What social media can’t tell you
Posted on 29. Jul, 2009 by Josh in Bike industry, New Media, Sponsors, Sports Business
Note: Unless something irresistible comes up, this will be my last post about social media for a little while. I just feel like talking about other things.
Robert Gourley of Mojave Interactive recently posted this analysis of social media performance during the Tour de France for Trek, Specialized, Cannondale, and Cervélo. He also gave this insightful interview on my buddy Rick Vosper’s blog. I have a different interpretation of the numbers, which I’ll get to in a minute. In short, Mojave found that:
… both Trek and Specialized use Social Media well. Specialized edges over Trek in some key areas, like integration and user engagement. Cervélo has great organic buzz, despite having a smaller corporate Social Media strategy.
Although Technorati paints the opposite picture over the last 30 days, I don’t dispute Mojave’s numbers. Here’s what Gourley told Vosper and I believe this is true.
We’re partnered with a bunch of different tracking tools analytics companies. But it turns out none of those tools really give you a complete picture. We’re a small group, and we have our own internal analysts, and we use them to develop a much more complete picture of what’s going on, and that’s how we put the Tour comparison together.
The problem
What the study fails to address is that Cervélo is the title sponsor of Cervélo TestTeam, whereas Trek, Specialized, and Cannondale are the bike sponsors of the Astana, Saxo Bank, and Liquigas teams. So when a blogger talks about Thor Hushovd or Carlos Sastre, Cervélo gets a mention by default. But when a blogger talks about Lance Armstrong or Alberto Contador, Astana is much more likely to be mentioned than Trek is. Same thing for Fabian Cancellara or Andy Schleck, Saxo Bank, and Specialized. Same thing for Franco Pellizotti or Vincenzo Nibali, Liquigas, and Cannondale.
To be fair, Gourley touches on this in the interview with Rick Vosper. But I think it’s a huge factor that significantly clouds Mojave’s analysis. It becomes more about the merits of Cervélo’s sponsorship strategy than it is about social media marketing. Despite the apparent social media benefits of their approach, Cervélo has stated that they can achieve their goals with the team (e.g. control of the program and rider involvement in product development) without being the title sponsor and they’re looking for a non-cycling brand to come on board
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My point here is not to rip Mojave. They’ve produced an excellent analysis and I don’t doubt its accuracy. Instead, I mean to say that a brand’s social media performance has to be viewed in the context of its overall strategy.
Looking at the four brands in the study, I’d say that Specialized is by far the most active in social media. They’ve put significant online ad campaigns behind I Am Specialized and they’ve recently hired a full-time social media guy. Trek hasn’t been as active, although they’ve made some effort. So has Cannondale according to Gourley. Cervélo, meanwhile, hasn’t done as much socially. They haven’t used Twitter for conversation and their excellent video series at Bartape.net lacks social features.
Why aren’t these relative efforts even remotely reflected in Mojave’s popularity data? Because the numbers reflect more general brand positioning. Let’s take Specialized as a baseline and look factors in the other brands’ performance.
- Cervélo got a boost because they’re a title sponsor and therefore get more mentions (see above).
- Trek is in the same non-title sponsor boat as Specialized but sponsors the most talked-about riders, Lance Armstrong and Alberto Contador.
- Cannondale took a hit because their sponsored team, Liquigas, had a lower profile than Specialized’s Saxo Bank.
Conclusion
Social media is effective for brands. Joining the conversation in the right way with the right content can be a win for marketing, customer service, and sales. Clearly, there’s a huge opportunity, especially to reach a web-savvy consumer base like cyclists.
But there are too many variables – such as everything else that the company does – to compare one brand’s social media marketing to another’s over a short period. Metrics like those used by Mojave are extremely valuable but I think they’re much more useful when tracking single brand’s social media footprint over time. Combine that with internal conversion tracking to get the clearest picture of ROI from social media marketing.
(Photo taken by me at the Tour of California for Zipp. I wish I had time to Photoshop out the blue rope. Oh well.)
Good points, and interesting quantitative data. But if I were the marketing director at Cervelo, I’d be be more concerned about trends that BOTH charts point to: That the positioning/strategic approach that Cervelo is taking with both their sponsorship dollars and brand positioning (“Enjoy. Engineering.”) may be garnering a great deal of chatter, but it is not connecting to consumers on an EMOTIONAL level. The second chart on the Mojave page indicates that Cervelo’s have the LEAST presence, the LEAST consistancy, and most disturbingly the LEAST engagement. That’s scary, because frankly when you’re asking consumers to plunk down over $4K for a recreational device, you have to have their hearts as well as their minds.
The data on both charts leads me to think Cervelo’s are occupying a very rational place. It is logical and performance driven, but the personal aspirational is falling flat — it’s where all the communication activities around “I am Specialized” truly support the Specialized campaign, both above the line, and in social media.
However, these are the boundaries to quantitative information — it leads to conjecture. To really fill in the blanks qualitative information would benefit. Cervelo may want to revisit their position, and build communication activities to support a place that better connects to people on an emotional level.
Excellent points, and the idea of “chatter” is an important one. Qualitative analysis is definitely the key to teasing out engagement from chatter.
[...] within seconds of posting this, saw that Josh also posted another interesting series of points around this topic. Read that too. Written by chris in: General Musings [...]
Josh,
I appreciate your point of view, and having this conversation is exactly what social media is all about.
To clarify, our intent was not to judge one marketing strategy over the other, but to look imperially at the data in social media. Of course, trying to fit human conversations into data-points is not easy nor perfect, but that’s why we’ve spent the last three years building a process that helps brands understand what’s happening in the social space. With our clients, we go into even more detail – and to your point, we do link our results to the client’s ongoing marketing campaigns. Until recently, social media was a black box that was largely unaccountable, but now we can gain insight to see what’s working and what’s not.
I would like to clarify a few points, if I may:
Technorati
Technorati is a great tool for researching blogs, but is not very useful when looking at the larger social space. The results you pulled for Trek, as an example, could cover terms such as “Star Trek, trek Nepal, trekking the Himalayas” and Specialized, keyword such as “Specialized hardware, specialized content, etc”.
We use multiple tools that track across the entire social space; blogs, video sharing sites, forums, micro-blogs, and social networks; getting the data is not the hard part. We actually spent a lot of time creating our models to filter terms like “Star Trek” or “specialized software” from the results.
Cervelo as team sponsor
We are aware of this factor, but our goal was not to make any judgments on the merits of team sponsorship over other kinds marketing activity. All we looked at was the overall impact each brand had in social media. In our minds, Cervelo is first and foremost a bike manufacturer and the results show that team sponsorship DOES affect brand mentions in conversations. It’s up to the brand managers to decide whether or not the costs are worth the results.
Lance or Schleck brothers vs Cervelo
Yes, Lance is mentioned in social media more than anybody in cycling. One thing to note, however, is that Lance is his own brand, and the link between him and Trek may not be as strong as people think. We didn’t count mentions of Lance as a hit for Trek (unless they were talked about together). Plotting Lance on our chart would probably put him on top of all the brands, if we treated him in the same manner. Such is the power of “Mellow Johnny”.
I won’t argue the fact that you can’t make sweeping judgments on marketing success from a couple of charts. Our post was simply a peek under the hood of cycling and social media that we hoped people would find interesting, not an exhaustive study of the bike industry. With our clients, we spend time looking at the data as a bigger picture, then work with them to set strategies moving forward. The data is only useful when interpreted with the goals and positioning of the organization.
Anyway, I’m happy to “agree to disagree” – I just wanted to make sure you understood our position as well.
thanks,
- R