Social Media in Digital Marketing

Ashley Friedlein is founder and CEO of Econsultancy. In the latest Foviance podcast, we discussed digital marketing in social media. 

Ashley, I don’t know if you’ve read New Media Age recently, but it has given quite a lot of column inches to a debate about whether digital is relevant at the moment – what’s your stand on that one?

Everything is going to become digital, most things already are digital, so in one sense the label ‘digital’ is going to become irrelevant in the foreseeable future. Digital is just going to become part of life, part of marketing. At the moment, there is a huge change happening within big brands and organisations where they’ve got ways of working and corporate structures which are being battered by the internet and social media, which means they’re having to wrestle with things and often call them ‘digital’ in order to try and get their heads around it.

I think the skills, knowledge, tools and techniques to do the job aren’t going to go away – and they keep changing. So it doesn’t really matter what you call it or how it will turn out, search marketing will remain. And affiliate marketing and email marketing and user experience and interface design. It’s going to keep changing, so somebody’s going to have to help businesses figure out what works and what doesn’t – and that’s what we’re trying to do.

Obviously digital has supported the growth of social media, and we’d like to hear about your Twitter experiment and what’s been happening on your home page.

We started out covering Twitter as the hot new thing. We are always keen to experiment ourselves, partly because it’s fun and partly because we can publish the results. We’re trying to practice what we preach, which is actually quite unlike most publishers. We set up an Econsultancy Twitter account and started doing the Twitter thing not really knowing what would happen.

We have a feed that searches for the text string ‘Econsultancy’ on Twitter and automatically publishes that on our home page. Rather than us shout about how great we are, we let our readers, users or anyone else be on our home page, uncontrolled by us. If they’re saying good things, there will be a greater degree of trust and credibility because it’s not us saying it. That is a much better and more powerful endorsement.

I suspect a great deal of trust came from putting up the bad as much as the good?

Yes, and thankfully most of the bad has been about specific bugs on the site. It’s useful to spot those because a lot of people can’t be bothered to phone up, and they don’t send emails because they think emails disappear into a vacuum never to be responded to. The stats bear that out – most companies don’t reply to emails at all, let alone within any sensible timeframe. With Twitter you can just sort of vent your frustration because it’s only a very short amount of text. It’s easy to mouth off, which is why we capture a lot of opinion – it’s much more honest that way.

Have you seen any changes in what people have tweeted before and after tweets were made public on your home page? Has it toned people down?

When we first did it people realised that, by mentioning Econsultancy, they could get on our home page, so they were just doing silly things to get on the home page and sure enough they did. But they did it once or twice and then got bored of it, and everyone pointed out that it was a bit of a waste of everyone’s time, so actually that’s pretty much gone away. It doesn’t really work as a link spamming technique anyway because we only show the five most recent tweets on the home page, so you’ll very quickly go off the page.

The next step was to adapt our blog articles with a button saying “Tweet this”, which means if people clicking on it are logged in to Twitter, it automatically creates a tweet of the blog post title and a shortcut URL directly to that article. Essentially it is a way of marketing a particular article you are reading to your followers on Twitter; a sort of viral marketing thing for us. Having made it easy to do, currently about 60 or 70 percent of tweets are from people reading our blog posts and retweeting them or tweeting them to their followers. It is very nice and we think that it is a more powerful form of endorsement because it’s them marketing to their peers and followers, not us.

Do you think Twitter is an effective viral form for any brand, or does it particularly work for brands like yourself that are in the information industry?

I think that it depends a little bit on your target market. It is particularly powerful for us because most of our users will know what Twitter is and most will be comfortable with the notion of some button that they can click on; they’ll understand what it is doing and probably how it’s doing it. It’s an equivalent of the “email this to a friend” in the early days of viral marketing. I think different platforms will work variously well, depending on the nature of the proposition and the market. Some people might really like Netvibes, iGoogle, RSS, some Facebook and some Twitter.

Does it worry you that because social media buttons are easy to put onto web content, brands will be faced with a blog post and 15 different buttons for doing different things?

I think it is the paradox of too much choice, and as you know, that has always been a tricky user interface challenge. On the one hand people supposedly want choice; and power users want dashboards and big long lists. On the other hand, some people want extreme simplicity. If you look at Web 2.0 sites, part of their success was the fact that they typically did only one thing and they did that one thing very well, but it was extremely simple. So I think you have to balance the two. You want to make prominent the things which people most use, or are most likely to want to use, and you want to have all the other options accessible. It becomes a question of how you do that balancing within a page.

What’s next for the Twitter experiment – do you have any plans?

Yes, there are a couple of things. Firstly we’d like to roll out ‘tweet this’ across most of the pages of our site; that’s easy for us to do because we’ve already done it for the blog. The other area I think is interesting is live events. At ‘The Future of Digital Marketing’ we had a hash tag, #FODM, and people at the event would be tweeting using the hash tag. Then we correlated feedback about the event in real time. We didn’t display it live on a screen because I think it’s too distracting; we had about 700 tweets during the event.

If you hand out feedback forms at an event or a training session it is a nightmare trying to get people to fill it in. But now everyone – and certainly our lot – have mobile phones and smart phones and they are all geared up to tweet. So we’re looking at using Twitter as a sort of reviewing platform. We want reviews, not necessarily ratings, but reviews about our events, about our reports and about our training. Twitter can allow people to do quick reviews. I haven’t seen anyone doing this yet, but it strikes us that there’s an opportunity to do it. The reason to do it is in the same way that user ratings and reviews increase conversion rates for online retailers – we would hope that the same social persuasion factor would work for us.

Thank you Ashley for taking the time to speak to us. The full podcast is now available for download from the Foviance website.

A the time of this posting, Twitter experienced severe downtime, the culprit has been confirmed as a “denial-of-service attack”. Read more from Econsultancy.

Update: 7th August, Twitter still suffering.

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