Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Social Media Marketing: What's The Point?

The link to the full story is here




Advertisers lost control of the media years ago when the Internet gave all the target audiences the power to run their own message delivery systems.

I’m not sure we’d fully recovered from that peaceful revolution when another gigantic wave hit us, then another and another: Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, blogs, Yelp, Foursquare, and on and on.

The whole Social Media thing can be very confusing which partly explains the problems some companies are experiencing with it.

Consider a prospective client we visited a few weeks ago. They showed us their website, some of their Twitter and Facebook work and mentioned interests in Pinterest and LinkedIn.

I asked about their overall strategy, especially as it relates to acquiring new customers and communicating with the customers they already have.

They looked at me as if I’d asked them to explain Unified Field Theory.

After a little gentle probing, I learned the company’s Social Media marketers work in silos:

·        The Facebook people don’t send prospects to the company’s website; they offer products right on Facebook.
·        The Twitter Group is trying to increase followers by chasing their target market through hashtag (#) searches.
·        The people in charge of the website don’t capture prospect information because they can’t.
·        Nobody in the company is working to create real gold: a prospect and customer database.

When I got back to the office, I started to develop a theory: Big companies have the Social Media thing under control, medium and small companies don’t.

No comments:

Post a Comment