One reason you read this blog is for guidance in how social media will impact business. At least, we are hoping that is why you subscribe!
Social media expert Chris Brogan wrote about cafe conversations last year. He feels that the most impact comes from organisations who are seeking to take a more one-to-one approach to their communications versus people who treat social media as just another into a mass communications channel.
No-one is sure how conventional marketing planning is going to adapt to a medium where communication has to be adapted to thousands of dialogues all over the Internet. Social media just doesn’t plug straight into the marketing mix, though some large companies just see it as another element.
In November 2008, a large PLC spoke frankly to Chris Brogan about their marketing spend: there isn’t a pound allocated to social media. Instead, they treat social media as just another item in the marketing mix: they just don’t see it as anything really different.
If that’s your perspective, treat it as Marketing 2.0 but advertise, rather than participate, on those channels. You can target ads specifically to the types of people who might be more inclined to act on your messages.
There are some important issues about how social media delivers and who, in a marketing department, participates. I think some companies will want big conversations, mass messaging, when what are on offer are cafe conversations, the intimate, the personal, the chance to talk in numbers of hundreds and to make the appropriate kind of interactive impact. It is more PR 2.0 than Marketing 2.0.
Today, we wonder how newspapers survive, we marvel how the music industry will cope with digital downloads and music rights and we try and calculate how vehicle manufacturing will prosper in a downturn.
We already are equipped with the most robust and least expensive toolset for communications that the world has ever seen. We possess massive distribution networks with tiny transmission costs. We are our own authors, publishers, printers and distributors.
Why do we seem wary of this new medium? Because resources don’t follow distribution in the obvious way as it did with the other media (radio, TV, films, outdoor). But maybe that’s not where we need to make an immediate margin?
Communication is now modular. We are meeting smaller, multiple challenges rather than tackling one major, simplified issue. We are communicating in a smaller way and having simpler conversations. We are the dial tone, the cinema and the radio channel put together.
Yes, bigger issues will still require managing. There will be those stories that need the larger stage. That won’t change. But you can do business without social media. You can implement the same marketing strategies and throw budget at those strategies in the hope that it will net some multiple of more traffic/customers/sales.
Most will be trying social media (and other Marketing 2.0 techniques). Just ask yourself, and your department, a few questions that Mitch Joel posited to see if you are ‘ready’ for social media:
- Are we willing to not just listen, but to respond and adapt based on the back and forth?
- Are we willing to become active participants — not just in our channels but in the other channels and spaces as well?
- Are we willing to change the focus from being on our company to being about everybody — us, them and the entire community?
- Are we willing to be participants with just as much fervour and passion when it’s not good for us, but good for the community or the industry as a whole?
- Are we willing to be really, really open and transparent?
Change is coming, and it’s not easy to understand. The economic downturn is rippling all over the world’s markets. And, yet, the needs, the goals, the returns that companies have to derive to stay alive in their marketplaces are higher than ever, too.
In 2009, communications meets a fork in the road. Same budget, two different tracks: larger scale, and tailor-made. You do larger scale to stay alive and afloat where it makes sense.
You do tailored, or smaller touch things like social media, where a more subtle hand is necessary to influence opinion-leaders in your marketplaces. The balance is not an easy one to strike but there are a couple of characteristics of Marketing 2.0 to help you get it right.
These techniques are measurable and there are some light-footed digital agencies who are dedicated to getting you big results for your buck. Talk to them and find out how to manage a myriad of conversations with the same technology that allows you to hold this dialogue in the first place.
I like to think I’ve a decent sense of humour. In fact I’m regularly criticised for maybe not taking some things seriously enough. My favourite TV viewing is comedy, whether that’s stand-up, sitcoms, movies - whatever. And I’ve got a reasonably eclectic taste – Eddie Izzard is probably my favourite stand up and Outnumbered my current favourite sitcom.
