Shama Haider is a social media marketing OG. At the University of Texas at Austin, she wrote her thesis on Twitter, when it had 2,000 users. She attended the first interactive event at SXSW. In interviews, Shama says that social media marketing is one of the few things she's good at. You don't have to talk to her for long to know that's not true. She's the CEO of Zen Media, a B2B marketing consultancy she founded in 2008 and now has 65 employees. She's a mom and, as they say in Boston, “very smart.” (The interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
question: Tell us about when you first started.
answer: It was a crazy time in the early days of social media and technology, and I was like, “This is going to change the world,” and, you know, not a lot of people agreed with me, but here we are.
I was trying to get a job at a top consulting firm and I said social media was the future, and they all looked at me like I was crazy, some of them outright saying so, and they said, “This is just a fad, and I don't think it's going to change the way we do things.”
Larger companies were interested, but the Great Recession happened in 2009, and the hiring didn't happen. We realized that small businesses had a willingness and hunger to experiment. They said, “If this will bring us customers, let's give it a try.”
So I put up my own sign. I didn't know anything about entrepreneurship. Absolutely nothing. All I knew was that I understood this new world of marketing. I understood it in my bones. Being a digital native helped a lot. And also, that I wasn't in the fray like a lot of people in traditional media were at the time. My mindset was, I'm the new guy, and I want to do whatever works. That really helped me.
But I didn't know anything about starting a company. I still remember one time a customer asked me, “What are your net terms?” I said, “Wait a minute,” and turned to the older VP and asked, “What do you mean by net terms?” He said, “When do you want to get paid?” I said, “Right now?” He said, “What?”
question: When you started your business, what was the main problem your clients wanted to solve?
answer: Initially, the problem we were solving for our clients with social media was how to get customers. That's what we still do today, just on a different scale. How do we break through the noise? How do we get people to know we exist? Real marketing is about whether people know who you are, what you do, and whether they choose you or your competitor.
question: What do you like about social media marketing?
answer: I'm good at it. There are only a few things I'm good at, Constantine. This is just one of a very short list.
question: I don't believe it, but that's okay.
answer: I have an aptitude for it and have trained a lot to be good at it.
And the other reason is that to me, work has always been sacred. I grew up in an immigrant family, and that's what I was taught. One of the things that really bothers me about our culture today is that it's cool to belittle work. Or to make fun of work. We're comfortable making fun of the work that goes into putting food on the table.
That's really frustrating because that's not how I was raised. My husband and I are both entrepreneurs, and we both have a lot of respect for the system that allows us to put food on the table, to pay for soccer lessons, to be able to have people that are financially stable, to have a company that allows us to employ people and have that for them. At the end of the day, being able to provide more opportunities for people is what motivates me.
question: How has social media changed since you started?
answer: One big change is that social media has gone from being very public to being very private. On Facebook, for example, you post a photo and everyone “likes” it and comments on it. Now, a lot of this happens behind the scenes. This is the rise of “dark social,” a term that journalist Alexis Madrigal coined in 2012 for The Atlantic. I think he was a bit ahead of his time. Now, people consume publicly, but share privately. The number one app for everyone is messaging.
From a marketing perspective, it's a matter of understanding that consumption is engagement. How many people read your piece and leave a comment? Zero. Absolutely not. But how many people read your piece? And how many share it with their teams in Zoom conversations, Slack channels, Google Meet, email? Think about how much you consume in a day as a consumer. How much are you engaged with? For most of us, it's tiny.
I probably only publicly touch 2% of what I consume and privately share 20% of what I consume. The other 80% I do neither.
From a marketer's perspective, you might be thinking, “I used to get a lot of likes and comments, what happened?” It's not about the platform. It's not about the content. It's just about humans and how we view social media now. The rise of dark social has been a big topic on social media, but I don't think people fully understand or embrace it.
question: How do you adapt to that?
The community is big. Reddit is big. Discord is big. You have to learn to adapt. It's the same great content that people used to want to share. You have to know that you're going to lose access to those conversations.
question: What has changed in marketing?
question: The last 15 years have led to an obsession with big data, which is the saddest thing, because someone made a stupid statement saying, “Only half of your advertising spend works. I don't know which half doesn't,” and the entire marketing industry decided that that was the problem they needed to solve. The question is not whether it's more effective, but whether it can be measured.
The problem is, the more meaningful something is, the harder it is to measure. So, on one side of the scale of meaningfulness, there's a mother's love. Measure that on a quantitative scale. OK? Good luck. And then there's spam ad clicks. Very easy to measure. It's completely meaningless. It's just a scam. I mean, it's just spam.
How do we get to that middle part that makes sense? We have some measure of it, but we know it's never going to be 100% measured, and we're not aiming to be 100% measured because the closer we get to that scale, the less meaningful it becomes.
question: I like the phrase “data delusion.” Can you elaborate on that?
answer: Look at who's made the most money. Google. Microsoft. All of these big companies. We've all been sold the promise, “We'll tell you what works.” That's a lie, because all they can tell you is what's efficient. They can't tell you what works. They can't tell you. There's a big difference.
Instead of using common sense and doing the right marketing, the right advertising, the right storytelling, people have thought, “At least I know where it is, so I'll just keep throwing money at it,” because of the data illusion that we're in.
I'm not saying data isn't important, but instead of putting it in context and appreciating its role, we're kind of bowing down to the data gods, and if it's not measurable, we're not going to invest in it, we're not going to act on it.
