“I wish there was just this one-stop tool for all things social.”
“It would be great if we had one tool that would do everything.”
“There is no one good tool.”
Talk to the head of social media at any Fortune 500 company, and you’re likely to hear comments like these. It’s not that social media professionals are lacking software options: on the contrary, “there are a hundred different solutions for aggregating discussion, tweets, et cetera,” Miguel Moreno Toscano told me.
Toscano is marketing communications director at Coca-Cola, and he’s one of half a dozen enterprise social media leaders I’ve spoken with in recent months, beginning with several at the annual SXSW conference. In those conversations, one concern was repeated by all: the embarrassment of riches (in terms of social media software options) has given marketing, communications and customer relations pros a major integration headache.
“We are almost having tool fatigue,” said Jay Bartlett, vice president of global social marketing for Xerox. “These tools are developed in a very fragmented way; I wish there were some integration. You can see how they could work together, but they are all very niche-y.”
“I’m using one tool for monitoring and listening, another for monitoring and reporting, another for engagement,” said Carla Saavedra Kochalski, manager of social media and digital for Samsung Mobile USA. “Then I’ve got one for case management, one for content management and another one for reporting. I wish those companies would focus on making a more cohesive ecosystem.”
Nor is the fragmentation problem limited to the tools: the ecosystem of social media platforms is fragmented, too, and growing more so.
“The critical mass of consumers is on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, but there is a whole other range of networks with different types of content, and it a huge challenge for brands to engage there, too.” Coke’s Moreno said. “The long tail of networks is starting to be very important.”
“The question is, how do you let customers get the content they want from you in the place where they want it?” asked Sam Weston, vice president of communications for Huge, a digital agency. “Companies have embraced Facebook and Twitter, but now Facebook and Twitter own those relationships instead of the business itself. Now, if you want to get your post to the people who want the brand then you have to pay premiums to do it. Ideally you are able to get this content to individuals, but it’s about how efficiently you can get your content to the people who follow your brand.”
If companies are experiencing so much pain from the proliferation of social tools and platforms, why is there no one-stop option that can deliver the full range of functionality required? After all, we’re now a full decade into the social media revolution: there’s an established market for social solutions, particularly those that solve pain points for corporate CMOs.
Andy Levey, senior manager of new media and analytics at Cirque de Soleil, sees integration just over the horizon. “We’re starting to see those all-in-one tools that are more encompassing,” he told me. “I know that is the path we are going down.”
Big players like Salesforce and Oracle are indeed beginning to roll out software tools that offer something closer to one-stop shopping. For companies that have gradually consolidated their purchases of other kinds of enterprise software needs like enterprise resource planning (ERP) and database systems it may feel intuitive to expect a similar consolidation in social media purchasing.
But there are good reasons to doubt that the proliferation of social media software and platforms will give way to integration. Among them:
Low barriers to entry: If I want to sell you my new financial software platform, I’ve got to dummy up some data for that demo, with enough quantity to convince you that I can support an enterprise of your magnitude. But with a social platform, I can aggregate much of your social data as easily as you can, simply by pulling in your social mentions across platforms. That makes it easy for me to show you exactly how my platform will work in tracking your social universe…and significantly reduces the competitive barriers to later entry.
Ease of migration: Barrier to migration is similarly low. Yes, there are always costs associated with changing platforms (especially in terms of the learning curve of your employees). But unlike ERP or database migration, changing social platforms often requires no data migration, but simply the effort to move a bunch of keyword searches and social network authentications.
Fragmented needs: Social media tools are fragmented in part because businesses’ social media needs are fragmented. You’ve got marketing people trying to push out campaigns, customer relations people trying to say on top of customer issues, business analysts trying to gather appropriate metrics, human resources teams trying to recruit off of social…and that’s just the tip of the social iceberg. Any integrated tool is likely to represent an imperfect compromise between these units’ very different needs.
Consumer demand: You don’t need your customers’ buy-in to push different divisions of your company onto the same ERP system. But your customers, not your staff, decide which social networks they’ll use…and you’ll have to go there to meet them. So far, consumers (goaded by the tech and business press) seem prepared to embrace at least one new social platform a year (this year, it’s Vine…last year, it was Pinterest). Enterprise social media managers must prepare to do the same.
“Startup” mentality: The reliable emergence of a new platform or two each year means that working in social media will continue to attract people who have not just a tolerance for novelty, but a hunger for it. These are the kind of people who will happily sign up for a dozen new social web platforms or services each month, just to see what they’re about (I’ll raise my hand if you will). Toscano called this a “startup mentality” — a willingness to “use a combination of tools, and use new tools as they pop up.”
So for that desired “integrated solution” to take hold, it has to undertake continuous and aggressive innovation so that it can support each major new social network and compete with newly emergent social tools. Tall task, to say the least. While there will surely be enterprise clients who value the efficiencies of integration over the features offered by having just the right tool for each job, the companies and professionals who have clear and high expectations for their social media performance will continue to explore and adopt the most effective platforms and services. Since these are likely to be the companies who will be most innovative and effective in their use of social media, expect their example — including their fragmented toolkit — to be the imperfect best practice in social media.
Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/samuel/2013/06/five-reasons-social-media-wont.html
