Social Media Add Twist to Modern Marketing

Brent Robinson, CEO of Modthink, based in Fayetteville; Amy Callahan, co-founder of Collective Bias in Rogers.

Marketing is still marketing, even if it looks a whole lot different in today’s social media world, according to Randy McLeod, a professor and director of the professional sales department at Harding University in Searcy.

A recent Pew Research Center study determined that 52 percent of people online used two or more social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Another study showed that 80 percent of Internet users had a smartphone that allowed for mobile online access.

That technology makes for a different marketplace, but McLeod referred to Dale Carnegie’s maxim that success is 15 percent technical skill and 85 percent people skill.

McLeod said today’s salespeople and marketers have to have technical expertise that includes social media fluency, but the job still comes down to engaging the customer.

“You have to have good technical skills because if I’m getting into the cockpit of an airplane, I don’t need to be confused by what all those dials mean,” McLeod said.

“Social media and technology have been added to those technical skills you must have. You have to walk in the door with those skills. How successful you’re going to be will depend on your people skills.”

Brent Robinson is the CEO and co-founder of Modthink of Fayetteville, a company that develops social media plans to help businesses attract and interact with customers. He said the old ways companies attracted customers — buying a feature ad in the phone book or magazine or running a television commercial — have had to be updated for the modern consumer.

“Back in the ‘60s it was ‘Mad Men’ or ‘four out of five doctors recommend smoking Camel cigarettes,’ and if anybody saw that and had a different experience they could yell and scream at their television all day long and nobody would hear it,” Robinson said.

“Now you can’t do that. You can’t be as opaque as ‘four out of five doctors surveyed.’ You actually have to say here are the four doctors and you can talk to them.

“The principles still apply, but the filters they go through are a lot more genuine. If your business isn’t doing good work, word gets out and it gets out in such a way it’s hard to overcome.”

Customer Participation

Amy Callahan said the consumer participates in the marketplace dialogue much better through social media. Callahan is a co-founder of Collective Bias of Rogers, a company recently named Arkansas Business of the Year in the category of companies with between 75 and 300 employees.

“Marketers no longer have the same kind of control over messaging that they once had,” Callahan said in an email interview. “A YouTube video or a well-placed tweet has the power to change an entire campaign. Today, consumers have a say in everything.”

McLeod agreed, pointing to a famous — or infamous, if you’re an executive at a certain airline — YouTube video in which a Canadian brother act sings about a bad airline experience. “United Breaks Guitars” has been viewed nearly 15 million times since July 2009.

“One thing we have to know about in this social media marketplace is, ‘What are people saying about us?’” McLeod said. “We are in the technology age, which means everybody has a laptop and a cellphone. Social media is obviously a wonderful tool, but it can also be a tool where people vent. Corporate America has to be more aware of what people are saying about them than ever before.”

Companies such as Modthink and Collective Bias work to help businesses control their end of the message through social media. Robinson, who used to work at Collective Bias, said many clients didn’t know what social media were just a handful of years ago.

Now, most businesses know what social media are — but that doesn’t mean they understand how to use it effectively for marketing.

Robinson said social media are not the end-all, be-all “silver bullet” but instead are just another tool to effectively engage interested customers.

“The question I get is ‘How do I get into social media? How do I efficiently and effectively spend my dollars to get people to come to my website and call my phone?’” Robinson said. “Talking to customers, everyone does it every single day in their regular life. They just get messed up when they think about doing it on social media.”

Callahan said a smart business pays attention to its customers’ wants, which social media research tools make more accessible.

“Marketing used to be a one-way conversation, but social has introduced an era of engagement, dialogue and collaboration between brands and their consumers,” Callahan said. “For example, social provides a quick snapshot of a consumer’s interests and makes for a great research tool. Listening to your customers via a Twitter stream can give you a glimpse into their interests, and may help you notice any underlying trends.”

‘Invigorating and Depressing’

Harding’s McLeod, who turned 66 last week, said the changing tools of the marketplace challenge a professor who has been teaching 30-plus years. The curriculum and concepts taught, though, don’t change as much as one might think.

“We don’t really teach you how to sell anything as much as we teach you how to sell people and how to relate to people,” McLeod said. “What is changing, though, is social media has changed as much as anything on how you have to react to sales and marketing.

“It is invigorating and de-pressing all at the same time, and my learning curve every semester is greater than the students’. They look at me and assume I’m a dinosaur who is not up to speed. I look at them and assume they are tech savvy.”

McLeod has quick advice for any prospective employee in the business world.

“If technology and social media is not your strength, you have to make it your strength,” he said. “We assume your generation has it all in that area. Those are things you have to add to your menu.”

Robinson said it’s important that companies don’t think social media success is a cure. Instead, social media are just a tool to accentuate an overall marketing campaign.

Callahan and Robinson both said social media allow companies to judiciously spend their marketing dollars. Robinson said that in the old days, the effectiveness of an advertising campaign couldn’t be judged for weeks or months, but now the results are almost instantaneous.

How long did it take Nationwide to get feedback on its depressing Super Bowl commercial about a little boy who dies in an accident? That went viral as it aired.

“Measuring the effectiveness of any campaign in any medium allows you to adjust your marketing plan, shift dollars or pull dollars when something isn’t working,” Callahan said. “It’s critical to be able to track campaigns, and that’s why social media is so powerful.

“Companies like ours have built real-time dashboards that monitor content and influence, and measure its impact immediately, allowing our clients to make adjustments on the fly or put more behind a campaign that is successful.”

McLeod reiterated that marketing is marketing and the more things change, the more they stay the same. The world through social media is more engaging and interconnected, but customers still look at businesses the same way.

“It comes down to ‘Do I trust you?’ is a major factor,” McLeod said. “You still have to be a person others can trust, but how you develop that trust is different in this day and time.”