misleading information) its customers, and if you complain they may go as far as to call YOU stupid and incompetent! Optimum does this so casually you’d be amazed if you already don’t know it. This, my fellow blogger, never happened in this country! Ever! To cut to the chase: bad quality products are now widely accepted on “it’s OK” basis. Social media products, like FB, Twitter, Snapchat and others are nothing but made by young and very irresponsible individuals who wouldn’t give a damn about negative effects their creations are causing (not to mention the future effects!). Zuckerberg either didn’t know that besides helping old lost friends find each other FB could also have a fantastic potential for adversaries and seriously harm our democracy, or, he did know but he was too greedy and careless, so he simply ignored it. In any case, non of it is good for our country! Period! Now he says he may not be able to fully control his own creation. But just as Mr. Bloomberg says: “you can’t have it both ways, Mark. If your product causes harm to our society, you have to fix not just part of it but all of it!” If your electricity provider gets problems because of damaged cables they won’t replace just some of the bad cables! They’ll fix all bad cables and that’s how FB, Twitter or any other products and services should work! In earlier days for Kremlin to undermine western type democracies it took so much funding and effort to spread their propaganda, but now they get practically the easiest, cheapest ride using FB and Twitter’s almost uncontrolled, “wild west” type platforms! This has to be fixed or we’ll lose already unleashed by Kremlin war BIG time!
Bonne analyse. Cela semble pourtant être du bon sens. La stratégie marketing est décidée par des humains et non par des machines. Alors si ces personnes spécialisées pouvaient un temps s’imaginer comme un simple consommateur manipulé par leur stratégie ils ne feraient peut être pas ce type d’erreur. Connaître l’humain n’est pas un job. Il suffit seulement d’avoir une tête et une âme. Probablement que ces professionnels sont dépourvus des deux.
Thanks Jill, you’re post resonates with what I’m seeing as well. Especially now that they see more ads in their timeline. In some ways, I think ad agencies aren’t seeing the writing on the wall. I recently read an article about how Facebook’s graph search will dominate for marketers. I had to disagree.
http://www.reinfluencemedia.com/thinking/2013/2/4/dont-believe-the-hype-facebooks-graph-search.html
Best,
Tom
It’s because big media is lost in the wilderness. Studios keep pushing ‘upmarket’ to find ideas that will play to everyone. Subway wants the sandwich that everyone will eat. Coke wants everyone to drink more Coke…so while Disney will spend over $200 million to get the whole world to see OZ…the whole world has actually been splintered into 6 billion worlds…and everyone has their own channel. Social media has leveled the playing field in the music business…and pretty much destroyed the record companies. The same will happen to the studios if they stay on the course their on, and also to large consumer product companies. From here on in it has to be about niche marketing.
Funny you mentioned pornography…they are the only ones who have figured it out. It used to be that men would watch any attractive woman who was naked…but now, the guy who likes women who only have big butts, or the guy who only likes redheads…they all have specialty places to go.
It gets awfully expensive to market to 6 billion channels at the same time. UNtil corporate America figures out how to do that, Linking-In and Friending is the best we got.
Change your profile picture to lets say an older brunette perhaps slightly overweight and see how many of your new friends de-friend you (and how quickly).
No, I have plenty of Facebook friends. Most of them creepy guys.
I will gracefully disagree with the author of this article.
All this stuff is getting old crap, they keep changing it to keep some interest, young people can’t keep an attention span, will jump and be gone.
Yes, I agree but if Coke posted a relevant blog or picture or video and interacts with it’s potential clients it would remain fresh in their minds and therefore they would more likely purchase the item next time they see it in the store, especially if there is an incentive like a discount if you liked their page. Or perhaps customer feedback on what their customer liked or disliked about heir product.
Sounds like this person might be bitter because the whole “Like” didn’t work for her page. The reality is that companies vastly increase the amount of people they can market to this way, so that’s why it’s happening.
It also sounds like Ms. Kennedy isn’t quite familiar enough with the ways of Facebook. Because some, if not all of these things (your name being used in ads, being hit by product blasts, etc) can be turned off via a quick visit to your privacy settings.
Too bad she actually turned me off to her “Brand” with this sort of article.
I get what you’re saying, Bart, but I don’t agree. I think even if I got 1,000,000 Likes I would have still felt completely disgusted with the process it took to get those 1,000,0000 Likes. Giant media companies have an advantage because the products they make are immediately thrust into the pop culture (and were long before social media). Jack the Giant Slayer has over 250,000 LIkes but we all know nobody “Liked” that movie.
And I do know about the privacy settings and I used to have them completely shut off. But for my experiment I had to turn everything On and be completely exposed. Because that’s the way it is for most people. And you do realize that if everyone turned changed their privacy settings so they wouldn’t be bothered, Facebook would have to take away that option because it would blow their business model completely.
Bart van de Goor, you’re my kind of guy.
I have to disagree, as well. Companies wouldn’t be investing in social at ever-increasing rates if it weren’t working. Your hunch that buying Likes will result in dissatisfaction when there are no measurable business results is about a year and a half behind.
Successful social companies like Coke aren’t buying Likes. They’re investing in creating content that speaks to their users. They’re taking advantage of the nature of social; that this working mom over here will comment on their cool picture, therefore exposing it to her network of 50-500 other working moms. People say they hate ad targeting and personalization, yet their behaviour tells an entirely different story. They want to be entertained and appreciated and courted by companies. They do click through on ads and make purchases. They actually do really like some brand content.
Further, they’re not all serial killers lol. They’re your everyday, average, socially connected consumer and they are telling brands, directly and indirectly, that they want to be spoonfed more and more information in order to make their lives easier. To suggest that a sample of 700 people who would befriend a pretty blond is indicative of the state of social media marketing is pretty naive, IMHO.
“Successful social companies like Coke aren’t buying Likes. They’re investing in creating content that speaks to their users. They’re taking advantage of the nature of social; that this working mom over here will comment on their cool picture, therefore exposing it to her network of 50-500 other working moms. People say they hate ad targeting and personalization, yet their behaviour tells an entirely different story. They want to be entertained and appreciated and courted by companies. They do click through on ads and make purchases. They actually do really like some brand content.”
Nailed it. Well stated!
And because working moms click those “Likes” – they are forever targeted by Coke. They will never get away from them. Maybe I’m wrong a bit – perhaps this is good for these giant consumer goods companies. In the piece, I called it a waste of time. I just haven’t seen the data that says working moms are buying more Coke (or whatever product) because of their social media engagement with the company. And the more they push products on their working mom friends, the more their working mom friends start to dislike Facebook and you.
I could have done with the F words but you are absolutely dead on with this one. I have first hand experience of exactly what you went through. It is a sleazy world out there if you’re trying to create your own buzz for your own product without a giant marketing budget. It’s awful. Thanks for this!
I think the only people defending the Facebook like system are people who have been hired as “social media” marketing people whose job it is to get Likes for their products. People with titles like Vice President of Social Media Engagement. Bullshit titles that won’t exist in 5 years.
I’ve noticed that you have trolled many news stories today about facebook’s announcement for their new look. And then criticizing FB for monetizing your stupid family pictures that nobody wants to see. Just to finish your post with:
Google: The Pathetic, Sleazy World of Facebook “Likes”
And what do you know? … your article pops up top of search results.
Google: The Pathetic, Sleazy World of People like Jill Kennedy trolling Facebook articles for “Likes”.
Douche
That last Google search you put doesn’t come up with anything, Mark Z. I agree that nobody other than my family would want to see my stupid family pictures – but, yet, you still want to monetize them. What gives?
I completely agree with you, Jill. Of the billion or so people on Facebook and few hundred million are absolutely horrible frightening people.
Great piece. Thanks Jill.
I don’t really see what the issue is here.
The process of liking and subscribing to a page on facebook is entierly opt-in (with the option to ‘unlike’ and opt out at any point you’d like). There are genuine companies out there pushing out interesting and relevant posts to people and that’s what this mechanism is intended for.
If you’re seeing content that you don’t want to see from companies such as Coke then you are free to clean up your own timeline and unlike the offending page. The posts you subscribe to are entirely self-regulated, if you’re seeing content you don’t want to it’s because you’ve syndicated it.
The same goes with regards to seeing contextual content such as pornography and racist content from friends. You’ve specifically elicited connections with people who propagate this type of content and thus you’re subjected to it. Again, due to your own actions which are self-regulated.
The term “big data” is generally applied to mined data on a grand scale which is used to determine trends and public opinion rather than specific information on disparate users – the onus is on coarse grained data trends rather than fine grained detail.
A lot of what’s said in your post is correct and logical. If you misuse and abuse facebook by liking lots of different, noisy pages then you’ll be inundated with irelevant posts. That’s the way social media works, but again, it’s your own actions, not those of facebook, that make this the case and it is easily rectifiable on your part.
Great points, Chris. I absolutely agree that I brought all of this on myself by not self-regulating. I accepted everyone who wanted to Friend me and suffered the consequences. And, yes, I could clean all that up if I wanted to – and I did have to do quite a bit of that – it was all too much to take even in an experiment.
But, I believe, these huge media and consumer goods companies don’t self-regulate either. If Joseph Stalin likes Coke – he can click Like and he is one of a million other Likes. (He may even turn up in a Ad for Coke because he is one of the other Likes.)
My point is, it’s just a wild, uncontrolled system as it is currently and doesn’t really mean much to anyone’s bottom line and will, most likely, result in bad things for these companies. But that’s just my opinion – as is the blog.
I thoroughly agree, Facebook is by far and away from a utopia and has a deluge of crap on it. The issue being that any type of in-depth regulation of content would be a massive undertaking for the facebook team.
My opinion is that the system is too well established to suffer any major changes in the logistics of how accounts are managed and regulated. Doing so would likely require going back to basics and potentially alienating a lot of users.