Social media campaigns need more scale and ‘seriousness’, new Warc study argues

Marketers need to apply the same seriousness to planning, budgeting and measuring campaigns with a social media element as is expected from the best traditional campaigns, argues a new report from Warc, the global marketing information service.

Analysis of almost 800 award-winning case studies containing a social media component has established that while brands’ usage of the channel has grown rapidly, many published cases feature campaigns that are small-scale, short-term and lack quantified proof of their commercial effectiveness.

The report, ‘Seriously Social’, aims to stimulate industry debate over the effectiveness of social media for brand communications at a time when Facebook and other sites are focussed on monetising their audiences by winning a greater share of marketing budgets.

It analysed cases with and without a social media element that won awards in a set of major international industry schemes and were published on Warc between January 1, 2011, and September 30, 2012.

More than half of all cases published by Warc during the period involved a social media component. However, compared to the average among all cases on Warc, cases including social media activity were:

• shorter in duration
• involved lower budgets
• less likely to cite a quantified impact on sales, market share or other financial metrics as proof of their effectiveness.
• less likely to cite a quantified impact on sales, market share or other financial metrics as proof of their effectiveness.

In addition, cases featuring social media marginally under-indexed in wins of top ‘Gold’ awards (or their equivalent) in the schemes surveyed.

Overall, cases with a social media element accounted for more than 55% of all cases in the sample, but only 51% of Gold-winning cases.

This under-performance was most marked among low-budget social media campaigns. In the sample studied, cases including social media accounted for 44% of all cases with budgets of US$500,000 or less, but only 28% of Gold awards were won by social campaigns from the sub-US$500,000 budget segment.

Examples of social media deployed as a commercially effective stand-alone platform, without integration with print, TV or other channels, were also rare.

The report – the full title of which is ‘Seriously Social – a casebook of effectiveness trends in social media campaigns’ – argues that brands’ usage of social media does not need to lack either ambition or rigour.

The authors call for marketers to become more serious about their social media activity and to enforce higher standards of planning, strategy and evaluation in social media campaigns.

They write: “Growth in the usage of social media has outpaced growth in objective understanding of how to use it effectively for communications. It is time to bridge the knowledge gap.

“Social media might not always be the right choice for every context. But in order for marketers to extract more value from their investments in this field, it is time for social media to be taken more seriously.”

Based on their analysis of the most effective cases on Warc, the authors argue that success in the social media environment often depends on meeting four main challenges:

1. Adopting a social mind set: This approach focuses planners and insight teams on understanding what type of content will drive social currency within the target audience, and how to provide this content.

2. Social articulation of a clear brand idea: Best practice campaigns embody a clear brand idea. But they also show marketers being relaxed enough to encourage users to add their content and voices to campaign content in order to give an idea genuinely social expression.

3. Scaling up of ambition: Marketers need to review campaign budgets, duration and media integration to ensure these all help to capture the full benefits of their social activity. The best marketers can also distinguish themselves by their commitment to rigorous evaluation of social programmes.

4. Including key elements: Components such as storytelling, calls to participation and taboo-breaking often feature in successful social campaigns. However, it is more important that brands work out which exact elements drive social currency for their audience than look for a rigid creative formula.