The Online Articles
A May 5, 2011 posting on ClickZ, “Is Facebook Marketing Behind Macy’s Online Sales Jump,” suggests that that Macy’s efforts to pick up Facebook “likes”, which in 2011 grew to 800,000 was responsible for the 50.3% rise in the Macys.com and Bloomingdales.com monthly sales. The article also mentions that Foursquare and Twitter were used in this campaign.
A May 10, 2011 posting to the Business Insider by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, “Turns Out Social Media Marketing Doesn’t Work” reports on recent research done by Applied Predictive Technologies. The research tested “how much location-based services like Foursquare and Facebook Places can help local businesses.” It found an impact that is just “close to 2%.” (There is no clarity as to what the 2% refers to in the article, e.g., sales, visits, etc.”
Gobry advises Foursquare investors not to panic because the used social media may not have had enough time in the test to work and “Right now, social media marketing and advertising is in the experimental phase. We don’t really know what works and what doesn’t, fumbling in the dark.”
I consider customer service as a critical marketing tool, so another online article that recently caught my eye was by Joe Light and posted on April 25, 2011 to the Wall Street Journal’s website. Titled “With Customer Service, Real Person Trumps Text,” the article reports on a large national survey conducted by American Express to find out how consumers want corporations to provide customer service. The survey found:
- 90% of the respondents wanted customer service handled by live representatives over the telephone
- About 50% like customer service delivered by online chat
- Just a little more than 20% would use social networking sites
- 20% said they would use auto-response phone systems
- 70% said they would spend more with a company that provides good customer service , an increase from the 58% that felt that way last year.
My Take-Aways
I think Gobry hit the nail on its head, but that his remarks apply not just to social media marketing, but substantially to internet marketing in general. What is obvious is that large, savvy corporations with ample resources and large technical staffs such as Macy’s and American Express are still trying to discover what really works and what doesn’t and many of them are still “fumbling in the dark.”
The small merchants that populate so many of our downtowns lack the resources and skilled staffs of the large corporations and the results for them of a failed online marketing campaign are probably more dangerous. Advocating their involvement in unproven and for them complicated and expensive internet ventures is irresponsible. Yet, an internet presence is fast becoming an existential imperative for all merchants, be they large or small! Downtown organizations that want to foster merchant presence on the internet in most cases need to focus on programs that have some real proof of effectiveness and that make merchant involvement less complicated and more affordable. I have always been fond of the Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS) approach to program development and to my mind it applies here. For most small downtown merchants small, affordable, simple to do and easy to maintain steps may be the most viable.
Of course, there are always the exceptions, those marvelous exceptions among the small business operators. At the extreme they are the true innovators that may start in garages, small offices and small shops and create firms like Apple, Microsoft, and Limited Brands. While small business innovators of this high caliber are relatively rare, my experience suggests that there are 5% to 20% of a downtown’s merchants who may be open to some innovation and willing to take some risk. Should downtown organizations focus their efforts on this group or do they need to develop two-tier programs, one level for the more innovative-prone merchants, the other for the average merchant?
N. David Milder
