So you want to be a pinball wizard…

Alex Hunter, the IPA’s finance director, on the rewards and risks of social media advertising…

If traditional advertising is like ten-pin bowling where you pick your ball with care and bowl it down the alley towards the target with a fairly predicable outcome, then social media advertising is more like working the pinball machine: setting the ball in motion and hoping with the odd nudge that it’ll bounce around the various contacts and still get a positive result. It’s a comparison you may have heard before but is no less true for the repetition.

The use of social media as part of an integrated offering (or on its own) is well enough established and the key platforms – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn – have established their own differentiated characteristics.

The ability to rapidly reach a wide population of actual or potential customers relatively cheaply is hugely attractive as a “tell” mechanism for a given brand. Social media is ideal as the signpost to the “sell” side of the business, providing information, backed up by PR, satisfaction surveys or even contests. To that extent it shares the same benefits as traditional media.

However, one can no longer stand back and watch your weighty ball’s progress towards the target; this pin ball is going to produce reactions and they have to be managed or there is a risk not only of missing the target but of reputational damage: At one level it simply provides a ready opportunity for the brand’s enemies to deliberately negate the message, be they pressure groups, ex-employees or dissatisfied customers. There are plenty of examples of these. At another level, consumer reaction can either innocently or deliberately misconstrue the message in a way that the brand image ends up portrayed in a very different way to that intended.

To minimise these risks, one should not only pay attention to the usual controls on content, tone etc, but should also have effective monitoring and response processes in place. Just as one would plan a military campaign, look at the possible reactions of the consumer and ensure your counteraction processes will engage, blunt and even convert the opposition that might arise – the nudge buttons on your pinball machine, if you will.As with that game, speed of reaction is of the essence, since a slow reaction is as bad as no reaction at all. Worse, of course, is the wrong reaction.

Possibly because some major businesses increasingly protect themselves from customer reaction (when could you last phone your local bank branch, railway station or utility company?), their marketing campaigns can seem remote parodies of their customers’ actual experience.

That may not be evident when only traditional media are used and customer interaction is limited. But marketing campaigns using social media will encourage reaction from every quarter, especially if they use the same unjustified hyperbole. An integrated campaign should take greater account of the public’s scepticism. More than ever before, it should be legal, decent, honest and truthful, as the ASA requires.

The effectiveness of a campaign that includes social media is no more difficult to measure than the purely traditional media ones, in that reach should not be confused with result. Certainly for social media, both Klout and PeerIndex give useful indications of engagement levels. But success is generally about sales penetration and the extra profit made as a result. For that, the traditional effectiveness measures remain key.

So, social media advertising carries its own risks and rewards, and thus requires a different emphasis on agencies’ arsenal of influencing skills. To help them, the IPA’s annual finance conference is making the risks and rewards of social media its theme this June. The participants are typically from the mainly measurement-savvy section of its agency membership. Managing social media needs as much logic as magic, as any pinball wizard knows!

Booking a place on the IPA’s Finance Conference costs £100 plus VAT for IPA member agencies and £120 plus VAT for an IPA member’s guest. Please contact tanya@ipa.co.uk if you wish to invite a guest.

For more information on the IPA’s Finance Conference click here.