Social media marketing: Making a case for what works

Some of my best posts come in the form of comments left on other blog posts. Yesterday, in reading the Direct Marketing Observations blog, I noticed these remarks made by its author, Marc Meyer...

A) Don’t trust a single article about marketing in a bad economy, unless the writer has concrete proof. and B) If someone writes an article about marketing in a bad economy using social media- read it and then run the other way.

Puff pieces notwithstanding. Unless the person is making up the rules as they muddle through these ridiculously bad economic times, there is no template on how to use social media marketing correctly to market a business, product or otherwise, right now.

While Marc later apologized for taking what he referred to as a "pessimistic" outlook, his remarks hit me right between the eyes. For quite some time I've been feeling that we really have to begin qualifying and quantifying what works and what doesn't in social media marketing and why, and I made an attempt at doing so via my comment.

If you're interested, keep reading to see my response.

Marc, your post hits right between the eyes. I’m on a quest right now to prove that social media marketing can work in bad times as well as good. Heck, I’m on a quest to prove SMM can work at all. I believe it can and does. I’ve sent it in my own experience.

Having made that statement, let me cite some possible ways by which it can work:

1. SEO value - Blogs, for example, are their own form of SEO. While I don’t disparage the use of traditional SEO (and the subsequent expense involved), it costs very little to produce blog content.

2. Low cost - Much of what constitutes social media is free to use. While I recognize some social network technology providers charge a king’s ransom to use of their platform, aside from the investment of time (and, yes, time is money), social media can be a cheap date. Consider Dell’s involvement with Twitter as a case in point.

3. Content, content and more content - This ties to point #1, but content marketing is valuable for SEO and other reasons and social media is a way to produce lots of it. Plus, it gives your company two things traditional marketing and advertising cannot (or not as well, at least not without deep pocketbooks), ubiquity and personality.

4. WOM - What better way to put word of mouth on steriods than with the tools of social media. It exponentiates the viral capacity of a message to spread. That’s got to be worth something.

5. Niche marketing - Dr. Ralph Wilson said that success in marketing these days is about penetrating unfilled or partially-filled niches. The tools of social media are great for that.

While true blue died in the wool marketers will seek to formulate the ROI of social media, I tend to take a more intuitive approach, for good or ill. My forumla (and philosophy) is this: You can use conversational media to turn strangers into friends and friends into customers. Seth Godin said something like that years ago.

Strangers > Connections > Conversations > Friends > Customers

It probably wouldn’t play in a board room or with the CMO, but it worked pretty well in the small town where I grew up (pre-Internet days). And the web is now a massive collection of small towns (niches). I don’t see why it can’t work here as well. But, having said that, the proof is indeed in the pudding.

Comments

[Jim Turner]

"It probably wouldn’t play in a board room or with the CMO, but it worked pretty well in the small town where I grew up (pre-Internet days)."

Holy smokes Paul you can't possibly be that old! Well if so, I might just add that what worked THEN, will still work today. We just have different tools to work by and these tools change how we approach the same principle. I like the last paragraph and may steal it for my own use. Most of my customers are friends or have become friends through social media.

[Paul Chaney]

Jim, oh yea, I'm older than dirt! Feel free to steal away.

I'm cogitating over the notion of the Internet as this massive network of "small towns." Feel another post coming on!

[Alex- The Blog Traffic Guy]

For me, I focus lots of time on 3 ways: Blog SEO, WOMM and relationship building. These 3 ways have been giving me the most traffic. It is free and makes the most sense to me.

Blog SEO and WOMM is good for a blog which has high quality content. When I offer something valuable and useful to other people. People will start talking to their friends and linking to my blog. I get traffic from referrals and search engine at the same time.

The reason I love to build relationship with other bloggers because we both share the same passion: Blogging. Not all of them though. Some might be only interested in making money. I focused on relationship building nowadays because of one important lesson I learned from traffic "You can't do well in everything by your own". I can get traffic by my own easily but it will be struggling and it will not grow big easily.

Social media allows me to build relationship quickly with many people on the internet and access huge amount of traffic. That's one of the reason I love social media too :)

[Paul Chaney]

Alex, it sounds like you've drank the kool-aide for real! And, for good reason. This stuff works.

[anonymous]

I'd have to agree with you Paul. I work for a software company and we are often faced with the challenge of determining the ROI on technology. Like SMM, it is often impossible to put a true value on some of the things we implement. Much of what we do has never been done before, so there is no real way to quantify its return since it is NEW. The technology may not have a direct affect on anything, but improves virtually everything. SMM can be an improvement to your entire marketing effort.

[Paul Chaney]

I believe SMM should stand for Social Media Matters, because it does. Hard to quantify, yes, but you can't tell me it doesn't have an effect on the bottom line.