Quit Touching Me! I Just Want Simplicity!

“Most commentary on social media ignores an obvious truth—that the value of things is largely determined by their rarity.” A smackdown of social media’s best and brightest that appeared in a column in The Economist in December, 2011, titled Too Much Buzz.

Getting a social media strategist, marketer or salesperson to buy that idea might require a hard sell of its own, because it means upending some well-entrenched beliefs. For instance, “It takes an average of seven touches to convert a suspect to a prospect.” Persistent marketing advice that some accept with the same fealty as a family proverb passed from generation to generation. If it takes seven touches to move a prospect just one level in our sales funnels, how many touches to get to Close? Time to hop on Excel and run the numbers! Engage! Nurture! More is more!

But a recent article in Harvard Business Review found touching has a point of diminishing return. An elusive concept for marketers, if you checked your email or spam folder lately. “For many consumers the rising volume of marketing messages isn’t empowering—it’s overwhelming. Rather than pulling customers into the fold, marketers are pushing them away with relentless and ill-conceived efforts to engage.” To paraphrase from Fiddler on the Roof, “Why do we communicate so much if it’s so dangerous?” Tradition!

Marketers have gotten the hint, but have done little about it. Last week, when I freed myself from some unwanted email, the propagators wanted to know why, helpfully offering their own suggestions, including “The email content is irrelevant . . . the emails are too frequent . . . I never requested receiving email from your company.” Check. Check. Check. What part of unsubscribe don’t you understand?

Did I opt in? Or did I just fail to opt out? Who cares? It’s only the tip of the communication-overload iceberg. According to a recent IBM CEO Study, Command & Control Meets Collaboration, “While social media is the least utilized of all customer interaction methods today, it stands to become the number two organizational engagement method within the next five years, a close second to face-to-face interactions.” Heaven help us if marketers keep steadfast to a Seven-Touches, more-is-better mentality. Overloaded? Just wait! We ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

According to the article Too Much Buzz, “the more people tweet, the less attention people will pay to any individual tweet. The more people ‘friend’ even passing acquaintances, the less meaning such connections have. As communication grows ever easier, the important thing is detecting whispers of useful information in a howling hurricane of noise. For speakers, the new world will be expensive.”

Most of this I knew, but it was the word expensive that elevated my pulse rate. With the low-cost ubiquity of social media communications today, it seems a rare word, unsettling in this context.

What’s the solution? Has engagement lost its meaning, watered down from overuse like other marketing buzz-speak, including synergy, proactive, and innovation? Are we intoxicated on metrics, servile to Seven Touches, or seventy, or seven hundred without thinking about the consequences or outcomes? If Seven Touches doesn’t cut it today, what does? Or might?

There are several answers. Start by letting go of the myopia that “there is a continuous linear relationship between the number of interactions and share of wallet”—a finding from a recent Harvard Business School Study, described in an article, Three Myths about What Customers Want. “There’s no correlation between interactions with a customer and the likelihood that he or she will be ‘sticky’ (go through with an intended purchase, purchase again, and recommend).” Instead, the authors believe that “shared values build relationships.”

What does that mean for marketers and salespeople? “Instead of relentlessly demanding more consumer attention, treat the attention you do win as precious,” according to the article, which makes these additional recommendations:

1. Ask yourself “is this campaign . . . going to reduce the cognitive overload consumers feel as they shop my category? If the answer is ‘no’ or ‘not sure,’ go back to the drawing board.”

2. Communicate shared values by promoting a higher purpose to your product or service. Companies like Mini, Pedigree, and Southwest Airlines were mentioned as examples.

3. Get off the brand wagon! “Only 23% of the consumers in our study said they have a relationship with a brand. In the typical consumer’s view of the world, relationships are reserved for friends, family and colleagues.” When they explain why, they say, “‘it’s just a brand, not a member of my family’ . . . Stop bombarding consumers who don’t want a (brand) relationship with your attempts to build one through endless emails or complex loyalty programs.”

Move over Seven Touches. Say hello to Decision Simplicity Index—”the ease with which consumers can gather trustworthy information about a product and confidently and efficiently weigh their purchase options,” according to Harvard Business Review. “Our study found that the best tool for measuring consumer-engagement efforts is the ‘decision simplicity index,’ a gauge of how easy it is for consumers to gather and understand (or navigate) information about a brand, how much they can trust the information they find, and how readily they can weigh their options.” Ahhh. Just reading that makes one feel better!

What’s touching to a marketer might be groping to a prospect. Something to think about before you envision your social media strategy. Keep things simple, and treat the attention you do win as precious. Easy to say, but much, much harder to execute when “conversation” is so cheap. Authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath said it best in a recent FastCompany Magazine article, Why Market Your Company with Stick-on Emotion When You Can Tap the Real Thing?, “When you mean it, convincing customers doesn’t take as much shouting.”