Social Media Marketing – A “Fair and Balanced” Look

Posted on 13. Dec, 2009 by Robert Rose in Online Marketing, Social Media, Web Analytics, Web Content

So, over the last week, I've been catching up on some reading, and I ran across this article in BusinessWeek called "Beware Social Media Snake Oil".

The article is worth reading – but overall I think it resembles a familiar network's "fair and balanced" coverage (and yes I mean *that* kind of "fair and balanced") of Social Media and its relationship to marketing. It is a highly selective set of criticisms – which basically starts by warning (rather breathlessly) that "there are "hordes of marketing 'experts' promoting the value of wikis, social networks and blogs." But then goes on to basically use the orthodoxy of hucksters to define what Social Media Marketing is. Therefore, the article concludes – in order to flush out the "snake oil salesmen" marketers must "shift the focus from promises to results".

Um, I have news for BusinessWeek. Actually two… Yeah, Duh!

The whole "promise vs. results" thing – is a classic marketing problem that has existed since… well… since marketing began. So news that there are both scrupulous and unscrupulous practitioners of marketing more generally and now Social Media Marketing more specifically – certainly shouldn't be revealing to anyone. This is just part of the growing process for a new marketing tactic.

Let's not forget our history. Remember, in the 1940's there was this brand new marketing technology called television. Advertisers, which had historically sponsored radio shows left the "old media" of radio in such a hurry that in 1950, Variety described it as "the greatest exhibition of mass hysteria in biz annals." And, until 1950 – when Nielsen finally introduced the audience diary – there was really no measurement of television at all.

Well, except for one extraordinarily important exception – sales.

Word of mouth (a la case studies) of success (not hard numbers) were the primary drivers for this new marketing technology to circulate among businesses. There is the well documented story of Hazel Bishop Cosmetics. When they jumped into TV advertising they produced a sales explosion so large, that other advertisers saw that it was worthwhile to reach the ever-expanding television audience.

I don't need to tell you how the story of TV advertising went from there.

There is no doubt that the marketing technology and the ways that people consume content and advertising is shifting again. Is Social Media the new television? I think not. Is it a piece of a much larger sea change in how marketing is being executed. There's no doubt.

One of my greatest marketing mentors (a television executive FWIW) used to have a variation of the Ogilvy saying "if it doesn't sell it's not creative" hanging on his wall. It said: "if it doesn't sell, it's not marketing".

At the end of the BusinessWeek article, the author does, indeed, attempt a bit of perspective. He warns that a "backlash" against the purveyors of bad Social Media advice could, in fact, be like the dot-com boom and convince companies to withdraw investments just as the technology was "on the verge of living up to its promise".

So, as we put together our marketing plans for 2010 – let's truly seek the *real* fair and balanced use of Social Media and our marketing efforts. In fact let's remember these 5 things…

Of course it's not right for every company – and it may not be right for mine.
Of course every type of Social Media tactic (Blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc…) may not be right for my strategy. Some or all of them may be.
Of course our experiments should have results-oriented goals such as increased sales, higher engagement, customer retention, decrease in customer service costs.
Of course we should work to associate (as much as we can) our tactics with our goals. But let's not avoid a Social Media strategy – just because we can't directly correllate every lead to it.
Let's build a process of adaptive marketing into our organization so that we can use Social Media Marketing as part of a process to iterate faster, learn more quickly – engage more deeply and ultimately grow.

In one of the responses to the BusinessWeek article, Morten T. Hansen at HavardBusiness.org says that investing in social networking tools, without first addressing the process of "why" people aren't collaborating better is like prescribing "cough medicine for a broken leg".

It's an excellent point for sure. And as marketers we've all broken our leg on marketing tactics in the past. But, just as importantly, we shouldn't avoid a new tactic just because there are a whole slew of consultants (both good and bad) out in the world trying to figure it all out. That would be as if, after breaking that leg – we vowed to never walk again.

Photo by Robert Couse-Baker

Tags: Online Marketing, Social Media

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