The Hamburger Helper Theory of Social Media

Eric AndersonVP of Emerging Media

White Horse

Like all great movements, social media needs its revolutionaries.

Traditional marketing is dead! Long live the glorious social media revolution!.

But it also needs reformers.

Paid advertising isn’t going away. We should find ways to help advertising become more engaging and more social.

There is no question of traditional media’s declining health.

90% of people who can skip TV ads do.

Web users have banner blindness about 80% of the time.

Newspaper ad revenues fell $3B in the first 6 months of 2008.

But it does us no good to declare traditional media DOA. We need to shock it back to life.

The argument for reform is in the numbers.

Let’s look at Ford’s 2008 online impressions…

Social media impressions

Display advertising impressions

90,000,000

13,221,358,000

Yes, capitalist running dog, but Ford’s social media hits are influential in a way that their loathsome banner impressions will never be! The numbers don’t tell the whole story. .

True. Because social media impressions also consist of this…

And, uh, this…

Social media has the creds but not the volume.Advertising has the volume but not the creds.

What’s a marketer to do?

Paid advertising

Social media

Sounds like an argument for collaboration.

A modest reform proposal:1.ALL marketing will be socialized.

2.We shall not freak out about ROI.

3.We shall use social media to activate our brand evangelists. .

Reform #1:All marketing will be socialized.

Advertising is simply content.

In social media, content is malleable and shareable. Your advertising should be, too.

Reform #1:All marketing will be socialized.

A UGC promotion adds about 10% to the production cost of a broadcast campaign, and 0% to the media cost.

So why isn’t everyone doing it?

Reform #1:All marketing will be socialized.

Let us vow that all campaigns will have a social media component.

And let us vow that when we have marketing content worth sharing, we’ll share it in social media.

Reform #1:All marketing will be socialized.

Flog that B2B content too. There’s an audience for it in all the places where people share content.

Reform #1:All marketing will be socialized.

Even paid search has a crucial integration point with social media.

Social seeding, blogs, reviews, forums, and social network sites all greatly improve your SEO, which in turn enhances the performance of paid search.

Source: iCrossing Search Syngery, 2007

Reform #1:All marketing will be socialized.

Reform #2:We shall not freak out about ROI.

What is the ROI on a ham sandwich?

Reform #2:We shall not freak out about ROI.

“There is not enough ROI for figuring out ROI.  It is an intellectually bankrupt exercise.”

- Andrew McAfee, Harvard Business School

Reform #2:We shall not freak out about ROI.

Yet marketers are desperate to come up with an ROI model for social media. This is how far it’s gone.

Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester Research

Reform #2:We shall not freak out about ROI.

An insistence on direct ROI for social media will destroy its potential for marketing.

We’ve been down this road before, and it wasn’t pretty.

Banner advertising average response rate (CTR)

Reform #2:We shall not freak out about ROI.

It’s how banner advertising ended up looking like this.

Reform #2:We shall not freak out about ROI.

I’d like to propose a baseline metric for social media: free impressions!

At a minimum, social media extends the impressions from paid marketing by encouraging unpaid pass-along.

It does much more,

but the rest is just…

Reform #3:We shall use social media to activate our brand evangelists.

Advertising is good at increasing brand equity.

Social media is good at activating it.

Let’s make them work together.

Reform #3:We shall use social media to activate our brand evangelists.

Every brand has its “alphas” – people who are both passionate about the brand and are active social network users.

Reform #3:We shall use social media to activate our brand evangelists.

Example: we found that Celestial Seasonings had a real groundswell of interest in bringing back their high-caffeine Fast Lane tea1083 petition signatures!

Reform #3:We shall use social media to activate our brand evangelists.

The obvious solution: Bring the tea back! We reached out to the petitioners and gave them an incentive to tell others.

Within a month, Fast Lane was outselling the next-most-popular tea by 10x.

If you’ve thought of other Hamburger Helper uses of social media, I’d love to hear about them.

Thank you!eanderson@whitehorse.com