Baylor EMBA Marketing

MATT ROGERS: Social Media Is About More Than Just Advertising

If you remember one thing from this discussion, I hope it will be that social media is about much more than advertising.  Organizations that only look for advertising opportunities will miss the point.  Social media is different because it's not just about marketing, it is an evolution in how we communicate. While the exact model for how to best take advantage of this evolution is not fine tuned, getting started is pretty simple. 

 

Social media is not an isolated trend, its is the dawn of the Connected Age. Today, Facebook has more than 70,000,000 users. If it were a country it would be the 10th largest on the planet, just above Japan. Every day 200,000 blogs are started.  Some of the best brands on the planet are learning how to gain enormous insights from their customers by engaging them in this space. 

 

Here are ten ideas for getting started.

 

And 3 things everyone in the class should do today (these are requirements for anyone in marketing).

1. Join LinkedIn.  It's a great site to get your feet wet in this brave new world.  You'll be surprised how many people you know are already there.  It's also a great tool for recruiting, my last three hires have come from this recommendations passed through this site.
2. Join Twitter.  If you're not ready to actually start sending updates, pick some people to follow from twitter.alltop.com.  Start with @danyork, @techcrunch, and @pkedrosky  because you'll learn something.  Then add @JasonCalacanis because he's entertaining. 
3. Pick a few blogs that are interesting and follow along.  Look for opportunities to comment and participate.  If you're not sure where to start, pick topics from alltop.com that interest you. 

BILL TOWNSEND: Social Media Is Not Replacing Advertising Soon

Mat you are right about advertising as we know it being a dying model, but I’m not ready to concede that social networking is going to take its place or become the be-all for the future of advertising. Certainly there is a lot of interaction taking place between consumers on the Internet. There are chats, discussion boards, instant messaging, text messaging via mobile, and much of this is done in an environment of similar interests. But what is “Social Media”  and how does it play into all this?

We all are familiar with Facebook, Linked In, MySpace, and Yahoo! Groups. Those are good examples of large websites that attempt to group people by similar interests or the people they know. In my neighborhood we call this interacting with your friends and neighbors and we have fancy terms for these self-segmenting groups: football boosters, PTA, bunko night, soccer practice, bridge club, etc. But you don’t have advertisers intruding into these groups, trying to make sales. You have the members of these groups making recommendations to one another: “Oh, Bob, he’s a great plumber;” “I bought that new Braun razor and it is fabulous;” and “I’m not into my second month on BeachBody and look at how lean and fit I’ve become.” These are all consumer-to-consumer interactions.

The challenge that social media has is that breaking into the intimate conversations of consumers is difficult. Push too hard and you are not believable. Show up as advertising and you’re suspect. Attempt to create a viral marketing tool like a web video that is passed around to millions and you may have a hit, but most likely will not (it’s estimated that only .001% of all web videos are seen by more than 1 million people.

I’m not saying that social media advertising is not going to change and become relevant, I simply believe it is not going to do it in the next 3 years.

MATT ROGERS: Why Social Media Matters

A few weeks ago Bill Townsend gave a great presentation to the class covering online marketing. Save the presentation and refer to it often because the content will make an impact on your business.

Right up until slide 21. Take slides 71-78, delete them, and forget everything he told you about blogs and other social media.

Originally I planned to call Bill and point out the error of his ways but I just kept worrying that you would walk out of this class with the wrong impression of the next generation of marketing and I could not let that happen. Maybe if this were UT I could go on quietly...but this is Baylor.

Over the next week or two Bill and I will talk about what I (and soon Bill) believe is the next generation of not only online marketing but marketing in general.

To understand where we're going you have to first understand that many marketers are coming to accept a grim fact...advertising is dead.

Maybe not quite dead, but it's certainly trending that way.

We live in a world where consumers are receiving more than 3,000 advertising messages a day. It's an overwhelming amount of information and consumers cannot possibly keep up. So they're not. Increasingly people are ignoring advertising altogether. There was a time when advertising was one of the most important sources of information when considering a purchase. Today ads barely register.  The younger the consumer, the stronger their distaste and outright resentment of advertising.  Consumers bring their feelings about advertising to work with them as well, which means we are not dealing with strictly a consumer issue.  These trends impact business to business marketing just as strongly. 

We are witnessing what is arguably the most important change in marketing in decades. One of the four pillars (or P's) of marketing is being turned upside down. Certainly there has been innovation in product, pricing and place (distribution) but arguably nothing as dramatic as what is happening to Promotion.

What is happening in social media today matters more than Bill led you to believe because the number one influencer of purchase decisions are---other people.

But more on that next time.