Before becoming a pre-eminent customer experience thought leader and expert, Augie Ray was a leader in social media marketing and customer experience insights for brands, such as American Express and Prudential. Frustrated by what he thought was Marketing's persistent belief in social media as an effective marketing tool whereas evidence indicated the opposite, in a 2014 blog post he invoked Upton Sinclair for help in understanding why: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Marketers have biases. Strong ones. Sinclair's aphorism and Augie's recognition about social media marketing are still true today. In 2021, things need to change.

For various reasons, my marketing firm rarely offers social media services anymore. That decision was well supported by recent research: I'm working on a book that deals with social media marketing, so I've waded through more than my share of social media marketing data in the past year.

Julia Roth, director of marketing and communications at the University of Colorado Law School, and I collected and analyzed 50+ reports and studies published on social media marketing, and I interviewed people involved in some of the case studies we uncovered. We also attempted to find updates to each of the studies cited in Augie Ray's previously cited post ("What if Everything You Know About Social Media Marketing Is Wrong?").

We discovered four significant implications for social media marketing going into 2021.

1. Marketers (still) don't do data very well

You've probably heard some version of this before: 67% of executive marketers can't quantitatively measure the impact of their social media marketing, according to the 2020 Duke/Deloitte/American Marketing Association CMO Survey. That percentage balloons to as high as 77% in some B2B sectors.

At the same time, marketers are planning to increase their social media marketing spend. That's a huge disconnect.

2. Let's face it—organic social media marketing rarely works

Avinash Kaushik, one of the most respected analytics thought and practice leaders online, urges brands to stop organic social media marketing posthaste. "Kill all the organic social media activity by your company," he writes. "All of it."

Let me point out a study that jumps out from my own research. "The Value of a Facebook Fan: Does 'Liking' Influence Consumer Behavior?" (a 2017 study published in the Journal of Marketing Research), found strong evidence that consumers like brands they already have a fondness for on social media, and that "the mere act of 'liking' a brand has no positive first order effect on consumer attitudes or purchases."

Social media engagement is a consequence, not a cause, of brand affinity. In fact, two meta-analyses suggest that, "if anything, its effect is detrimental."

3. To build online social groups, unlearn marketing

Rob Siefker, senior director of customer loyalty for Zappos, told me he doesn't look for social media-savvy talent when hiring customer care experts to manage his company's social accounts—because "everyone knows how to use social media." Instead, he looks for people who know what "going above and beyond looks like, because how can you give it if you don't know it?"

Community-builder and researcher Nichole Kelly, who built a social community of over a million people for a debt-relief organization, told me she's spent a career asking and training people to "unlearn marketing" for the purposes of building online communities.

Marketers are driven by conversions. Social groups are driven by community. Knowing the difference is crucial (more on that, next).

4. Move social media out of Marketing and into Customer Care

Marketers need to come to terms with a tough reality: The most thriving social media communities with a marketing bent tend to be built within three narrow contexts.