Social Media Renders Your Marketing Strategy Obsolete. NOT!

In which Jill admonishes marketers to be deliberate about their strategies now, and tweet later.

photo by Matthew Oliphant

The evolution of social media has all my marketing and CRM buddies a-twitter. (Sorry). They understand that there is promise in using social media tools to strengthen their brand images, to share company news, and to connect with customers and prospects. It’s just that they can’t seem to tear executives away from their balance sheets long enough to enlighten them.

Indeed, faced with falling stock prices, budget cuts, and shareholder disaffection, your CFO is all for social media, as long as it’s free. Your CEO thinks Delicious is a porn site that should be blacklisted from corporate access. And forget about asking your CTO to start blogging. He’s hunkered down trying to figure out the next disruptive innovation, and pronto!

But your marketing department is intrigued, enough to form a social networking task force and send twenty seven staff members to BlogWorld Expo. And just when you think social media has saturated the marketing Zeitgeist, you overhear your CMO say the words, “Friend me” to a supplier. This exchange strikes you as obscene, not because of any sexual undertones but because what the hell is he doing on Facebook anyway, he has a marketing organization to run!

If you’re like me, you’ve noticed that the social media buzz is taking far more time and energy than the answer to the question, “How will sales and marketing support this year’s corporate objectives?” Many sales and marketing organizations have emphasized social media at the expense of their strategies. It’s as if strategy doesn’t matter anymore.

Newsflash: It does. Moreover, the past is prologue. Companies that emerged from the last recession did so by returning to fundamentals. They understood that technology—even the coolest let’s-get-naked-and-party, Sandhill Road-backed, WTF 2.0 software—was nevertheless still a means to an end. In 2001, writing in Harvard Business Review as the dot-com bubble spewed its detritus far and wide, Michael Porter said of the Internet:

“Two broad conclusions can be drawn. First, many businesses active on the Internet are artificial businesses competing by artificial means and propped up by capital that until recently had been readily available. Second, in periods of transition such as the one we have been going through, it often appears as if there are new rules of competition. But as market forces play out, as they are now, the old rules regain their currency. The creation of true economic value once again becomes the final arbiter of business success.”

If you substitute the Internet theme of Porter’s assertion with social media, the same truisms apply. Companies still have to articulate how they intend to compete in the market, serve their customers in differentiating ways, and innovate. Smart marketing, customer experience management, and CRM leaders will lift their heads from their Facebook 25 Things lists, craft a deliberate, multi-media plan that supports their firms’ unique value proposition, and then—only then—determine how social media will fit. Got that? Okay, now friend me.

Comments

[Scott Davis]

A fantastic reminder. Be discerning about tools and approaches that you can re-purpose from Playground 2.0. They CAN make a difference IN the real world of commerce, but they do not herald a new real world. That's a lie that poorly educated, lazy, or frivolous snake-oil salesmen use to get you to lay down your superior weapons of experience and reason and strategy and culture.

[Marty Moseley]

Great post, Jill.
I believe the myriad Social Media tools are changing the way we form communities, interact, collaborate, learn, contribute, and trust. But, with all the goodness these tools provide, they cannot substitute for sound vision, judgment, strategy, innovation, delivery, customer care, etc. based on tried-and-true rules of business economics.

[Dylan Jones]

Nice post Jill.

The thing I really love about social media is the way it levels the playing field.

Smaller consultancies and vendors can gain tremendous traction simply by providing more useful and unique content or conversations than their competitors, many forget the fact that conversation is a bidirectional process however!

You're absolutely right that at the heart of all this is classic marketing.

Many as you say completely forget this and expect some kind of silver bullet with web2.0 but there are no short cuts, social media can be equally brutal to those who don't really get it.

For example, I'm seeing a lot of companies who don't really understand their value proposition or if they understand it they sure as heck can't convey it simply.

Social media conversations can be sporadic and short-lived. If you are looking to peddle your wares then you need to be succinct. Tell stories that add value, don't just push endless PR, it simply doesn't work and can actually damage, not strengthen your brand.

Therein lies the problem, social media done correctly can be very time-consuming and therefore expensive.
Okay, it doesn't cost a DQ vendor $3 an adword click to promote your latest whitepaper but if your marketing team are pounding away on Web2.0 all day long you better start measuring what return those hours are really giving you!

[John Moore]

Jill, as a VP of Engineering and CTO I take offense when you say you cannot get a CTO to blog. Okay, I'm kidding, most CTOs cannot be bothered with blogging.

Companies must always, as you put it, return to basics and remember that the ultimate goal is to create or grow an existing market, making money for the company and shareholders along the way. Social marketing, and tools like Twitter, are simply that... They are tools that can be used to help you execute your strategies, they are not strategies in and onto themselves.

I feel that people need to join Twitter and understand it fully as it is not a tool where the value is immediate apparent. I wrote, briefly, about this in a post a couple of weeks back: http://johnfmoore.wordpress.com/2009/03/12/do-not-miss-the-boat-join-twitter/ .

Feel free to review and let me know what you think.

Keep up the great writing.

John
http//johnfmoore.wordpress.com

[westley]

Thanks for sharing this great article! I'd like to share also this article I found which provides another great explanation and examples on how important a social media to a business. Check the article on this link: http://www.procontentsite.com/articles/index.php?page=article&article_id=82348