Wax Apples and Plastic Oranges

“Social Media is a waste of time. The audience is too small.”

Maybe so. How many people are you talking with?

No, I didn’t ask how many actually talked back with you, how many people were you talking with?

You see, two people having a conversation in a closed room is two people. Two people having a conversation on stage at a conference means there are even more who are witnessing, and are influenced by what they see and hear. The first doesn’t scale – the second might, if you have the right people in the room.

For some reason though, the Powers That Be want to deride the metrics of new media as though they were fruity, and fake. Wax Apples. Yet they ignore the inherent falsehoods and assumptions that lie underneath the surface of their beloved ad equivalents.

Numbers Matter; So Do Units

In a television market with 1-million potential viewers, there’s no way to know exactly how many are consuming your message. There’s polling and surveys and boxes that give you a reasonable estimate of how many sets are on, and how many are properly tuned. But that’s hardly the same as knowing who’s paying attention.

It’s useful to compare forms of mass media against one another, because you’re looking at the same variables and vague assumptions down the chain. Advertise on a radio station in a town of 100,000 – and all things being equal you’ll probably get a tenth the audience of a transmitter in a town of 1-million. It’s that “all things being equal” that trips us up. When there were no other measurements, you’d just follow the assumption that everything scales.

So what about that person who is “only” Tweeting to 600 people, or only has 1,000 fans on Facebook? Let’s break down those numbers a little further.

Peeling the Plastic Orange

Start with that 1,000,000 figure. It sounds impressive, to be sure. A radio station these days can win a time slot with a 4.0 rating – meaning four percent of the potential audience is tuned in. Assuming that’s the case, we’ve got 40,000 people, which is nothing to sneeze at.

But, of those 40,000 how many are actively engaged with what they’re listening to at that moment? How many tuned away when content gave way to commercial interest? How many made a phone call or found something else to do? Most of them, actually.

Those ads are still, to this day an unwelcome interruption. Use fear and humor and shock and parody to make the message as entertaining as you can, and it’s still an interruption. (The only people who have figured out how to beat the system are making infomercials for television, and some are deliberately made god-awful bad to keep you from turning away…)

So now, instead of getting the attention of a city of one million, you’ve got the 40,000 who might have packed the local stadium. Only, you didn’t get all of them in the stadium, you yelled at them as they drove through your parking lot.

Now, of the people you yelled at in the parking lot, how many will actually take the step to come inside? Yes, I know that it takes several exposures to a message for it to really sink in, but let’s compare fruit to fruit. How many actually come inside? 4,000 of them? A tenth?

Conversion Aversion

Alright, now here’s the final piece. You got them inside, but how many of them were ready to act on your message? You got people salivating over the prospect of buying gold jewelry at 50 cents on the dollar, but you caught them in a week where they didn’t have the disposable cash. Somehow, the overall timing wasn’t right.

When you add up all the factors that blunt the impact, then you really weren’t talking with very many people at all. You were talking at them, but not with them.

Meanwhile, in the auditorium where you’re only counting the people who wanted to be there, you still have people who might not be able to act on your message. But they know where they can come back, and they know they’ll be recognized when they do. They weren’t talked with directly, but they know that the answers they overheard could easily apply to them; they know you might as well have been talking with them, because you knew they were listening in.

Using new media, you start with a smaller, more intimate room – but it’s often populated with the people you ended up getting through traditional means at a far greater cost in terms of money and customer interruption and irritation.

Fruit Salad

I have no idea what numbers you’ll need to compute the relative worth for your own purposes. Plug them in, the principle is the same. The dirty truth is you’ve been comparing the potential of one with the practical of the other – and that’s some expensive potential, too.

I’m not advocating the overthrow of traditional advertising and marketing. Just a rethinking of the standards that have crippled certain techniques by saddling them with irrelevant measures.

“Social Media is a waste of time. The audience is too small.”

Oh really? How many people do you have on your Media Relations staff? How many relationships do they manage? You’re talking to a very small and select number of people, but they are influencers.

Then add in these final thoughts:

• Technology has allowed some desirable demographics to slip completely outside any contact with traditional media channels. They get their news online, maybe from NPR, and they don’t watch television.
• There’s a growing group of Millennials who do watch TV, but they stream it commercial-free through Hulu or Netflix. They plug their iPod into the car stereo, and don’t listen to commercial radio. They see advertising as an anachronism to be avoided – a time-stealing product of a different time.

You’re going to need a way to cover these gaps. Fruit Salad to the rescue.