Marketing professionals are feverishly obsessed with “social media marketing.” Social media marketing includes websites where huge numbers of users provide their very own content and create connections and relationships by sharing information and following each other’s updates KKVSH. You can find dozens, and perhaps hundreds of these sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, Spoke, ecademy, Classmates.com, Friendster and Flickr, where people exchange business and personal information, status updates, photographs, videos, news articles, political views, resumes, sexual interests, sports opinions, recipes, health facts and endless levels of other data.
It doesn’t end there. Social media marketing marketing also includes the utilization of blogs, videos, discussion forums and creating ways to permit customers to offer feedback and ratings on the pages of your websites. And a whole lot more. It’s tremendously valuable and some organizations have inked a congrats getting real value out of their social media marketing efforts.
Without a doubt, there are massive marketing benefits offered to marketers who will figure out how to harness the interest and preferences of audiences using social media tools. Everywhere you turn in the marketing world, folks are promoting the worthiness of engaging social media for businesses purposes. I quickly went through a week’s worth of emails to get invitations to go to or view whitepapers, webinars and conferences. Listed here is a sampling of what I’ve received during the last 7 days:
How exactly to Develop a Social Media Strategy That Works For Your Brand
Connecting Constant Contact and Social Media for Internet Marketing Success
Free webinar – Webcasting + Social Media Increase Attendance: An UNLEASH09 Case Study
The Best of Both Worlds: How exactly to Effectively Leverage Social Media Relationships with Real-Time Collaboration Tools
Email Gone Viral: How To Extend Email Reach Through Social Sharing
2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarketing Study
Service in the Time of the Social Customer
Understanding Your Online Reach
Generate a Buzz for Your Business Through Social Media Marketing. Convert that Buzz into Revenue.
5 Killer Methods to Promote Your Facebook Fan Page
Now, I donate to several marketing newsletters, but there are countless others and this list represents just a week of emails — and I probably missed some. Marketing via social media is white hot — the degree of excitement is off the charts.
Social media marketing, however, cannot yet substitute entirely for other, more traditional forms of marketing. Recently, I was on an “expert panel ” at a marketing event and the audience was breathlessly excited about social media. At one point, many of us panelists were asked to comment on the worthiness with this new channel and when it had been my turn, I stated that while I believed social media would someday provide enormous marketing value, I was concerned that individuals were focusing a lot of effort and attention on it. I said that, in my own view, there clearly was probably no huge “first mover advantage” in figuring out how to advertise successfully via social media and that it was important to carry on to utilize email, direct mail, direct sales, telesales, advertising and other channels for now. I said that folks should make sure they stayed current with the thing that was happening in social media and they must be constantly experimenting, but, since no you’ve got yet cracked the code on measuring the results of these new opportunities, it had been important not to obtain distracted from demand generation methods we currently use that we know are effective.
These statements won me a significant number dirty looks and I felt like I’d just announced that I was predicting a major comeback in Yellow Pages advertising. Several people in the audience probably dismissed any notion of hiring my company to accomplish marketing consulting for them and I believe there might have been murmurs of organizing a lynch mob.
The odd thing is that I just am very excited in regards to the potential of social media marketing and we utilize it in my own company everyday. I recently believe that its value as a questionnaire of demand generation isn’t clearly understood yet and, since it’s not to measurable, it flies in the face area of responsible marketing for most companies to devote inordinate levels of resources to it.
We are likely in marketing to assume that new channels make old ones obsolete. Like, when email began to get in popularity and effectiveness, many marketers figured direct mail was returning out. Oddly enough, email marketing, somewhat, became a prey of its success. Spam grew at a faster rate than quality email, and soon customers’ in-boxes were full of so much garbage that system administrators throughout the country became more aggressive at filtering out unwanted email. Unfortunately, a lot of top quality email, much which customers had subscribed to, got caught in spam filters. Deliverability rates of email marketing campaigns dropped precipitously and the entire medium has lost some of its effectiveness. The web result is that direct mail, trusted old fashioned fashioned printed offers sent through the USPS, has made somewhat of a comeback. The death of direct mail was highly exaggerated.
Something similar probably will happen to social media marketing and I believe it’s already started. Like, I get many emails telling me that folks have started to follow along with me on Twitter. These emails contain no details about my new fans, just a cryptic user name, which I will click on if I want to see who it is. What I have discovered is a growing number of these “followers” are providers of porn and are probably signing up to follow along with thousands of unsuspecting Twitter users like me. If this continues unchecked, I will not be considered a Twitter user for long because, as as it happens, I am not actively seeking more pre-approved offers in my own in box. I suspect you’re not, either.
My own company has yet to generate any business from our social media efforts. “Old” methods like telephone calls, emails, speaking at conferences and networking still drive nearly all of our business. When I began Real Results Marketing five and a half years back, I resolved to go through my contacts and either email or telephone people in my own network every month. To this day, all of the business opportunities we uncover happen through this type of work and former colleagues are still the richest source of consulting deals. It’s a real struggle sometimes to produce myself take time out of an active day to produce those calls or send those emails, but they’ve proven so vitally important to the revenue stream that I don’t dare let on these efforts.
I realize that many businesses can’t depend on the founder’s professional network as a principal kind of demand generation. Bigger companies have their very own tried-and-true methods for driving growth. Your company may start using a sales force, telesales personnel, advertising campaigns, sophisticated database marketing initiatives and other tools for creating sales opportunities and I’d argue that the importance of those approaches hasn’t diminished one bit in the face area of social media growth.
Whatever has worked for you historically should still be the principal focus of your sales and marketing. You want to stay plugged directly into social media and, by all means, attend workshops, conferences and seminars on the subject. It may even be considered a smart investment to devote a headcount or two to doing just experimenting with one of these exciting new marketing tools.
Someday, someone will master how to advertise effectively and measurably via social media. Once that occurs, many of us in marketing will have to learn how to adapt those discoveries to the businesses and use them to operate a vehicle sales and profits. Until that time, however, marketers should focus most of their resources on the equipment they understand for them to surpass their primary responsibility of driving profitable, long term growth due to their employers.
I have joked that I have become the leading advocate for “antisocial media marketing.” I’m actually a large supporter of these exciting new channels — not at the cost of marketing techniques which have been proven to work. Nonetheless, my less extreme position on the subject probably means I won’t be voted the most popular speaker at marketing conferences in the future. I’ll just to possess to be certain I stay one step prior to the lynch mob and keep making my networking calls month after month.