Manifesto
How attention flows on the web
Here’s an example of how agencies still want their clients to believe notions that are completely and obviously at odds with reality.
The statement above is presented with no supporting evidence. ‘Micro-sites’ have been de rigeur for years now. It’s what agencies always do because of the associated planning, design, build and marketing fees. They also don’t work, appearing and disappearing as campaigns start and end, failing to sustain interest.
For more on this read my award-winning post about Coca-Cola’s attempt to build a ‘hub’, with supporting data, and in particular do refer to the comments.
These places are the antithesis of a hub. Consider the following:
“Snickers and Pepsi have both created successful content hubs, where their communities can go to add, discover, and share content.”
‘Success’ is undefined in this context. The only example linked to in the piece quoted above is the Snickers website. You should visit it, then ask yourself:
Why would I go back?
Would I share anything on this site with my friends?
Where on earth is the ‘community’?
We know the answer and we don’t have to guess. Using a service such as Ahrefs we can see what content on this domain is linked to or shared.
In the post the author suggests that due to social platforms forcing ‘brands’ to spend money to reach people then brands must ‘own’ their ‘content’ on their own ‘hub’. He then goes on to suggest the challenge is then getting people to visit these hubs… by using paid media such as that provided by Google, Facebook and Twitter.
Check out the Snickers Twitter account. This is not a platform that restricts ‘organic reach’. 203,000 followers yet the favourites and retweets barely ever top double figures.
A couple of years back I took apart a previous presentation by We Are Social about work performed for Jaguar you can read here. They’d claimed that Jaguar was the third most engaged with UK brand on Facebook. I pointed out that most popular city for ‘fans’ of the Page was New Delhi and wondered how many cars Jaguar sold there annually.
Note that the author states “the days of vast organic reach on Facebook and other social channels are over”. This is pure revisionism. If you look at the Jaguar Page from back then around 3% of followers interacted in some way Facebook measured. This is really low. It’s even lower now, 0.6% at time of writing, but to claim ‘vast organic reach’ is yet another false narrative.
The author cites “creating genuine dialogue” as a goal but no evidence of this is presented because none exists. Furthermore I would challenge the statement “the aim of marketers still needs to be on facilitating conversations”. No client hires me to ‘facilitate conversations’. They hire me to increase sales. Lose sight of that and you’re lost in the fog of proxy measures of success.