Last year saw a social media steam train hit the world of marketing, and the adjustment, whilst shaky, was sudden and total. I can remember watching an episode of Question Time towards the end of the summer when David Dimbleby announced a Twitter page for the program but delivered this with about as much confidence in what he was saying as I am able to muster were I to talk about the mating habits of the Bezoar goat. (For the record I know nothing of goats whatsoever and would be hard pushed to string even my first sentence together on the subject).
Soon after that everybody in every channel was at it. Amassed followers of hasty self proclaimed gurus and Facebook friends pages numbering in their millions. Social was the new media and the chorus rose that any other form of communication was as dead as Michael Jackson.
The web in particular has a habit of whipping up these storms. Sometimes they are warranted and sometimes they are no more than passing summer storms that rage loudly and then are heard no more. Google Adwords is a perfect example of the former and Second Life of the latter. The pattern is set though, and when the call goes up some normally sane brands suddenly decide that their need to be ‘hip’ and ‘with it’ must overtake their common sense and make enormous budgets available without question. Both funds and concentration are diverted to this celebration of ‘the new’. That is what we are currently seeing with the announcements coming through at the moment.
Now I believe completely in social media as a way of engaging customers and prospects and driving traffic to websites and mobile sites for the overall marketing process to continue. I also think that social media is part of the overall digital marketing strategy rather than being a complete marketing solution on its own. For that reason whilst I am pleased that the world is opening up to social media practices I haven’t taken my place amongst the faithful who are all proclaiming other channels (including other digital channels) dead.
The danger is that we ‘big up’ social media to a level it cannot deliver from. Exactly the same happened to websites at the end of the last decade when half million and above budgets were ploughed into development. Many of these sites were badly conceived and had no concept of how to produce a return on investment. The only mantra was “Build it and low the people shall come”. The reality was quite different and when the hangover set in after the dotcom crash there was in its place a distrust of website development which remained with brands for the next 18 months.
Websites on their own couldn’t deliver the riches that brands needed to recoup their investment. We now know that sites need to be promoted and consumers require trust to be built before they will hand over their hard earned cash. Basically the world woke up to the fact that relying on a tactic whilst forgetting the overall strategy was a quick route to disaster, and I can see disturbing signs that the same thing might be happening again but this time with social media.
I don’t hold in with the exponents of social media who simply want to have a chat with prospects and customers. The entire interactive Mix is based on a cause and effect model that starts with a new prospect and then leads them through to sale and beyond. If the chorus and expectation for social media is built beyond that which can be delivered quickly then the budgets will vanish and an extremely effective tactical tool maybe disgraced before it has shown its potential.
