Social media marketing's scalability problem

I'd like your thoughts on what I see as one of the biggest problems I see for using social media in marketing:  scalability.

In theory, using social media for marketing should scale elegantly.  Most advisors and evangelists tell a story that plays out something like this:  once a marketer gets up enough courage to push over the first domino and launch a social media effort, that person tells a friend, who tells another three friends, who tell yet another three friends, and so on with almost infinite reach at almost zero incremental cost.  Examples like Subservient Chicken, Dove Evolution, and Elf Yourself are often cited here.

In practice, real life starts to get in the way.  You can't create "viral."  (In fact, "viral" is even the wrong metaphor.)  Philippe reminds us of Watts's "big seed" concept, which starts to look like mass media. One-ninth of the WORLD's population watched the 2006 FIFA World Cup final.  Social media vs. Television for marketing purposes just doesn't match up.

People don't scale, either.  Frank at Comcast does a great job, but he's only one person.  Dell has 17+ people on Twitter, like Amie Paxton.  Scott Monty is a new kind of leader, but he's only one person.  How much harm did Exxon Janet inflict?  (Answer: none.)

[Let me pause here and say that I have and will always believe that the purpose of marketing is to sell stuff, whether direct response or 30-year sales cycle.  Marketers who don't believe that their job is to ultimately sell something should become receptionists instead, if all you want to do is talk.]

I do believe social media can help sell.  Social content has started integrating into traditional tactics like banners and emails.  I have a better opinion of Comcast after Frank helped me with my cable modem and will resist Verizon FIOS for a while longer.  From my last post asking if social media matters, the commenting consensus seems to agree, with its impact in awareness, consideration, and preference.

But if social media marketing matters, then does it scale?

I don't think so.  I think the technologies scale.  But the programs - especially those with a labor-intensive component - don't.

[Social technologies are better applied inside the enterprise - to improve existing systems, grow culture, improve productivity, and scale to a finite point...]

Your thoughts appreciated.

Tweet

Comments

[Helena Makhotlova]

I agree with many good points in this post. Especially that marketing, or PR for that matter, is about selling stuff, not just talking about them. I think it’s the centre of the conflict between practice and theory: it looks so much better on paper when we don’t mention a dirty phrase – return of investment.

Still, sometimes it does take a lot of talking and persuasion to sell a product. Sometimes it might take days, but usually it takes months, and even years. The thing is that companies want their results delivered to them fast, and when social media strategy fails to do just that, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that it doesn’t work.

I think, as you mention, social media is more than just marketing strategy: it’s a part of dynamic corporate thinking, which changes organizational culture within the company for a better one, more open and more horizontal. Because of that, I think it’s unfair to put social media on the line with advertising: it has totally different concept, nature and sometimes even objectives. And, besides, all good things scale slowly but certainly.

[Bjoern]

IMHO - mass marketing and conversational marketing (in the means of using social media for conversations) are just two ends of a spectrum. Whereas pure mass marketing is just as ineffective as a purely conversational approach is inefficient - because of the need head count to make it effective. Therefore the true marketing is somewhere in the middle.

[Peter Kim]

Hi Helena - I wonder if, over time, marketers have become more impatient and thus demanded quicker results from advertising...as a result making it worse and worse.

Bjoern - exactly! I believe an integrated mix starts to get us there.

[Stu Andrews]

Do you mean if a service like Twitter scales in it's ability to be used to market?

As in, the number of people spreading a rumor or a new thing at one time?

[Peter Kim]

Hi Stu - theoretically, services scale, although in practice some have had difficulty. Marketers using the services don't scale well and are overpromised "viral" benefits. Hope that helps clarify.

[Stu Andrews]

Peter, thanks for clearing that up.

Can you explain a bit more about what "virul" benefits are promised, and how they don't come to pass?

Cheers

[Adam Cohen]

Hi Peter,
Thoughtful post. I think innovation to allow scale will follow where the value is. For example, if Twitter really becomes a viable customer service tool (requiring scale, like your Comcast and Dell examples), I think Twitter's API platform will allow someone to build integration into a CRM tool or a customer service application tracking response times, like calls in customer service centers today. Already in the last couple of years we've seen listening tools like Radian6, Visible Technologies and others scale to become enterprise level tools, beyond the free do-it-yourself search tools and yahoo pipes. As more companies pay attention the value to figure out how to scale will likely be there.
On the flip side I agree that marketers can be overpromised viral benefits of using social media tools. The core skills for marketers to successfully navigate services to develop viral benefits are rare - but even more rare are the mix of understanding of social media tools and creative juices to develop the ideas. That said, I think the industry is shifting slowly and as traditional agencies focus on digital/interactive marketing more, opportunities to scale will be figured out. Think about how far it's come in the last 5 years - what do you think the next 5 will look like? (I smell a SXSW panel idea here).
Best,
Adam

[Tom Cunniff]

No, I don't believe social media scales. As a result, I think it has limited utility for mass marketers.

The consolidation of retail power in a few hands (1 in 4 dollars in America is spent at Wal-Mart) has given retailers enormous clout. They require mass marketers to generate huge product turns, fast. Small tactics that influence dozens or even thousands of people at a time can't do that. Why do mass marketers spend tens of millions of dollars on TV for product launches? It's not because they "don't get social media". It's because they need to generate millions of sales *fast*.

Yes, social media is important and brands need to get it right. But no, it's not even remotely close to scaleable enough to be "the new marketing".

[Bjoern]

Tom - you are so deadly right - nowadays product and brand marketing is driven by short-term sales targets; within this setting social media is just used as a campaign tool which makes it already ineffective because of its long-term results (e.g. building up communities and participation). But as an accompanying approach to my sales efforts the feedback of my customers and target group, the viral effect of spreading the word about my products thru the mouth of my fans and the sales potentials of integrating my customers as sales force can again drive business. But again - as a product/brand manager I have to understand this and convince as well my sales-driven management. And then - while talking about social media - there is always a small number of people that I can get involved (with a lot of effort), while the masses still rest and consume - therefore I will never be able to go without mass marketing as well.

BTW - started as well a FriendFeed thread on this - come and join: http://tinyurl.com/5f9hck

[Jim Deitzel]

Scaling is going to be difficult. How many people can I follow on Twitter and not miss a DM or reply? The answer is not many.

I run up against the TV (Mass Media) issue all the time. Can social media make the powerpoint sales trend chart spike? It's doubtful that it will show a spike, but it surely helps the chart trend upward.

[Marc Meyer]

Peter, I commented elsewhere but I have one more thought. It's not that is't not scalable, it's that it takes too long. You can have the resources to make it scale and some orgs. do but that doesn't neccessarily help. There is a natural flow and evolution that has to take place and that is the inherent problem. Look at the the lifespan of a consumer product for instance that might have some type of built in obsolescence, and that doesn't leave much time for any type of social media marketing plan to show up or to at least reveal some type of result. Though, I know, there are exceptions to this, there always will be, and THATS what gives marketers the belief that it can scale.

[laurent]

"does social marketing scale" - it could be that your question is a bit incomplete. Let me try my two flavors of a more complete question and I think the answer will be quite different.
Flavor 1: "Does social marketing scale so that you get impressions about your brand/product viewed by all your customers?" - answer : NO.
Flavor 2: "Does social marketing scale so that a team of marketers can build relationships with x00s relevant communities (blogs and so on) in their target market" - answer : Yes
So I think the answer really depends on the objective you have. And because social media is more labor intensive than other mass marketing techniques, you've got to find the right objective for it.

Social media is just a tool (a wonderful one in my opinion) but it's good at certain things and not so good at others ;-)

[Chi-chi Ekweozor]

Great discussion.

I think the question is a little too broad, as has been alluded to by @laurent and others.

Social media marketing scales when an online community can form around a specific interest.

Look at YouTube... this online community interested in video clips is scaling... all the time...

Ditto Twitter. Except the interest is in short ‘micro-blog’ posts.

The best example of social media marketing scaling so far is Nike+.

The trick is to bake in a consumer need into a social media marketing campaign.

That bit takes a fair bit of figuring out... as we are all finding.

[Lou Covey]

Two things.

1. Viruses general run out of steam after a few days. Viral marketing, like viruses, has limited lifespan. but it is a way to get stuff going.

2. Social media is an adjunct to a complete marketing program, no a replacement for it. The buzz and verification that is created by social media makes PR, advertising, marketing communications effective. None of the components alone can survive or prosper.

The term of the day is "holistic marketing." That's the way to think.

[Peter Kim]

Thanks for all the great comments so far. Here are some of the questions you've set in motion for me:

- Do media channels scale? Are ideas scalable or static?
- Brands themselves need to become flexible and scalable to win
- Does marketing really matter? If the iPhone isn't a good product (e.g. 3G lousy, battery weak, expensive), then what is propelling its success?

[Aaron Strout]

Peter,

This is a thoughtful (as usual) and timely post. I am a big advocate of social media marketing but agree with you that scale is a problem (the people part, not the technology) as you point out.

Here's my take, however. You and I both worked at Fidelity a few years back and we saw the power of a marketing powerhouse in action. Fidelity literally sent out millions of pieces of direct mail, e-mails and fulfillment kits every year. We had thousands of phone reps that took inbound calls. We also spent hundreds of millions of dollars advertising online and on television so our reach was big. Biggest problem though was that we rarely ever created relationships.

The beauty of social media marketing is that through creating relationships, you don't need as much scale because:
1) you have other people who will now start helping you do your marketing by passing along your message assuming that there is a quid pro quo with these relationships. We've seen this to be true in spades at Mzinga (the company I work for).
2) Because you are creating deep relationships through social media marketing, your "open rate" or "pay attention rate" is 10 times higher because people you have a relationship want to hear what you have to say. So instead of a .01% open rate on 1M, you have a 10% open rate on 10K. And there is a good chance that out of that 1K that did "open" or "accept" your message, 10% will pass that on to their networks creating a multiplyier effect.

I know that you believe in this stuff so I'm not telling you anything that you don't already know. But I do think it's important to point out that social media marketing works differently than the "spray and pray" methodology of our forefathers. It's definitely harder to scale but once it does, the network effect is awesome.

Thanks again for a thought-provoking post.

Best,
Aaron | @astrout

[Jeremiah Owyang]

Interactive social widgets can scale, but "Conversational marketing" has it's limits. I should do a real study on this.

Anyways, I added your challenge to this list of "Social media challenges"

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/08/07/the-many-challenges-of-the-social-media-industry/

[deb lavoy]

You said something key here. Large companies should first be focusing on how to use social media within the organization to promote not only culture but that ever elusive knowledge management and sharing.

I'm currently working with an enterprise company that claims to be "Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0" and yet won't allow the use of wikis, blogs or other community and collaboration tools not built internally or held behind the firewall. social Media is about community. Corporations need to build their internal community - that may make it easier to effectively extend that community to include their markets and customers.

[Peter Kim]

Hi Aaron - I hear what you're saying. Here's where I still have a problem - companies can't blog/tweet/podcast/network - only people can. The only way social media marketing can scale is by having customer evangelists take up a brand's cause...limited scalability, but maybe that's the answer...

JO - thanks; it's a subject that I'd include in the "Churbuck Challenge," if you know what I mean.

Deb - agreed, and scalability isn't an issue inside the organization's distributed nature.

[John Bell]

Great conversation. No doubt that social media's 2 biggest challenges as a marketing discipline is scale and measurement. And there is progress on both. As has been pointed out in comments - communities can scale quite well. If one of the best outcomes of social media is to activate (read: encourage, facilitate, or "energize") word of mouth - what could be more impactful to the bottom line then generating more positive WOM? (Yes, providing that the products and services, themselves, deliver on a core promise). WOM scales via communities and agent-based programs. I believe it scales far beyond that and can only prove that on a case-by-case basis.

Our experience with social media marketing to activate WOM is that it is art and science and a bit more of the former. It takes a lot of effort and expertise and is not as simple as deploying an effective media plan. Everyone wants the discipline to mature super-quick and be comparable to the scale and repeatability of advertising. That's just not going to happen. At the same time, it doesn't mean that social media isn't a valuable, perhaps the most valuable, marketing choice some brands can make.

One Key To Scale: as we all continue to develop this discipline, one key to brands getting a bigger impact from social media techniques and programs (scaling - if scaling means getting bigger results that the effort put in) - that key is training and practice inside the organization. Unlike advertising where the creative, the strategy and the media plan/buy can be outsourced to an expert company (i.e. "agency"). Socila media can produce a bigger impact if made part of the discipline of teh internal staff - and not just the internal marcom staff. One small example of that can be found in the model of Visible Technologies which provides an enterprise-wide infrastructure for organizations to engage with social media via comments.

Does Social Media scale? yes. Can I prove it? In many cases 'yes' but not with the same rigid model as paid advertising.

[Peter Kim]

John, the problem with "activating" WOM is that a lot of companies are out there selling empty promises. Where are the case studies proving the ROI of WOM?

I agree that the place to start is inside the organization first. However, your example of organizations engaging with comments is proof that social media doesn't scale. What if Apple had this tool enabled? Would they be able to engage with every brand enthusiast globally? No.

So where's your proof, these "many cases" that you mention? What does "rigid model" mean?

[philmang]

Peter -
I think that one of the places the social marketing has scaling potential is by bringing back the personal touch in remote customer service. A company could train their customer service reps (and product development teams and engineering etc etc) to use social media as a feedback, troubleshooting and outreach medium -- Then software that monitored the conversations about them could alert reps to engagement opportunities and allow for "early intervention" in the case of an issue.
Much like the model of Frank at Comcast, but integrated into the full business culture and model. This is the real key as you and others have also said -- if a company is just using social media for marketing, they are missing the true potential for changing the way that they engage with their existing and future customers. And in the end, I believe that companies that fail to adapt will be out maneuvered by companies that are constantly optimizing their products and services to meet the expectations of their consumers.

[Peter Kim]

Phil - I think you're on the right track. Technology has always created efficiency (collections centers turned into call centers) and you point out a path to getting more done. Maybe the scalability issue I see should be recast as the theoretical infinite capacity of social media reach that doesn't exist.

Social media marketing isn't a J-curve. It's an S-curve that we're all still figuring out.

[Ann Kingman]

Peter, thanks for the thoughtful post, which has also led to some great comments.

You wrote: Here's where I still have a problem - companies can't blog/tweet/podcast/network - only people can. The only way social media marketing can scale is by having customer evangelists take up a brand's cause...limited scalability, but maybe that's the answer...

Perhaps it's industry specific, but often the employees are a company's biggest fans. It's true in my case (trade book publishing). I think there's an argument to be made for taking social media out of the marketing dept. and energizing motivated employees to become "educated evangelists" -- after all, any department with customer contact is already taking the message out into the world.

[robin seidner]

Pete,
Your point is well taken. I love Phil's idea of integrating social media monitoring with call center data, and I do know that some of the vendors are toying with these ideas, some can already do this.

Certainly, if you are a Dell or an Apple, responding to it all isn't scalable. But, using the overall view into conversations to solve common concerns and issues, and to open doors of communication between customers and companies - not to mention companies and distributed employees - is a worthwhile venture to embark on.

Its also important to remember that these technologies have valuable function outside marketing (even if the focus right now is on the marketing side).

[Joe Cothrel]

So much of what we're discussing here seems to suggest that social media marketing is one-to-one or one-to-few or one-to-many or even few-to-many, but in fact the scale in social media comes from many-to-many interactions.

To test this, Google the kind of question a customer might ask when they shop - for example, "does the x61 have Bluetooth"? More than 1MM results, almost all from social media like blogs, forums, and user-generated product reviews. The ability of marketers to enter this conversation in a thoughtful way - for example, to host forums, blogs, and reviews on their own site in a well-supported community informed by the best answers from customer advocates and the company - well, that scales like crazy. But it's a different model and a different mindset from one that sees marketing as pushing static, controlled messages to a your target audience.

Needless to say, the effectiveness is higher with many-to-many social media because the contact comes not when a marketer thinks a customer should know about a product, but when a customer is in the discovery process.

Where's ROI? For starters, look at conversions to registrations or transactions from organic search traffic to your forums, blogs, and reviews.

(Caveat lector perhaps, since I build communities for companies and have for the past 10 years, but if you see a fault in my logic, please argue with me.:)

[David Alston]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the post and for starting such a great conversation. I'm going to echo what Robin just mentioned. Scalability all depends on whether you focus on the marketing or customer support angle of listening and engaging in social media.

In the past 20 years we've seen some pretty big scale advances with respect to contact centers. If you look at social media in a similar way (listening to folks on a global basis who have needs, questions, feedback, concerns, complains, requests etc...) then I think social media can be scaled in a similar way. With the right infrastructure in place for prioritizing, reporting on, measuring, routing, tracking, etc.. these social media "calls" or "call outs" and the right people resources (Dell has done a great job in this area as an example) I think it's entirely possible for any brand to listen and engage at whatever scale necessary. One other point to note, if you view social media from this "customer support" angle ROI metrics become clearer because many of them can be adapted from the contact center industry to fit.

On the marketing side I think it's less clear cut. I'd like to throw in a concept that Chris Brogan considers to be one of the biggest things this year - content marketing. Is it possible that mass media beats WOM when it comes to relaying "content" to an audience in a quick and effective way (for example, a typical retail flyer with goods and prices). Of course if the price of something becomes "remarkable" (like when the iPhone price dropped in the last round) WOM can certainly do quite well in spreading the word effectively.

So I'll through this out for thought, could it be that useful (though perhaps not remarkable), relevant content can best be spread via mass media but brand is best built through WOM (due to the experiential nature of a brand?)

Thanks for the thoughtful post Peter.

[Taylor Davidson]

I'm amazed by the quality of thought in the comments. A lot of people point out how social media marketing is really a part of the overall marketing mix, thus it is important to structure thoughts and plans around social media marketing around the goals of reaching people with a message, benefit and cost; characteristics that can be then compared to other marketing methods.

Back to the idea of social media scaling: why does it have to scale?

[Peter Kim]

Hi Taylor - me too. I think I'll step back and analyze the content here and on a few other posts next week, because there's a lot here.

To your question - the question of scalability in social media *marketing* arises, because marketers need effective ways to communicate with customers and sell products. The more scalable/efficient a vehicle is, the less budget required to perform the same amount of work as an alternative choice.

Does that address the question or am I missing something?

[Gavin Heaton]

Don't know that I agree with you on this one. You can't really contrast the reach available for a global brand through soccer or even the olympics with social media -- are there any global brands who would buy global ad space? It would all be segmented and fragmented anyway.

As you point out the technologies scale, but the people don't. Depends on the people. The idea with a good strategy would be to used social media to activate a social network. Then you have scale. You may lose control, but you gain scale. I guess it starts to look like one of those business constraints triangles where you have one side showing "cost", one side showing "control" and the other showing "scale". Any change in the size of one will affect the others.

Thought provoking post, thanks!

[Peter Kim]

Hi Gavin - there's a reason for the comparison. How can a marketer justify allocating budget for social media? There must be a business reason and traditional media buys [should] have a well-worn path to sales. Social media needs this as well, with potentially longer decay effects. Look at BzzAgent - they call themselves a "word-of-mouth media network."

One person has finite scalability. To your point - and something that Aaron Strout pointed out before [ http://www.beingpeterkim.com/2008/08/social-media-ma.html#comment-127520482 ] a network helps a campaign scale. But to be clear, people - in particular social media marketers - do not.

[Philippe]

Hi Pete,

I react a little late... I was on holiday.

I'll meet Scott Monty soon and I can't wait to hear his analysis of the "Hurra torpedo" case (Ford Fusion), a very innovative campaign created by Ford and JWT end 2005.
http://media.ford.com/newsroom/release_display.cfm?release=22240

I still regard this as one of the best new marketing cases ever.

[Shiv Singh]

What a great discussion and a timely one too. Practically all my clients ask me about the scalability question. I tend to agree with Aaron's perspective - if done right, the customers will take care of a lot of the scaling for you. However, depending upon the industry and the type of company, this may seem a naive response. Sometimes, you simply need to scale up your customer service teams. There's no way around that in those instances.

[dominic]

OOps, looks like I'm late in participating.

Just one quick question: "does customer support scale" ?

Not really !, This does not prevent companies invest in customer support some even using it as a strategic differentiator.

Another way to look at it would be to position social media marketing as a "problem solving" tool that can prevent problems, help companies (co) develop better products, design better marketing messages, better target aso.

If one pb you solve in design is a 100x savings from discovering it when product is shifted, there may be big $ for social media.

Anyway, thanks for the great conversation

[Larry Irons]

Peter, Robin, David, I agree that making a connection with customers using social media, whether for explicit marketing or customer support, offers little in return unless social media is also used to build a collaborative, sharing company culture.

As Li and Bernoff recommended in "groundswell", organizations must plan how to act on what they learn from social media connections to customers. In other words, closing the engagement gap also means learning from the customer's experience with your brand and acting on it as an organization. Otherwise, social media is little more than impression management, not conversation.

In other words, using social media in marketing, customer support, or internal collaboration is really a part of an overall customer experience management strategy, not marketing per se.

[Rebekah Donaldson]

Is this true or false, do you think?

--> Individual acknowledgement by the brand rep is necessary to ensure a great brand experience for each follower who asks/contributes

I don't resent an FAQ-style response from a popular blogger -- i.e. if he rolls up my question with dozens of similar ones and applies one answer to the whole group.

Maybe that's unusual.

I know FAQs are often resented as a sort of Frankenstein... an attempt to replace a real person with an artifact.

To me, David Alston's comment is on the money. Call center e-FAQs can help customer service agents be a faster better resource to customers.

Seems like scaling social media requires modern day social media-appropriate eFAQs.