Repeat the Lie Often Enough and it Becomes the Truth
By: Chris Huebner
Tags: Advertising, Higher Education, Social Media, Marketing

Repeat the Lie Often Enough and it Becomes the Truth

Has social media led us down a path of sloppy thinking?

Marketers have led themselves down a repetitious path of untruths, creating the belief that hyper-targeted ads, brand purpose and influencers are key to brand growth.[1] Sloppy thinking, repeated-ad nauseam by digital thought leaders and marketers selling their latest suite of services bound tightly to the digital de jure have, to quote Les Binet and Sarah Carter, allowed us to “mask false assumptions about how marketing works.” [2]

The tall tale we have told ourselves in higher ed is that social media — the channel reserved for our most “authentic storytelling” — is free from most marketing rigor. We post photos of dogs, the same slow motion pan of the most historic part of our campus, turn our Presidents on to social media and report any increase in vanity metrics as improving brand equity. And while these aren’t inherently bad, they are most often practiced because it is what makes our content optimized to fit a framework developed to serve only the platforms themselves or an imagined audience waiting patiently for our next post.

A recent Inside Higher Ed article, titled Rethinking How We Measure Social ROI, challenged the presumption that social media should be completely bound by business objectives. The author wrote, “ROI has taken over the social media world. Consequently, it’s too late to dislodge ROI from social media. But dislodging fiscal dogma from social media ROI, that’s a battle we can still win.”

The battle isn’t dislodging fiscal dogma from social media, it’s dislodging the belief that because it’s on social media, we don’t apply the same level of scrutiny we apply to other channels. We follow the dominate narrative that most of our social media activity should be filed under “social PR” or “non-transactional” marketing goals, often measured in short-term intermediate metrics, and then connect it to some obfuscated content strategy or an incorrectly applied measure like share of voice. It always sounds nice on paper but rarely attached to long-term goals.

Engagement: Metrics for Whose Vanity

Engagement metrics have been a farce from the beginning.[3][4][5] We have assumed they provide a real-time test of our content strategy as well as markers for business objectives. In many cases, these beliefs are reinforced by content marketing service providers as well as social media management platforms. This has led us to optimize all creativity out of videos, oversell reach and create an over reliance on tactics. Remember, Facebook once claimed to reach 41 million Millennials in the U.S. when there are only 31 million and claimed they didn’t consider whether or not organic posts actually appeared on a screen to count as an impression.[6][7] Without getting into fraudulent traffic, quality of impressions and the loyalty fallacy, vanity metrics only get so far — even removed from ROI measures. You cannot discount the need to make vanity metrics relevant and, at the same time, make the claim they strengthen brand equity. In that case, the numbers just don’t add up.[8] [9][10]

To Have and Have Not: Non Transactional and Social PR

Similarly, we find ourselves mired in the belief that these metrics are excused from rigor and simply considered relational goals that are valid metrics for brand equity and customer relations — a sentiment, once again, that continues to be reinforced by marketing service providers.

For example, the article extended a quote made by a writer at the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), “These non-transactional goals (as opposed to business goals) mirror the relational goals of a social PR campaign. Hochuli [CMI writer] notes that social efforts strengthen brand equity and customer relationships over time.”

If we are going to marry public relations and social media, then we need to marry our collection of data and hold it to the same accountability. By definition, the function of public relations is to influence perception and behavior, manage stakeholder relations and build brand reputation. However, we cannot continue to develop the perception that shares, likes and share of voice (the correct term: social share of voice) have the direct effect we believe them to have. We often forget that social media engagement is a non-representative sample of people exhibiting non-representative behavior.[11]

The Return: An Integrated Approached

Somewhere along the way we lost the value of truly integrating our marketing and communications efforts. Yes, we can wax poetic about storytelling across channels, repurposing content and extending messages but in most cases, it’s through the lens of continual short-term assessment.

As noted in the Long and the Short of It, “Sadly there appears to be little progress in the world of digital metrics, narrowly concerned as they often are with very short-term responses and questionable metrics such as social media ‘likes’, often bought with short-term incentives….much work remains to be done to reliably link these to business performance and the focus of attention appears to lie elsewhere.”[12]

What we do know is that there is power in closely aligning social and digital with traditional marketing efforts. As the IPA Databank continues to show, “campaigns which include owned online media are 13 percent more likely to report very large business effects than those that don’t. Within that, there is some indication that branded content (e.g. social media feeds or videos hosted online) is more effective than other owned assets (e.g. microsites or apps).” The same databank shows us that non-video display ads in social media increase integrated campaign effectiveness by 7 percent.[13]

At the end of the day, our job as marketers is not just exposure but also shaping preference and influencing behavior. The dogma that social media should be free of rigor and driven to influence non transactional goals and social PR has led us chasing the wrong intermediate metrics. We are optimizing for efficiency and not effectiveness. To bring credibility and to operate under evidence-based based approaches is to be realistic with social media and to apply the same level of scrutiny as we do with other marketing channels.

As Peter Drucker wrote, “Long-term results cannot be achieved by piling short-term results on short-term results.”[14]

[1] Sharp, B. How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know. Oxford University Press. 2010

[2] Binet, L and Carter, S. How not to plan: 66 ways to screw it up. APG, 2018.

[3] Ries, E. Why vanity metrics are dangerous. 2009.

[4] https://marketingland.com/heres-itemized-list-facebooks-measurement-errors-date-200663

[5] https://www.marketingweek.com/2011/04/06/when-it-comes-to-social-media-coke-is-it/

[6] Binet, L and Carter, S. How not to plan: 66 ways to screw it up. APG. 2018.

[7] https://marketingland.com/facebook-discloses-new-measurement-errors-continues-hone-math-200416

[8] John, L. K, Mochon, D., Emrich, O and Schwartz, J. What’s the Value of a Like? Harvard Business Review. 108–115. 2017

[9] Ritson. M. Marketers are clueless about media effectiveness — here’s the proof. Marketing Week. 2018. https://www.marketingweek.com/2018/03/07/mark-ritson-marketers-perceptions-media-effectiveness/

[10] Sharp, B. How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know. Oxford University Press. 2010.

[11] Poynter, R., Cassidy, F. and Duckworth, S. Measuring Not Counting: Evaluating Social Marketing Communications. IPA. 2014.

[12] Binet, L. and Field, P. The Long and the Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies. IPA. 2016

[13] Binet, L. and Field, P. Media in Focus: Marketing Effectiveness in the Digital Era. IPA. 2017.

[14] Drucker, P. Post Capitalist Society. Butterworth-Heinemann. 1993.