Death of the social media guru

It is the only context in which it is meant to be used, a title earned through many years of learned devotion. A fledgling 7 years would certainly not suffice to reach such a status, yet it is deemed more than enough for the most prevalent of the modern-day variety: The Social Media Guru.

Experimenting with social media

Social media has, quite simply, not been around long enough yet for anyone to have cracked it. It's been a process of experimentation at best with largely mixed results, to put it kindly. And the prevalence of the most recent buzz, Native Advertising, proves that even the very creators of social media are still wrestling with how it might or should unfold.

Native advertising, in its simplest form, are ads on a website that look or behave like the site's content, such as sponsored posts or promoted tweets, in the hope that visitors will click through to links of the advertisers' product or service.

It is about finding a content environment that your audience chooses to interact with and placing short segments into that content which contains information on products or services you think they might find useful.

As the excellent @AdContrarian points out, however, that logic sounds an awful lot like something we've seen before. In fact, it is predicated on the notion of traditional advertising methods for television and radio spots and printed advertorials.

What people want from social media

So, after years of varying attempts to try to monetise social media advertising, the inventors and biggest players themselves (Facebook & Twitter) have been forced to fall back onto traditional advertising approaches. Alarm bells. If they haven't figured this out yet, what chance do the rest of us have for effectively managing social media advertising spend on behalf of our clients?

And the numbers are telling. Click-through rates for social media are abysmal, some estimated at as low as 5 in 10,000 at a conservative measure. People simply cannot find the inclination to move their mouse 2cms up, left or right and click one finger, no matter how pretty or witty your native, display or banner ads are. It's not working. Regardless of what the 'gurus' might say.

So what do people want from social media when it comes to brands? If someone in your office at this point mentions anything about "conversations", fire them.

People do not want conversations, relationships or interactions with brands online - just like they don't want them in the flesh. They want those things with their real-life friends, colleagues and acquaintances. What they want from brands is free stuff and discounts. That is not a phenomenon created by social media. That is a phenomenon that has been in evidence since the dawn of time.

Sure, every brand, fan page and Twitter account will have their share of crazed 'fan-boys', but as Byron Sharp's insightful "How Brands Grow" proves through statistics, more than half of a brand's sales comes from the bottom 80% of its customers.

Back to advertising

So what is the purpose of social media? That's just it, it needs to have a purpose. I think we will see social media move away from an emphasis of selling and back to the heart of advertising - projecting personality and brand values.

Dove's 'Real Beauty Sketches' recently became the most watched advert in viral video history. Why? Because it speaks to what the Dove brand is about - improving self-esteem in women.

Coke has achieved consistent online success and this is evident once more through the latest video on India-Pakistan Unity. Why? Because Coke is wholly about optimism and brings this to life through social media in a way that is genuine, unique and effective.

Social media provides a great platform to be anything your brand wants to be: cheeky, serious, consumer-facing, tongue-in-cheek but most of all, unique and memorable. Maybe that'll even be enough for a consumer in a brick-n-mortar store, choosing real-life products (how 95% of retail shopping is still done) - to remember and choose yours.

That's a success in any advertiser's book. So as Facebook and Twitter turn back to traditional roots in their strategies, shouldn't we be doing the same?