"Brands daze and confuse consumers with Twitter messages"

According to a recent report more than half of Twitter and Facebook user feel overwhelmed by messages from brands. But as Monty Munford finds out, this isn’t the whole story.

Brands have enthusiastically colonised Twitter

Earlier this week I was talking with a friend and discussing how brands use social media. He works for an ecommerce company and told me how bored he was with his agency’s refrains about how many RTs they’d received on Twitter and the number of Likes they had on Facebook.

Without thinking, I blurted out that a ‘monkey could do that’ a comment that surprised my

friend in its violence but made us both laugh (out loud).

It’s easy to think of brands as simian when there is so much evidence of laziness and arrogance when it comes to social as a channel, and a recent report commissioned by Content & Motion would seem to bear this out.

The report, conducted globally among more than 3,000 people, says that 50 per cent of respondents felt overwhelmed by brand messages on social media and 40 per cent believe that everything was ‘too complex’.

In effect customers were not only confused with the messages they were receiving but it was making them angry, especially on Facebook where the interaction is supposedly personal and not corporate.

“Brands are royally screwing up on social media. People use Facebook to talk to people, not to talk to brands. Those brands who continually fail to get this are tomorrow’s spam and will be screened out… forever,” says Roger Warner, Managing Director of Content & Motion, the company behind Majestic Wine’s recent award-winning social campaign.

In many ways this attitude is reminiscent of the mobile industry five years ago. Brands and agencies at the time knew they should be doing something in this new channel but were only using it as an adjunct to their other marketing efforts, not as an integrated element.

Five years on it’s clear that those who incorporated it into a clear strategy are the winners, not least in the mobile ad sector where consolidation means companies are now being sold for hundreds of millions of pounds.

At this point it’s difficult to see how social media is going to make billionaires of anybody. Big retail brands such as Gap and J C Penney have recently and to great fanfare announced the closure of their Facebook stores. Others are scaling back and (some would say wisely) using the mobile marketing channel as a more effective way to grow their revenues.

Jim Dowling is Managing Partner at Cake, an agency that handles social media for the likes of Sony and IKEA who believes that the relatively low-cost of social media campaigns may be to blame for brand and customer disillusion.

“It’s [still] new. One effective way of agencies taking money off clients is to play on the client paranoia that says ‘we must do something’ with this new thing social media. It leaves them vulnerable to a bloke with MacBook walking in waving a Starbucks logo, saying ‘you could be as good as them’. If he's only asking for 20 grand, it's worth a punt,” he says.

Compared to the cost of marketing campaigns across billboards, TV and film this is undoubtedly true. Others, however, think this is a marketing issue, and not purely a social play as Chris Binns, Managing Partner & Head of Planning at Mediacom UK explains.

“People do feel overwhelmed by the tyranny of choice (via social media) and are looking for curators to help them smooth over this complexity. The truth is that marketing has failed these people; it has failed to systematically try and understand what value a given brand can create in someone's life and then act on that in a distinctive manner,” he says.

Others are more succinct. “If social media users even perceive 'brand messages', something's gone wrong. However, if you give them something good such as an amazing film, a laugh or money off, then you might just be rewarded with a Like, or even love,” says Graham Hodge, Head of Branded Content at LBi.

Then there’s the new kid on the social block, Pinterest, yet another social channel that brands (probably) need to engage with, but are already struggling to understand properly.

“Consumers want great content and Pinterest enables them to access that great content and share it too. But while I’m finding out I’m about to be Maid of Honour for my best friend and my friends are liking it, a fashion brand is telling me that they have yet another sale on. Cue social-junk fatigue,” says Heather Healy, Head of Social Media at Stickyeyes.

So, referring back to the monkey analogy at the beginning of this piece, it really is a jungle out there. Lots of noise, lots of messages, lots of media and a lot of money being spent.

Time will tell whether it’s the old adage that if you pay peanuts then you indeed get monkeys, but treating social media as a form of ‘gorilla’ marketing is probably not only a pun too far, it is probably the worst way to treat a customer.