I was just reading an article in 1to1 Magazine – called “The Social Media Hype Is Over” – basically, they feel that it’s time to create real value from online customer interactions. Beyond being today’s buzzword, social media has taken our job as marketers, and thrown us on our collective asses.
We started out with the Internet – a nice, controllable vehicle to get our message out. Then, we started corporate blogs – which gave us the ability to get closer to our customers, while getting feedback (good and bad) – but we still retained some control over the “message”. Now, with the growth of social communities such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc, – we no longer control the message – our customers do.
The question we keep asking ourselves (or, get asked by our bosses / clients / customers) – is whether social networking is really relevant?
Short answer – if you think for a second it’s not – it’s time for a new career.
I’m thinking of a kayaking trip with friends in the next few weeks. I’ve communicated with my friends to plan the trip over Facebook. I read reviews of different tours on Yelp. One company – has a blog where i read up about the last few trips they’ve headed up for clients. I’ve checked out trips taken by other customers on Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube, and Picasa.
In the past, I’d had just called the company, booked the trip, and hoped for the best. Yet now, with a tightening economy, I want to know what I’m getting prior to the trip – and I want to know what others think.
The opportunity for us as marketers – is to realize that as costs go up, for us to ignore our clients desire to research what they are getting for their money – that the less we do with marketing over social networks – the more our customers will do it for us. I realize that I’d mentioned above that the customer controls the message now. This isn’t totally true. They interpret what we put out there as our message – and then do some of our marketing for us.
Our job – is to make sure the message is more accurate than ever before – and, make sure that we stay on top of that message. Then, utilize these social media tools to make sure our customers know about our message. Finally, once we’ve accomplished that – we then need to stay on top of what they say about our message – how they interpret it and market it – so we can constantly make course corrections in our message.
I like to think that in some ways, we’ve simplified some of our market research via the introduction of social networks. Think about how many blunders have taken place over the years because what a focus group said was important, was irrelevant once brought to market. Now…you’re going to know the relevance to the market that much sooner, and possibly more accurately, than ever before. We now have the ability to monitor our brands in real time – for better or worse!
