A Prejudiced View: Heard during a meeting at Facebook HQ

In 2014, I visited Facebook HQ in Menlo Park, California for the first time. Like most, a lot of things on the day left a lasting impression on me, the state-of-the-art facilities, the endless food options, the exceptional work environment and the hilarious sign outside of Mark Zuckerberg’s glass office that read “Please Do Not Photograph the Animals”.

But most importantly, someone would say something to me that day that would ring in my ear for years to come…

At the time I was the Social Media Manager of a large government organization and was visiting to have a meeting with the Facebook & Instagram teams that helped our business. It was in the middle of a discussion in which I was babbling about “social media this, and social media that...” that the most senior manager present from the Facebook team interjected and said in no uncertain terms:

“Mike, you know what your biggest challenge is? It’s your job title”.

To my intrigued reaction, he went on to elaborate further. He said that the word “social media” in both my title and the name of the function I belonged to was a self-applied limitation to the potential of what channels like Facebook and Instagram can achieve for the business. The term “social media” in his explanation evoked some reactive feelings and thought patterns, in the minds of stakeholders, that are mostly associated with one’s personal use of social media, as opposed of thinking about it as a business channel. Once the personal view of social is introduced, it creates prejudice, and is likely to compromise judgment on strategy and objectives of the channel from a business point of view. His comments were more symbolic than literal, but I got the point.

This may sound a bit too philosophical, so let me break it down...

We all use social media personally. Narcissism and fascination with self-display are inherent habits and natural outcomes of the widespread of social media in different forms over the past 20 odd years. That is why, when we post something on our Facebook or Instagram, we usually measure its value by the amount of engagement (likes, shares, comments) it receives. Most people dream of going viral.

On the other hand, from a business point of view, these measures of success such as likes, shares and comments are not remotely satisfactory on their own if platforms like Facebook and Instagram are to be a sustainable aspect of a business’s marketing strategy and investment. Hence, the suggestion of not to think of them exclusively as “social media”, but rather as marketing and advertising channels.

If we thought of social media for a business the way we think of it from a personal perspective, we run the risk of setting ourselves, and our egos, a trap, and we tend to measure results and outcomes from an uninformed prejudiced point of view.

I know someone who always says; "there's a lot of marketing out there, some for the ego and some for the pocket, but when I look at social, there's too much of it that's for the go at the moment". Bang on!

For years, what that senior manager at Facebook told me stuck with me and rang in my ears in the middle of meetings, pitches, proposals, and negotiations. I particularly remember it when I’m talking to marketers, from juniors to CMOs, and they say something like “we posted this on social and it did really well”. My response is usually: what is ‘really well’? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s a post that had a few hundred likes, got more comments than usual or just had a few extra shares. That’s the prejudiced view that businesses need to control. That’s a highly effective marketing channel being undermined by the trap we set ourselves in the first place by not setting the right objectives and asking the right questions.

Instead, “really well” needs to mean something like a 5:1 Return on Ad Spend, or a percentage decrease in cost per Acquisition, or an increase in database size, and so on. A proper return on investment.

It gets worse. This prejudiced view of social media not only impacts what a business measures but the resources and investment it allocates for the channel. Ever seen a business who added social media duties to the receptionist, assigned it to a grad or put the intern onto it? Yes, you have. Worse, ever seen a business owner put their son/daughter on social media duty because, well, “they’re always on Facebook anyway”? Of course, you have, and so have I, a thousand times.

The reality is that the ROI conversation has been so under-rated when it comes to social media, especially for small businesses. This has mainly been an outcome of an unfairly limited view of the channel’s potential and its ability to deliver tangible business results. Don’t get me wrong, there are many out there who are doing it right, but they are not remotely an overwhelming majority. Not by any stretch.

Even Facebook thinks this is true and has taken various measures over the years to ensure its advertisers are thinking of the channel more from an ROI perspective, rather than just as a traditional exposure medium. These measures include a multitude of conversion-centric ad products, sophisticated analytics and various tracking tools.

In the past, I’ve helped agencies become Facebook Preferred Marketing Partners – an accreditation ad agencies receives for processing a certain amount of ad spend, usually seven figures worth. One of the things I’ve observed is that Facebook doesn’t just care about how much you spend, but how you spend it. A mandatory requirement for claiming such accreditation is to allocate a minimum of 80% of your ad spend against “direct response objectives”. This means conversion optimized ads targeting Sales, Leads, Website Visits etc. rather than Reach, Likes and Followers.

Last year alone, Facebook generated $69.66 billion USD in advertising revenue, but what I’d like to know is; how much of that was against direct response objectives? How much of it was wasted against soft objectives akin to the personal use of social media, rather than that of a business? How much of it was tracked, attributed, and measured properly against ROI objectives that made it all the way to balance sheet and not just to the monthly “social media report”?

As a marketing and advertising community, it is our job, whether clients or agencies to ask these questions, and set the parameters in place from the outset for every project and every campaign that touches social media to have tangible business objectives at its core. An effective social media strategy is not about what a business can achieve on social media, but what social media can achieve for the business.

I think back to that fellow I met at Facebook and can’t help but think that he had, unbeknownst to him, rewired my brain entirely, and fundamentally changed my view of social media as well as marketing in general. If I ever meet him again in the future, I’ll be sure to shake his hand.