The Challenge Rambles and riff raff about all this and that

Social Media: not the center of the universe

Sparked by reading this post, and as a sort of follow up to my recent rant on Social Media Marketing being the extremophile of Marketing I decided to look at my own area of expertise from a different perspective.

We usually tend to regard our own activities as core for the business we work at. We like to see ourselves on the spotlight and doing tasks that create great value, boost sales, improve customer relations and spawn all sorts of benefits. We take comfort on the -usually- false believe that we are fundamental and irreplaceable.

It is very healthy to do some sort of mental exercise to prevent us from looking at our own bellies for too long: Picture yourself as a manager of a different area which is looking at what you do. How much would you care? How important would your activities be from that outsiders' perspective?

That was exactly what I did when I started writing this post.

Social Media can only help certain businesses.
Social Media Marketing in general is only appropriate for certain types of business. On very broad terms it is only good for corporations that deal with end users. There are some ideas that can be more broadly applied than others. For instance, blogs could be a great idea for a company doing b2b, but public sentiment monitoring would be useless.

A forum or blogs are unimaginable for the defense sector. Can you imagine a thread on "Should we fit nuke warheads on our new rockets?"

Social Media is part of a broader Marketing Universe.
Relying solely on Social Media to promote a brand and/or products is wrong. No caveats, no exceptions, it can't live on its own. It can (and in some case should) be an integral part of a broader overall online marketing strategy.

Social media only appeals and reaches a limited amount of users. That is the one thing the so-called social media expert seem to conveniently forget. Unless your target is to sell blogging platforms chances are a good chunk of your audience is not going to read or write blogs, spend time on Facebook, or even use iGoogle.

Of course the market is on a continuous evolution, and things are bound to change. Blog readership and social network sites have been on the rise, but I don't think SMM is mature enough to stand solely by itself.

A smart marketer would use SMM in conjunction with online advertising, a good partner program (if applicable) and traditional Marketing strategies. All of this are pieces of a puzzle, an Orchestra that should work together complementing different audience's preferences to get influenced into buying something.

Social media is just another player, one that is getting increased attention and importance, but not the Prima Donna that some consultants and analysts state.

Integration is key to achieve a successful Marketing policy.

Listening is still important
Listening to customers is becoming increasingly important. Social Media Marketing is one of the best tools available to do so. Yet there seems to be a void between SMM and traditional marketing. Most companies, consultants and agencies fail to see the creative marketing potential behind this conversations that have started to happen.

Leveraging what you learn from your faithful customers has already given results in overall sentiment and pressing issues that emerge every now and then. Yet that same knowledge could be applied towards building more successful campaigns. If your users continuously say that your product is great because of "A" and you keep on marketing feature "B", there is something broken somewhere.

This does not mean that you should use a "we listen" tagline. That is lame, people already expect you to listen and you'll end up looking like a useless gimmick if you do so.

Famous Last Words
I'm not contradicting myself, but rather putting things into perspective. Social Media is an important player in the web marketing universe in general, easily scalable (both up and down) and cost effective. But I thought that as a Social Media guy myself I should try to put some sense into the great amount of rubbish and over-excitement around SMM that I've been reading lately.

Social Media is a new player and a lot of people take advantage on the overall ignorance on the matter that takes place on a lot of organizations. As with most things when your audience is ill-educated on a particular matter it is fairly easy to deceive them and trick them with colored mirrors (or powerpoint presentations and mischievous graphs).

Sidenote: this post has been on the forge for the past week. Yesterday Mark Cahill posted an interesting entry on a similar (and, I think, complementing) tone.