Social Media’s Failure To Communicate
“What we have here is a failure to communicate,” says the evil prison warden Strother Martin as he sentences Paul Newman to a night in the box (a small, hot punishment cell), in the classic 1967 film Cool Hand Luke.
Fast forward to today.
Exactly the same words could be used to describe the disconnect between social media advocates and their prospective customers. Those advocates risk a night in the box – or maybe a box on the ears – when they fail to speak the language as CMOs, CFOs and CEOs. It may be one reason why so many Cs say they’re “sick of hearing about Web 2.0 and related buzzwords such as ‘blogs’ and ‘social networking’” in a survey by the Marketing Executives Networking Group.
You’d think that in the communications business, the value of clear, effective communication would be taken for granted. But you’d be wrong, because some of our contemporaries require constant reminders, as in this Small Business Trends post by Zane Safrit. He reminds us that “The story CEOs and CFOs want to hear is the story of numbers that go up and numbers that go down.”
Speak to the Cs.
It’s an issue we touched on a few months back, when we said “Help them decide in your favor by demonstrating ROMI — Return On Marketing Investment.” Now we’re wondering if Rosetta Stone could create a special version of its language learning software to teach social media advocates how to speak the language of business. It would turn social media’s jargon into a fluent translation for real-life business:
• From “tweets, trackbacks, links, rss feeds, feed readers, community members, blogtrolls, stalkers, spambots, and organic SEO…”
• …to “qualified sales leads, conversion rates, sales per customer, revenues, customer churn and cost of acquisition.”
It’s late summer now — back to school season for many marketers. And time for social media advocates who want to sell to Cs to go back to school themselves, before they receive a big “F,” which stands for “Failure to communicate.”
Tags: C-level, CEO, CFO, CMO, Marketing Communications, R.O.I., ROMI, social media
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 10:35 am and is filed under Fred Petrick, social media. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
2 Responses to “Social Media’s Failure To Communicate”
August 6th, 2009 at 11:13 am
Amen! A friend/fan/follower only becomes a customer when they buy something. You only prosper when you sell them more. And you only thrive when you make more and more on what you sell them. These are sometimes alien concepts in the social networking world.
January 29th, 2010 at 1:16 pm
[...] for social media measurement. This is a subject we’ve beat over the head in previous posts – Social Media’s Failure To Communicate, Back To Basics for Social Media and Social Media Bubble – where we objected to the usual vague, [...]
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