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.

Comments

[Michael Schneider]

I think that Bill is being really Blue-Chip in his assessment of the value of social media. He clearly would not be a first-mover in social media advertising.

On slide 74, he says "What do I advertise here?"

The answer is: Whatever the FB user's friends like (or nothing if they don't have a very broad network, or the image is private).