Mele’s Musings

Facebook Hegemony

In some ways, the news that Facebook may control 5% of online advertising in 2012 from a recent paidcontent.org article should be looked upon as a blessing by those of us in the media business, particularly those of us who are digitally oriented. First, it gives us another significant place to reach customers, and with a huge audience, Facebook can be a real complement, even dare I say replacement, for some TV advertising, which still garners too large of a percentage of ad dollars compared to the audience concentration it has. Second, Facebook should give us the opportunity to reach out to consumers and new and interactive ways.

I guess it’s this second point that has me worried.

I admit I have been a bit surprised by Facebook’s ascendance. Although it has a huge audience, the promise of brands being able to directly interact with fans made me think that Facebook would have a harder time attracting ad dollars once a brand reached a certain concentration of fans. Afterall, once a brand had a certain critical mass of fans, it should be able to reach out to them directly, in a way creating less of a need to spend advertising dollars.

But, I was wrong on a few counts. I was wrong because, despite it all, what still drives most media buying is eyeballs. Regardless of where those eyeballs are, or what we should be doing with those eyeballs, or what the return on that ad spend is, the metric of choice for most media agencies is still “how efficiently can I achieve reach and frequency?” Despite the fact that it is an outdated and mostly meaningless metric, reach and frequency still rule.

I was also wrong because brands, despite their desire to attract as many fans as possible, still don’t have a great idea of what to do with them once they get them beyond vapid attempts to generate comments. I, personally, have a grown a bit tired of brands asking questions like “Who is your favorite character from Lord of the Rings?” This was a real question posed by Amazon on January 6. Not that I don’t love the Lord of the Rings, but the question seems to me one of those examples of trying too hard to generate conversation. In a misguided attempt at humor, I responded to the question several times by naming my favorite Harry Potter character. I, of course, thought my comments were incredibly witty, particularly my choice of the “Sorting Hat” as my favorite character. No one else did. Especially not my kids who thought I was being a dork.

The failure at comedy aside, my objective was really to make the point that, despite all of the dollars being thrown at Facebook to grow fans, most of the time brands are doing very little to nurture real, meaningful, business changing, customer-centric conversations with their fans. And if the final calculus of what makes marketing on Facebook valuable is the number of fans you have or the cheap CPM you were able to negotiate, then I fear we have missed the point entirely.

What makes Facebook so valuable is that we can get authentic, honest, open comments from our customers. Instead, too many still want to treat it like every other controlled media channel - to own the message, direct the conversation, protect the brand.

Instead, we should be using the opportunity Facebook offers to our brands to listen to customers, engage them, provide service to them, etc. This takes careful planning, a well-considered strategy, and a not insignificant investment in people and time. But if brands can stop thinking of Facebook as a great media channel and instead think of it as a great customer connection channel, we might just be able to get the full value out of what it offers.

It’s just really hard to calculate that down to a CPM.

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