On the “FREE”ness of Social Media Marketing
19 Aug
I owe the inspiration of this post to the following quotes:
“To leverage Twitter to its strengths for maintaining more personal dialogs, well-educated personnel need not just monitor the Twitter presence, but actively engage. Getting value out of the free Twitter service is an investment in itself.” from Bryce Marshall at imediaconnection.com:
And “How many participants you have on your social media properties is far less important than how you interact with them.” from Larry Weintraub at imediaconnection.com.
Small businesses and corporations alike are rushing to the social media space like wildfire. Everyone knows they need to be there, but as is common in marketing, they don’t know why, how or what to do with it once they are there.
It is a common misconception that social media is the cheapest current marketing form, largely because it is free to open and maintain an account. But utilizing it as a marketing medium takes a lot more than just opening an account and having any hack make sporadic updates.
The problem lies in the fact that in order to engage social media in a manner that will generate real results, it needs a solid strategy, a plan of action that effectively and consistently employs this strategy, and the time required to implement this plan. Because so many people are misinformed about the actual effort and time involved in proper planning and implementation, we are about to have loads of disappointed business owners claiming its all a scam and doesn’t do anything for business (actually this is already being echoed by many). Though there are a growing handful of people using Twitter for spam and scams, this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work very well for many other companies.
There are a number of companies that have had great success utilizing Twitter as a marketing medium (Dell, Zappos and Whoel Foods, to name a few) – and what most of these companies recognize is that social media needs to be used as a tool to facilitate 2-way conversations and build relationships, not talk at people and continue to blast them with the same marketing messages they see everywhere else. Those who use it as a one-sided stage for simply broadcasting their message – unless the company happens to have extremely valuable content that people are choosing to opt-in to receive – are destined to fail. Noone likes to be talked at, and consumers are starting to make clear to companies that no longer will the one-sided marketing work to win their business. This is a new era of marketing – and those who don’t make a change real soon will quickly fall behind the pack as other companies step up and take the lead.
Like the local pizza place down the street that produces the same print piece and sends to the same homes every month and then wonders why they never gets any new customers, and so decides print isn’t worth the money anymore, one has to understand the medium and its delivery mechanism before they can understand what it is capable of and how to properly utilize it as a marketing tool.
EAVB_JRKGLELEYS
