Organic Social Media: Rest in Peace by Lon Safko

We all know the purpose of marketing is to drive traffic to sales. We use every trick and every channel of communication to convince people to buy our products and services. We use everything from coupons to sweepstakes, from fish food (attractive give-aways) to webinars, from email to Facebook, from newspapers to podcasts. All designed to attract attention, and then get the sale.

Marketing has changed dramatically over the past 10 years with the advent of email, smartphones, photo, audio, and video sharing and, social media.

The number of different tools we have available as marketers today is exponential from what it was a decade ago.

Content Saturation and Throttling

About five years ago, we began to see our marketing become less and less effective. We all know social media and the Internet had all but killed traditional marketing. No one is watching television or listening to the radio anymore. It’s all streaming. Magazines and newspapers are still going out of business at an alarming rate, and direct mail while seeing a very small up-tick, is barely cost-effective.

Over the past several years we all have come to rely heavily on social media marketing and we all have seen Likes, subscribes, page views, and conversion plummet.

Every so-called marketing expert and consultant is trying to convince us that they can increase our sales, teach us to create better videos, and podcasts, and get our emails read. However, none of them discuss the most important factor, how do you get people to see them in the first place.

We all know sales is a numbers game. If you can create the right message that resonates with your prospects and customers, you will sell to X% to any given exposed audience(demographic); however, if the audience is small or nonexistent, then your X% becomes less than 1 resulting in $0 sales.

You can create the most amazing YouTube videos ever but if no one knows how to find them, you’ve wasted your time. You can record killer podcasts, design better landing pages, and posts, but absolutely nothing will happen, because no one knows where they are.

The Internet today is overwhelmed with a glut of free and mostly bad content. This has caused organic marketing to fail. Organic such as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is now nearly worthless. We still have to do it, but we can’t count on it to produce sales. With Google’s Hummingbird, Penguin, and Panda changes in the algorithm, we were forced to flood the Internet with content, both good content and mostly bad. We are drowning in a flood of content.

But Wait, There’s More!

Today’s most important question isn’t “How do you develop better content?” So, stop telling me you are going to solve all my problems with “Five Steps To Better (Whatever)”. That’s not the solution. Not only is the flood of content killing our ability to reach our target audience, the platforms we are using are throttling our ability to reach them!

The following are several examples of our difficulties reaching our prospects and customers.

SEO - (Search Engine Optimization) - Example

Currently, there are over 2 billion websites in the world at the start of 2022. They are all competing with us for eyes. It’s the job of a search engine such as Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc., to index all these sites and every word on every page and determine which are the best pages to return to you, the searcher.

SEO used to be critical because if you did a good job, you could nearly be guaranteed that your page would show up on the first page of Google. The old adage was “Where does a company go to die, the second page of Google!” Today, with this many web sites, and all that content, SEO has been relegated to “Don’t do it to get on the first few pages of Google Results, do it because if you don’t, you will never show up anywhere.” So, you have to spend precious time doing something that you know will likely not help you much.

If you want to have any chance to show up in a SERP (Search Engine Result Page), you still need to follow all the “White Hat” rules for SEO, including freshness, backlinks, keyword usage, load speeds, SSL, navigation, etc.

Today, the most important thing to do with SEO is the make sure your web site is fast and responsive. This means your site looks good on all desktops, tablets, smartphones, and all 43 sizes and I.O.s, and, loads fast. Google penalizes sites that are not responsive and fast loading.

Also, if the visitor can’t navigate your site effectively, rather than struggling with your hamburger menus, they will simply leave, most likely forever. Be sure your images are of minimum size, your links work, the layout looks good, and the navigation menus work properly.

SEM - (Search Engine Marketing), GoogleAdWords, & Pay-Per-Click

Google AdWords has become prohibitively expensive for most small businesses. The competition for the most commonly searched keywords today has become so fierce, that even uncommon words are being charged $4 and up for a single click. And, to make matters worse, the clicks don’t convert. People click but few are buying.

Facebook, A Social Platform Example

Now that all of the social and sharing platforms have us hooked, they are throttling us. About a year ago, I ran a test on Facebook by posting a well-worded post. The following day, of my 1,000+ closest Friends on Facebook, I could only identify 14 people who saw it. When I questioned Facebook, their answer was, “Well, you wouldn’t want all of your 1,000+ friends’ posts all in your feed every day. I could, however; “pay” Facebook and have my posts shown in their feeds.” For free, I was only allowed 14 people to see my post.

Facebook’s Pay-To-Play or pay-per-click cost per click used to be significantly less costly than Google AdWords and others. That’s not necessarily true anymore. While it is still less expensive than AdWords, Its cost has now risen beyond the reach of most small businesses. This is especially true when you take into consideration the conversion rate. Facebook’s conversion rate is worse than Google AdWords.

In addition, I found the people willing to click on a Facebook ad do not want to leave the Facebook environment. They will click to another Facebook page, but not to an outside web site. So, the costly click ends there. The same holds true for all of the other social platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.

Self-Publishing - Example

Another example is self-publishing. It used to be that self-publishing a book would give you credibility and some additional revenue. Not true anymore. On Amazon alone, there are now more than 48,500,000 books, with over 2,700 new books being launched every day. That’’s a new competing book every four minutes. That’s a new book published every 4 minutes!

Here’s an analogy for someone trying to find a book on marketing and accidentally discovering yours. Stand in a second-floor office building window and throw your book down into the parking lot. Now dump 60,000+ books on top of it and wait for your customer to come across it. (You can go to Amazon select “Books” type in “Marketing” and see the results). Maybe your book is specifically on digital marketing – now you only have to dump 30,000 competing books on top of yours for your customer to wade through.

Podcasts - Example

Podcasting has seen a recent surge in popularity. With people as busy as ever, there doesn’t seem to be enough time to carve out an hour to read a book, paper or electronic. More and more people today are using time wisely by listening to their favorite podcaster while running, exercising, and driving in their cars.

The problem again is, the “democratization of technology”, where with all of the tools available today to produce your own professional podcasts, the Internet is flooded with a tsunami of content.

According to recent research there are more than 2 million podcasters with more than 50 million episodes. Apple alone hosts in excess of 550,000 active shows and more than 18.5 million episodes in 100 languages, and those numbers are climbing daily.

Blogging - Example

There are over 600 million blogs in the world today along side over 2 billion web sites. So, a client randomly finding your blog is about 1 in 600 million. Even the odds of winning the Powerball or Mega Millions are roughly 1 in 292.2 million and 1 in 302.5 million, respectively. This means you have twice the chance of winning the lottery as you do having a prospect find your blog.

YouTube

On YouTube, there are more than a billion hours of videos watched every day by 2 billion active users every month with over 30 million daily users with 38 million active channels. I don’t even know how to calculate those odds.

The bottom line for all this is that the platforms we are using still leave us struggling against the tsunami of content. So what can we do?

***IMPORTANT***

***The Two Most Important Questions***

Here are the Two Most Important Questions you need to ask today to overcome content saturation and throttling.

1. How do you build a following, a list, a tribe that you can expose all of your great content to? And…
2. How much money do you have to spend to access not only your own list but fresh sets of eyes as well?

Answer #1:

1. “How do you build a following, a list, a tribe that you can expose all of your great content to?”

The short answer is “innovative marketing”. You have to think differently here and use marketing to increase your marketing reach. Good, targeted, and creative content attracts eyes.

Fusion Marketing

Ten years ago when everyone was still trying to figure out how to use social media, I was telling everyone that soon, social media was going to fail us. Of course, everyone was so excited about social media, few believed me. That’s when I invented “Fusion Marketing”. This is not a sales pitch. I make only about $1 per book. What I do to solve these two problems is use Fusion Marketing to build my list and increase my reach.

Fusion Marketing is a technique that uses ALL of your existing forms of communication whether it’s social, digital, or traditional, to build your marketing, make it more effective, and eventually, sell more products.

Innovation & Creativity

Another important tool that most marketing people might not conscientiously bring to the forefront is innovation & creativity. Remember… Your competitors are all using the same tools you are. You are all equally equipped. The only thing that differentiates you from them is how you apply your creativity.

Think about it. What are the best commercials developed each year? The Super Bowl Commercials, right? (Well, some of them.) And, what sets them aside from all the other commercials we are bombarded with the rest of the year? It’s their innovation and creativity! The more creatively you use the same tools, the better edge you will have over your competition. Michelangelo created “David” with only a common hammer and chisel.

You Still Need To

To win at today’s marketing, you still need to:

• Always Create Good, Targeted, WIIFM Content

Follow my 1.54-Second Rule / 5.0-Second Rule. 1.54 seconds is all the time someone will initially give your post, update, subject line, heading, etc. If you can win them over in the first 1.54 seconds, you then only get 5 more seconds of their attention to convey your message. Make that first sentence count!

• Identify Groups

Identify all the groups on your social platforms that match your product or services demographic. These are your “Watering Holes!” Participate in comments and conversations, be active and noticeable.

• Publish Content

Publish a lot of well targeted content to your blog, web site, and social platforms.

• Examine your analytics. Google Analytics is an invaluable source of great intelligence about how your prospects and customers are thinking and acting. And, be sure to look at your server reports!
• Research the Competition. BuzzSumo and other similar platforms are a great way to check out what your competitors are up to. These services aggregate the social performance of specific sites and content to provide you with an at-a-glance view of what topics are resonating with readers.
• Host Webinars. People love to learn, and webinars are an excellent way to impart your wisdom to your eagerly waiting audience. Combined with an effective social promotion campaign, webinars are a great way to increase traffic to your website. It’s also a one-hour commercial when done correctly.

Answer To Question #2: “How much money do you have to spend to access not only your own list but fresh sets of eyes as well?”

This is the most important question you have to ask. That’s why I saved it for last. We as marketers aren’t thinking this way… yet. We need to change our mindset about digital and social marketing.

The problem is, all of the Internet has become “pay-for-play”, just like Traditional marketing has always been. Today, there is no difference between the two.

We are still looking at digital and social media marketing as it was for the first decade of its existence, free. Of course, there is always the cost of creative, but that has always been true of the more expensive traditional marketing of the past. With blocking, throttling, and pay-per-click digital and social media marketing is no longer, free.

Once the social platform of your choice went public with their I.P.O.s, their focus was no longer on you the member, the focus shifted to the shareholder. It is no longer about the user experience, it’s all about share value. They own us because they own the platforms we need to communicate with our customers. The “Big Box Stores” did to the “Mom & Pops” what social media platforms have done to online marketing. Social platforms hooked us because it was free, we all migrated to them leaving costly traditional marketing behind. Now they are charging dearly for their services. And, we will pay for it as we no longer have a choice.

Conclusion

We have to now view ALL marketing the same:

• What is the cost of the creative?
• What is the cost of implementation?
• What is the cost of monitoring? And…
• What is the budget for advertising, whether it’s newspaper, television, and radio ”impressions”, or digital and social media pay-per-click?

Finally, you have to analyze your R.O.I. Remember the old adage “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” You have to measure your PPC, and your cost per conversion or sale. Otherwise, you don’t know if you are successful or just wasting money.

If you do measure, you will most likely be disappointed with your results. Hang in there. Keep A/B Testing, test different platforms, PPC costs, amount of sales, number of new visitors, friends, connections, viewers, and just like traditional, find the most cost-effective way to communicate with your prospects / customers to generate the maximum amount of revenue. If you do this… You win!

Lon Safko

Author, Speaker, Trainer

www.Safko.com

Lon Safko is a serial innovator, inventor, bestselling author, speaker, trainer, consultant, and is the creator of the “First Computer To Save A Human Life” as coined by Steve Jobs. That computer, along with 18 of Lon’s inventions are part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. along with 30,000 of Lon‘s professional papers. Lon has 14 inventions in the collection of The Computer History Museum in Mountain View. He starred in the first PBS Television Special on social media, “Social Media & You... Communicating In A Digital World”.

Lon developed the world’s first “voice recognition”, “voice synthesizing” and pioneered home automation, with the physically challenged in mind. He is also the designer of the archetypes for the Apple Newton world first PDA, and Microsoft’s“Bob” operating system. He also invented those handy little help-balloon pop-ups “Tool- Tips”! He brought to market the world’s first Virtual Reality Operating System. He also designed the first Artificial Intelligence Nuclear Waste Tracking System for the United States Department of Energy.

Lon has founded over 14 companies, including Paper Models, Inc., based on “Three-Dimensional Internet Advertising” and “Virtual-Electronic-Retailing” (V-E-Tailing) concept for business, promotions, and education for which he was awarded three United States Patents, 60k customers and more than $1m revenue. Lon is a 2017 Pulitzer Prize Nominee and author of multiple innovative bestselling books; “The Social Media Bible,” published by John Wiley & Sons, now in its Third Edition and five languages which hit #1 on Amazon, is the most comprehensive book on social media marketing ever written, and exceeded $2M retail sales.

His bestseller, “The Fusion Marketing Bible”, published by McGraw Hill is published in three languages, hit #3 on Amazon, and the concept is patent pending. The Safko Wheel Marketing Toolkit leverages your existing marketing to make it significantly more effective, while adding to your company’s bottom line, without any additional costs. Lon’s two most recent bestsellers “The Innovative Thinking Bible, Cracking The Creativity Code” is 300 full- color pages of innovative techniques ideas with more than 200 innovative quotes, and 40 brain training exercises and his “A.I. Chat Bots, Unexpected Positive Consequences”, both hit #1 on Amazon. He is the author of 24 books. Lon is also a renowned international speaker, consultant, and trainer, teaching the world’s largest companies the concepts to harness the power of innovative thinking, social media, and digital communications strategies, creating higher productivity and profits.