 Alex Baxter Frank Cutitta Paul DeBraccio Judy Franks Dave Hendricks Marko Hurst Jay Lauf Daniel Lagani Karen Macumber Diane Salvatore Ken Sonenclar Domenic Venuto Marta Wohrle Matthew Yorke |
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By Frank Cutitta
While speaking recently with Fern, one of my nutty, crunchy clients, it struck me that many marketers are devotees of the Zen Buddhist ritual of Zazen. This ritual includes claims that sound occurs even if only one hand is clapping. Those of us who grew up in Jersey have a hard time getting this. What’s more puzzling is that Zazen has actually infiltrated social media strategy.
In recently launching a new Social Intensity Audit service, we’ve been approached by a number of major IT marketers to do a “lab test” on their social media content. We’re always happy for new business in a tight economy but we feel obliged to ask exactly how they define “social media content.” Inevitably the answer is that they want us to track the volume of posts and intensity of conversations on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the community section of their corporate Web site. They then want us to report back on the “buzz” for their brand and products.
This is how I got in trouble with Fern. My answer to the content lab test request is that auditing social media without doing so in context with a company’s traditional media is like clapping with one hand. Good for Zazen, bad for business.
Many digital marketers have convinced themselves that social media lives as an isolated celestial plane. We hear over and over again that it’s the conversation that counts. But the conversation is only one hand, and in some cases it’s not any hands.
Take a close look at your Twitter feeds to see the proportion that have tiny.urls or bit.lys attached. Then ask yourself where these links take the reader. While one can argue how to define contemporary social content, most of these links take us to relatively “traditional” media formats (i.e., blogs, white papers, press releases, webcasts, news articles, research reports, videos, etc). Few if any take us to other conversations, Twitter feeds or Facebook posts. Most take us back to completely non-social content.
The problem is that most marketers are so satisfied to have a social media strategy of any kind, the underlying content that serves as the foundation for that strategy becomes secondary.
What strategy there may be is typically bipolar. On one “hand” the social media posts are 140-character sound bites with little or no real meaning or launching-off point for the prospect. Or on the other hand the posts are so shamelessly commercial that the prospect will never return after the first distasteful engagement with an onerous registration form guarding a sales brochure.
Social media is a clapping with both hands experience. Unless your brand is an incredibly powerful conversationalist (name one!), intimate social repartee must be aligned to highly optimized traditional content. Anything less is what we refer to as a “random act of content,” or the sound of one hand clapping.
It’s interesting to note that when engaging in a social media platform, most prospects actually expect to be taken back to the traditional. More interesting is that their expectations are pretty low. Our research shows that technology prospects only expect 40% of the content they receive to be aligned to any given stage of their purchase process. They actually expect 60% of the content to be off target.
But here’s why you shouldn’t be satisfied with mediocrity: Buyers also tell us that every percentage point closer to optimized content when they need it provides an exponential increase in the chances of being added to the consideration and final purchase lists.
From a Zen point of view, as the alignment of conversational and traditional content increases to meet a heightened stage of buyer enlightenment, the clapping gets louder and louder.
As content experts in our respective industries, this alignment process presents the golden opportunity for media professionals looking to delve deeper into the strategies (and the ever-growing budgets) of clients and agencies who are negotiating the social media maze.
Minsider columnist Frank Cutitta is general manager of IDG Connect and former CEO of the International Advertising Association. He can be reached at frank_cutitta@idgconnect.com and is analyzing your company’s bit.ly’s on Twitter at www.twitter.com/fcutitta.
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Liam & John - My apologies if the reference to Zen and zazen was considered politically incorrect, crass or ill informed. It was strictly meant as a metaphor or B2B "koan" for social media.
At the risk of debating the validity of the social media connection with Zen Buddhism I can only point you to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kōan
"A kōan (pronounced /ˈkoʊ.ɑːn/; Chinese: 公案; pinyin: gōng-àn; Korean: gong'an; Vietnamese: công án) is a story, dialogue, question, or statement in the history and lore of Zen Buddhism, generally containing aspects that are inaccessible to rational understanding, yet may be accessible to intuition. A famous kōan is: "Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?" (oral tradition attributed to Hakuin Ekaku, 1686-1769, considered a reviver of the kōan tradition in Japan)."
It would be difficult to disagree that many aspects of social and conversational media are "inaccessible to rational understanding, yet may be accessible to intuition".
Zazen does not claim that clapping with one hand makes a sound. Zazen is a practice of sitting; practically speaking, it doesn’t claim anything at all.
The koan you cite does not claim that clapping with one hand makes a sound. The koan asks what the sound is, but this is a question, not a statement. There might be a sound; there might not be. Koans, as the definition you cite points out, do not admit to pat or rational answers. That’s not their purpose.
It would be atypical of Zen (and of Buddhism in general) to posit something as real that could not be directly experienced and understood. Reality isn’t a trick of the mind; rather, reality is the mind freed from (its usual) tricks.
In your comment above, you associate zazen with useful, intuitive understanding, but in your post your treatment of zazen is disparaging. Zazen is your metaphor for the incomplete understanding of your “nutty” clients who are too focused on social media buzz. The “many marketers” whose misunderstand social media and think it lives on a “celestial plane” are “devotees of the Zen Buddhist ritual of Zazen,” in contrast to you, the sensible, grounded guy from New Jersey, who doesn’t “get” the half-cocked take on things and is here to explain the big picture. Understanding things incompletely—or misunderstanding them—is called “good for Zazen, bad for business.” Zazen, evidently, is a la-la-land that’s bad for the bottom line. Where marketing is concerned, it’s involved in a debilitating cognitive error.
I’m not sure why zazen deserves this treatment, even metaphorically, even in a metaphor that is sloppy with its terms. If you had some evidence that practitioners of zazen developed intuitive understanding that proved counterproductive for business, that would be apt and interesting (and worthy of a blog post of its own), but nothing of the sort is offered here. Instead, zazen, a centuries-old practice of honing the mind, appears as a convenient whipping boy for misguided thinking about marketing and media. This treatment seems, at best, arbitrary and distracting, and at worst, glibly Orientalist (“devotees,” “ritual,” “clapping,” “nutty” vs. the level-headed of a guy from the West).
Which, I think, is a shame, because your points about social media are interesting and useful. Clients do need to consider the larger context of social media, including traditional content and, I would add, all other brand experiences. Aligning social media content with traditional content tuned to distinct phases of a purchase cycle makes good sense.
Now, onto a new week. Here’s hoping that both of us will please our clients so thoroughly that they’ll be tempted to raise clasped hands in a sign of victory.