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This week, Coca Cola released results of a study that concluded that online “buzz” has no measurable impact on sales.

That’s right. The company that’s arguably the most “social” organization in the world (with a record 61.5 million Facebook Fans) says there’s no relationship between online generated buzz and sales. (Well, almost. The study did give buzz credit for 0.01% of increased sales.)

So what exactly does this mean? That social media, while entertaining, does not contribute to sales?

Not quite.

For starters, I think it’s important to draw a distinction between social media “participation” and social media “buzz.” Buzz is primarily generated by a single piece of content or single event (think Red Bull’s space jump, written about here). These things are created solely to get eyeballs, and rarely have anything to contribute on behalf of the sponsoring product or organization. Another example would be this Long-Distance Slip-and-Slide video produced by Microsoft:

No doubt about it, this is amazing content. People may like it.. They may even share it. But would you seriously believe a slip-and-slide video would persuade people to buy a Windows computer? Or that a stunt like the space jump, no matter how spectacular, would have people lining up outside convenience stores for a Red Bull?

Social media participation, on the other hand, is not nearly as sexy. It’s not the atomic bomb, it’s winning the battle hill-by-hill. It’s never going to be a trending topic on Twitter. It’s never going to generate 20 million views. Instead, it’s an ongoing effort to engage fans and customers on a deeper level, where they hang out. It’s a way to listen to customers, try out ideas, provide “insider” content and provide one-to-one customer service. Basically a way to help your organization become more “human” for your customers.

What I hate about studies like this one from Coke (and the accompanying news coverage) is that things tend to get painted with a broad brush. Nuance is nowhere to be found. It’s either “this” or it’s “that.”

Successful marketing today requires a complete toolbox of owned, earned, shared and paid media. Attempting to break one of these out to determine its ROI is a fool’s errand.

It helps to think of social as a “trailing” tactic (nearly all people who become ‘Fans’ are already customers, and prefer you already). As such, social’s true value in the marketing funnel is to engage with converted customers on a deeper level, to give them more opportunities to interface with the brand, to shorten the buying cycle, to stem churn and learn more about your audience.

If you still question the value of social media to the marketing process, consider this: the more time your customers spend interfacing with your brand, the less opportunity (and inclination) they have to interface with your competitors.

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Way back in 2009 (ancient history in the digital world), Daily Deals providers such as Groupon and LivingSocial sprouted up on the digital landscape like weeds on an untended lawn. In the beginning, they were all the rage. Consumers welcomed them. Social pundits loved them. And local restaurants and retailers saw them as a great way to affordably bring in new customers. Some pundits even proclaimed Groupon to be “the next eBay.”

Here some three-plus years later, things aren’t looking so sanguine for them. So much so, that Groupon sacked its Founder and CEO due to its listless financials. (His legendary farewell letter to staff is worth reading, and can be found here.) And another pioneer of the Daily Deal, LivingSocial (the #2 player in the industry), is rumored to soon be sucked up by a larger company or get the plug pulled on it altogether as early as next year.

So how did the major Daily Dealers go from being the fair-haired child to the ugly stepsister in just a few years? A few factors conspired to hamper these firms:

1. The market became highly fragmented. Every locality in the country seemed to have sprouted its own Daily Deal services, and a lot of these focused on narrow niches. Plus a lot of offline providers jumped in as well (television stations and newspapers, as an example). The national players haven’t done enough to differentiate themselves from the local competition.
2. A lot of meat-and-potatoes businesses became disenchanted with participating. Groupon, et al, took a massive cut of the Daily Deals purchases. So often participants had to settle for a few crumbs from the paid voucher amount, sometimes not even covering their costs. While some participants had fantastic experiences with Daily Deals, many others didn’t. After a while, you could see which businesses would benefit, and which wouldn’t. But sadly, Groupon, LivingSocial and company treated business owners like pigeons, and took all takers instead of focusing on businesses their services could really help.
3. The Daily Deal offerings are all over the map. Here’s an example: my kids are teenagers. So why did I received offerings more applicable to young families (such as a diaper service)? A few of those, and you can’t blame consumers for questioning the services’ relevance.
4. The market turned out to not be as large as was originally projected. Annual growth has been around 3%, which in the digital realm is beyond stagnant.

So is there any saving the major Daily Deals players? Heck yeah. But there are a few adjustments they’ll need to make:

• Provide more relevant offers, and get involved in after-the-sale follow-up. Get to know customers’ interests better. Look at purchase patterns. Look at price points. If need be, send out surveys and questionnaires in return for “Groupon Bucks.” Learn from every purchase, and follow up with purchasers to have them evaluate their purchases.
• Focus especially on the highest value users. Twenty percent of the Daily Deal audience accounts for 80% of the sales. So do whatever it takes to cater to this group and build loyalty and evangelism among them. Create a rewards program that provides points for every purchase that can be redeemed for vouchers. Provide amazing exclusive deals that can only be “unlocked” by users once they reach a certain level. Create events specifically for this group of buyers.
• Mend fences with the local business communities. The feedback from the original model is pretty clear. Do more to partner with local businesses to make sure they succeed, give them tools to get the most out of their offerings, and don’t take a powder on them once their check are cashed.

Simply stated, the main problem with Groupon and LivingSocial is that they are more focused on being profitable than being relevant. For them to survive, that has to change.

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Mickey New Media, On Clients, On Customers, Social Media, customer experience Andrew Mason, Daily Deals, Groupon, LivingSocial, mismarketing

As you may have heard, this past Monday morning, a group of hackers “hijacked” Burger King’s official Twitter account (@BurgerKing) and replaced all the BK branding elements with the golden arches of McDonald’s. The hackers then sent out posts on the hijacked account claiming that BK had been sold to McDonald’s, then posted some raunchy posts about customer and employee “reactions” to the fictitious sale. You can get the whole chapter-and-verse on the hack at Mashable.

It didn’t take long to figure this was a hoax, and within a few hours, Twitter suspended the account. And within a day or so, @BurgerKing was once again tweeting out content about Whoppers and Chicken Fries.

An interesting side note: blogger Travis Wright followed the hack in real time, and discovered that the number of Twitter users “following” @BurgerKing went from 77,000 at the start of the day to more than 111,000 within just 90 minutes. Suddenly, getting a Twitter account hijacked proved to be a great way to increase followers by almost 50%.

As you’d expect, over the next few days Twitter got a pretty good spanking from social media heavyweights. The micro-blogging service was berated for offering insufficient security to commercial and branded accounts. But to me, there’s a bigger story at play.

The fact that the hacked account drew more than 37,000 new followers in less than two hours reveals how most Twitterites use the service, and how brands just don’t understand it. People were way more interested in the real-time entertainment value of the hacked account than they ever would be about anything Burger King was tweeting out on behalf of themselves.

In other words, the big “fail” for the Burger King social media team wasn’t that their Twitter account got hacked. It’s that they came up way short in delivering engaging content their customers and fans really care about.

I did a double take when I read that BK started the week with 77,000 followers. That’s a pitifully small number for a visible national brand such as BK (Starbuck’s, by comparison, has around 3.5 million followers). The fact that BK been unsuccessful at getting even their most loyal customers to follow them is an indication of how lame their content has been.

In fairness to Burger King (and Twitter, for that matter), they’re not in this boat alone. The unfortunate truth is that many marketers, who are used to “controlling” their messages via mass media advertising, still see social as a way of pushing branding messages. They are unwilling (or unable) to give up control to an audience that might say…anything. They fail to grasp that social is an opportunity for deeper engagement with people who already ‘like’ them in real life. They neglect their responsibility to provide content that’s relevant, useful and yes, entertaining. Instead, boilerplate management-approved messages get sent out and are for the most part ignored by customers. And brands wonder why their engagement rate on Facebook is less than 0.5%.

I hope the Burger King hack teaches a lesson to brands’ social media teams, but not necessarily the lesson everyone’s talking about. It’s my hope that this serves as a wake-up call to create more compelling content, whatever the platform.

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This past Tuesday, Facebook unveiled its revamped internal search system that makes it easier for users to get answers drawn from the social network’s vast array of status updates, pictures, “Likes” and other content posted by the social network’s billion+ users, its 240 billion indexed photos and its one trillion connections.

What the 'Results Page' of Facebook's Graph Search looks like.

The new service called Graph Search was announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg as an alternative to Google-type Web searches tied to keywords.

Instead, of providing the searcher with a page of links where the user “might” find her answer (as Google and other search engines do), Graph Search is geared to provide specific answers to specific questions and phrases by presenting searchers with a list of user pages that answer the specific query.

Facebook’s self-stated goal with its search system was to make search more “personal” and “social.” The company envisions it as a way to find word-of-mouth recommendations (“Mexican restaurants in San Francisco’s Mission District that my friends like” or “Movies that are liked by film directors”) and connect with people with similar interests (“People who live in my hometown who like hiking” or “People who graduated from my high school the same year I did”). The list of profile pages you’re presented with is based on profile information (which every Facebook user has already filled out), plus key words used in status updates, uploaded photos and videos, plus pages that are “liked.”

Depending on your point of view, this new development could either be extremely helpful or uncomfortably creepy (funny how that word pops up more and more in regard to Facebook).

While Facebook says it has no plans for monetizing Graph Search, you gotta believe that’s not too far off. The company’s most valuable assets are its users, and more specifically, the profile information shared by its users. Facebook has dabbled in profiting from profile data by allowing advertisers to target according to profile, and by selling “sponsored stories” based on user behavior. But from the sound of things, Graph Search has the potential to make this seem like small potatoes.

As a marketer, you can potentially find some amazing uses for Graph Search.

It could give you a leg up in areas such as employee and executive recruitment. Graph Search will allow businesses to create hyper-specific queries within their existing Facebook networks, such as “employees of my company who are friends with employees of (Company X)” or “people who have five or more years of experience in software project management.” Yes, there are other social networks that are more focused on recruiting (LinkedIn, for one), none of them can boast the user base or profile data Facebook has.

Undoubtedly, marketers will also benefit from even finer-grained ad targeting that’s sure to come. Facebook’s future revenues will be deeply tied to providing access to its users’ profile data. By sharing information about who their friends are, what music they listen to, where they vacation, and what brands they “like,” each Facebook user creates a rich vault of profile data that is of great value to companies and advertisers.

Ah, but there’s a big “if” here. All this could work out to help Facebook revolutionize search if…its users willingly cooperate by keeping profiles accurate and up to date, and more importantly, if.. they stay active on the network. To my mind, it would be a mistake to take this for granted, especially given the pushback Facebook has received regarding its many “privacy policies” and the potential for stalker-like searches (“single women in Seattle who live on Capitol Hill, are friends with my friends and like Gold’s Gym”).

So what do you think: will Graph Search reinvigorate Facebook and make it more useful for users? Or will it creep users out to the point where they step away from the social network? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

For more information on Graph Search, check out this story first published on MediaPost.

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Rather than cook up yet another “year-end list” of one sort or another, we at The Quisenblog thought we’d curate for you the most interesting marketing/advertising lists we’ve come across over the last few weeks. Our hope is there’s something here you’ll enjoy.

The best digital campaigns of 2012 (Slideshow with video).

From Gangnum Style to Red Bull’s “Stratos” space jump to the “Invisible Mercedes” get a peek inside the top-performing digital campaigns of the year.

Five Social Media Marketing Campaigns of 2012 to inspire your 2013 strategy. (From Content Lead)

Case study examples: The Obama Presidential Campaign (segmentation), The Dollar Shave Club (web video), Totino’s Pizza Bites (Twitter hashtags), Nike’s Olympic Run (promoted Tweets), Sephora Beauty Products (Pinterest). Ideas for how you can use these platforms in 2013.

From Tampons to Tablets: Best/Worst names of 2012. (From Marketing Profs)

Microsoft Surface. Chase Liquid card. Doritos Jacked. (The good) Pepperidge Farms Jingos! Parrot Zik. Qsymia. (The bad) These names and others are dissected in this post.

5 Smart marketing habits for 2013 (from OPENForum)

OPENForum is one of my go-to sources for timely management intelligence. This article is a classic.

25 Experts Predict the Future of Marketing. (from Exact Target)

Industry heavyweights like jay Baer, Geoff Livingston, Joe Pulizzi and Mark Schaefer share their insights in bite-sized forms, on topics from Cross Chanel Marketing to Email to Mobile and Social.

10 biggest ad stories from 2012 (podcast, from The Bean Cast)

The best/worst of 2012 advertising and marketing stories in one portable podcast. Stream or download.

That pretty much does it for 2012. If the world manages to make it to the New Year, we do hope you’ll check back.

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Unfortunately, in marketing (as in many other industries), we tend to throw around generalizations as if they are gospel. We use these generalizations as absolutisms–to justify our position, or to shoot someone else’s down. And because they are at some level, based on truth (or more likely, statistics), they rarely get challenged.

But what would happen it you were to challenge them? Not in a “you’re wrong” kind of way, but if, after you catch yourself using one, you add “until we give them a reason to.” For example:

Nobody reads long copy ads…until you give them a reason to.

People can’t tell you how Ford is different than Chevy…until you give them a reason to.

Customers care only about price…until you give them a reason to.

Web visitors won’t stick around after reading the first page…until you give them a reason to.

Nobody remembers a spot after seeing it only once…until you give them a reason to.

Nobody reads below the fold…until you give them a reason to.

Loyal customers never leave…until you give them a reason to.

Trolls can never be placated…until you give them a reason to.

Nobody clicks through on banner ads…until you give them a reason to.

Brands can’t be built using just social media…until you give them a reason to.

It floats the possibility that there might be an exception to the generalization you accept as gospel. No matter what the “best practice,” there’s always room for the “brilliant exception.” If you look at monumentally successful companies and organizations, chances are they flew in the face of conventional wisdom at some key moment of truth and “gave them a reason to” be seen differently.

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The “salesman’s salesman,” Hilary Hinton “Zig” Ziglar passed away on November 28th, a few weeks after his 86th birthday.

Ziglar authored nearly 30 books (ten of which became New York Times best sellers). When he returned from World War II, he landed a job selling pots and pans door to door. It was during those early years when he developed a method of selling and a penchant for motivating others that has come to be recognized as “The Ziglar Way.”

Much of what we blindly accept today as “best practices” in sales and management was first pioneered by Ziglar. At the core of his books, speeches, presentations and executive retreats was the idea that in order to be successful, “You have to SEE it to BE it”– the idea that if you see success in your mind, you’ll see a success in your efforts.

Ziglar not only elevated sales into a noble profession, he managed to make it glamorous. “Selling is not something you do TO someone, it is something you do FOR someone,” he once noted.

His personal success story, his homespun persona and his ability to craft memorable one-liners made him a celebrity and created today’s entire “motivational” industry. The likes of Stephen Covey, Tony Robbins and Tom Peters owe way more than their first-borns to The Zigster.

What made Ziglar successful wasn’t that he was pushier than other salesmen, or that he was “smoother’ than other salesmen or even that he was more driven than other salesmen. What made Ziglar a runaway success was his curiosity about human nature, and his ability to connect with his customers. He took the time to get to know the people he was selling to, and had the empathy required to “put himself in their shoes.”

His respect for the customer was uncompromising. His approach was characterized by what we’d call today, a “win/win approach.” One of his most-quoted lines is “All you have to do to get everything YOU want is make sure those around you have everything THEY want.” Might not sound so revolutionary today, but in the days of peddling cookware door-to-door, making whatever promises it took to make the sale, knowing you’ll probably never see that customer again, it was revolutionary indeed.

I think Zig would find himself right at home in today’s era of transparent marketing. (Interesting to note, this old-school salesman has a Facebook following of almost 90,000.) Ziglar’s “respect thy customer” approach is even more relevant today than in his heyday. Social media and the Internet have put brands on even footing with their customers, and require an anticipation of needs and a willingness to help beyond the sale itself.

Though decades old, these Ziglar quotes can serve as effective print-and-posts for today’s marketers:

“People don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons.”

“Positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.”

“If you learn something from defeat, then you haven’t really lost.”

“If you go looking for a friend, you’re going to find they’re scarce indeed. If you set out to BE a friend, you’ll find they’ll come out of the woodwork”.

“Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.”

It’s not how much you have, it’s how efficiently you use it that makes the difference.

“You cannot tailor-make the situations in life but you can tailor-make the attitudes to fit those situations.”

“A poor economy is the best opportunity for salespeople because the naysayers and grumblers have already given up.”

“A problem, properly define, is half-solved.”

These and other noteworth Zig ZIglar quotes can be found here.

In closing I’d like to share one other Ziglar quote I hadn’t heard before, but one that should resonate with every marketer:

“You can’t make it as a wandering generality. You must become a meaningful specific.”

If you have a favorite Zig Ziglar quote, please share it with us.

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One of the most under appreciated aspects of social media and how it can affect your marketing is how they give you the ability to ‘listen in’ on consumers.

By setting up listening posts online, whether through conversation monitors like Social Mention, keyword tools like Google Alerts or trending topic tools like Twitter hashtags, you can not only get a sense of what the public is saying about you, your products and competitors online. In many cases it can even give you inspiration.

One recent example of this is the case with Samsung and its Galaxy III smart phone.

Samsung’s latest television ads, which mock Apple’s recent release of its new iPhone 5, seem to be striking a chord with consumers, at least judging by its popularity on YouTube (32 million+ views as of this writing). The South Korean electronics maker credits part of its success to the fact that the insight behind its advertising came straight from the consumer’s mouth (or in this case, the consumers keyboard).

According to Samsung, the ads’ scripts were based on “hundreds of thousands” of Tweets the company monitored that complained or poked fun at specific features of the iPhone 5. Here’s on example of the TV campaign.

One of the customers says: “I heard that you have to have an adapter to use the dock on the new one.” Another young man chimes in: “Yeah, yeah but they make the coolest adapters.” Reportedly, those lines and other parts of the ad’s script came straight from Twitter conversations.

This is just one example of how social media are helping marketers shape their ad campaigns, or even their products themselves. Procter & Gamble’s Duracell Battery division used data from social media to help it develop the Duracell Powermat, a portable device that allows smart phone charging on the go. Duracell’s decision to use iconic red and green battery signals came about after social media analytics found that people often referred to the color of their battery signal when they were expressing frustration about losing power.

It’s rare that social media monitoring alone will provide all the marketing answers for you. But it’s one more tool to use to get a “voice of the customer” that just might lead to some inspired executions, whether through ad messaging or product refinement.

Just listen.

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Last week I wrote about why it’s never a good idea to cheap out on guerilla tactics. This past weekend gave us an example of one marketer who not only didn’t cheap out, but may have set a record for spending on a one-time sponsorship event.

The example I’m referencing is this past Sunday’s “free-fall skydive” of Austrian Felix Baumgartner. “Fearless Felix” jumped out of a capsule suspended by a balloon 128,000 feet (24 miles) above the earth. He not only smashed the record for the highest ever free-fall, he also became the first skydiver to go faster than the speed of sound, reaching a maximum velocity of 833.9 mph before touching down safely just outside of Roswell, New Mexico.

From a social media standpoint, the numbers are pretty incredible. A reported 7.3 million people watched the event live. Soon after, a Facebook photo generated nearly 216,000 likes, 10,000 comments and more than 29,000 shares in less than 40 minutes. And on Twitter, it occupied half the worldwide trending topics, pushing past seven NFL football games. The blogosphere continues to buzz about it. And the major news networks, newspapers and magazines have run stories on the stunt.

Mr. Baumgartner’s feat was not your ordinary extreme stunt or quest for a world’s record. Rather, it was a promotion bought and paid for (and managed) by Red Bull.

The question that begs asking here is a simple one: despite all the attention the event received, did Red Bull get a good value for its participation? Did it get an ample bang for its buck?

This is where the spin meisters come in. Barely 12 hours after the stunt, Huffington Post’s Janean Chun calls Red Bull’s sponsorship of Baumgartner’s jump “the most successful marketing campaign of all time,” noting that the brand “broke the traditional barriers of marketing, sponsorship and social media.” And a CEO of a digital agency opines that Red Bull stands to rack up “tens of millions of dollars” in sales because the stunt, although in typical social media style, he fails to quantify where those sales will come from.

But let’s back off the social media hyperbole for a moment. There’s no arguing the event generated a ton of social media eyeballs for the brand. But these are “social media” eyeballs. Eight million live views is big news in social media, but in the world of marketing it’s nothing special. By way of comparison, Sunday’s season opener of AMC’s “The Walking Dead” attracted over 11 million viewers–and this is basic cable.

And while the promotion is consistent with the “extreme stunts” Red Bull has become known for (at least within a select vertical market) and with its “Red Bull gives you wings” tagline, we need to remember Red Bull isn’t the lead in this story, Felix is. And while the stunt generated a ton of “free media” (specifically TV and newspaper stories), how much of it haloed onto Red Bull? I saw a one-minute story on NBC news that never bothered to mention Red Bull. I got a quick glimpse of the Red Bull logo on the parachute, much like you’d see a sponsor’s logo on a NASCAR driver’s suit.

While Red Bull has yet to release any spending figures on the sponsorship, one could easily envision an investment of $20 million or more on the stunt, plus all the advance promotion (check out this slick CG “movie trailer” that teases the event) with no guarantee of a happy outcome.

I’m not arguing that Red Bull shouldn’t pony up for events such as this. They’ve sort of primed their audience to expect such things. But the real measure of whether or not it was successful can’t be ciphered by social media buzz alone, no matter how much it gets. At some point, it has to be about sales. Good old fashioned ROI (remember that?). “Soft metrics” like mentions, hashtags, likes, shares, sentiment, etc. might make you feel all warm and fuzzy. But did the $20 million+ spent on the event generate incremental sales? Did it help drive distribution? Did it increase market share? Did it allow Red Bull to charge a premium for its product?

To be clear, I’m not saying we needed to see 40 million cans of Red Bull fly off the shelves in the hours after the stunt. Give it time. But for the cost of running a spot in each of the next SEVEN Super Bowls, it’d be a shame if all Red Bull got in return was a few million YouTube hits and some news photos with an incidental logo splashed across a parachute.

Success in the world of social media isn’t about dreaming up outrageous ideas that’ll get attention. That’s the easy part. The currency of a social media program is how well it marries to an organization’s business objectives. And in this case, we’re yet to see how that works out.

A side note to this campaign: a marketer that seems to have successfully “coat-tailed” on this sponsorship was Mars, who sent a Kit Kat bar into outer space to give Felix a “break” during his jump. You can view that one-and-a-half minute video here.

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Legally, I’m not allowed to use the ‘O-word,’ I’m not allowed to show the five rings. Or the official logo. Or, if this were a podcast or video blog, to play the theme music that one associates with the, uh,…big event that’s going on in London these next few weeks.

See, the promoters, stewards and powers that be of the…athletic competition started by the Greeks many centuries ago…insist on having a stranglehold on the branding elements surrounding the…event….and jealously guard them the way the military guards Fort Knox. The International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) intention is to protect those elements so that only official sponsors can use them, thus making their multi-million dollar sponsorships of the…big show…even more valuable.

That’s all well and good. If McDonald’s is an official sponsor, they should be able to cash in big time. But what the IOC is imposing on participants this time around is a bit of a head scratcher. Basically, they are trying to impose the kind of Draconian rules reserved for use of the Olympian graphic elements to the athletes’ and insiders’ use of social media during the games.

No posting photos to Facebook. No uploading videos to YouTube. No tweeting “in the third person” (tweeting about fellow athletes or competitors).

As logical as this might sound to the IOC (who wants its social media hub to be the only outlet for content), to anyone who knows social media at all, this is ridiculous. I can’t keep my teenager from texting at a restaurant. And you expect to keep some Albanian swimmer from posting a photo of Michael Phelps to his Facebook page?

And what happens when the high-jumper from Papau tweets about his teammates? Does the IOC sic their hordes of lawyers on the poor guy, and banish him from all future competition (now THAT will generate positive word of mouth…)?

While I’m sure the IOC is going to do a rocking job with their social media hub, it’s going to feel too controled. Something will be missing: an authentic interface with the athletes themselves. The unadulterated transparency that leads to authentic engagement.

As unnatural as it feels to the IOC to back off and let things just happen, that’s exactly what this year’s, uh,…big games,…could use. The primary goal of the IOC shouldn’t be to totally control the “O” brand, it should be to turn the event into a real-time event that can be enjoyed and talked about by everyone in the world, including the athletes themselves.

Let the games begin.

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