As Social Media Takes Off, Most Marketers Get it Wrong
January 2, 2008
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Most progressive marketers seem to understand the importance of social media by now. If they don’t, a new report by eMarketer suggests that they need to, and fast. According to the report by Strategy Analytics, more than one billion broadband users will be on social media applications by 2012, which is only 5 years from now. That’s quite an increase from 2007’s paltry 373 million.
The report goes on to say that U.S. users of social networks in particular (as opposed to global users of all social media applications) are also growing quickly.
Currently, 38% of all U.S. Internet users (over age 3) will use social networking in the last month. That’s 78 million folks. In this country. Wow.
But as head of a social media agency, I’m left to puzzle over how so many marketers are getting it wrong when it comes to engaging in the social media landscape.
The eMarketer report talks all about advertising on social media properties. That’s very important to the long term viability of Facebook, et al, but it’s missing the forest for the trees. We’ve written before about whether Facebook will ever be viable to the point of justifying their huge valuations. (And I’m personally pretty skeptical.)
If we had 78 million potential customers sitting in our lobby each month, would our answer be to hang an ad in the lobby? If we had 1 billion potential customers walking around outside our offices, many of whom wanted to talk about what we do, would we drop press releases out the window? (I suspect some CMOs would, actually, as Pavlovian conditioning is very strong…)
Social media’s future is bright. These statistics are pretty compelling. What marketers have to figure out is how to engage with this opportunity, in addition to advertise to it. It’s affordable. It’s just really strange at first. Hopefully these 50%-plus annual growth rates will convince more folks to try…
Ok, off the soapbox (for now).
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3 Responses to “As Social Media Takes Off, Most Marketers Get it Wrong”
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Part of the problem is that with tens of millions of new users of social media coming on board each and every year - or is that hundreds - we don’t really know how to “engage” them effectively. Not many deep methodologies have been created yet. A lot of it can be forced.
Yet a second challenge is that in order to get to know an individual better to better engage with them, we end up violating their privacy.
We’d better make those lobbies very comfortable and then treat our customers with respect.
@Johnathan: You’re right, but better to not focus on the numbers coming on line, or if they’re newbies or experienced. Because I don’t think people come online thinking they want to engage with social media in some fashion.
Better to focus on finding where your brand related discussions are taking place and how you can add value. If your product does add value in some way (price, technology, symptom relief, makes life easer, whatever), then it shouldn’t be too hard to do. If your product doesn’t add value in any way, then that’s a trickier issue…
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