Social Media: Resistance Is Futile

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Help me save the social media laggards from themselves

I’m trying to be patient. But it’s getting harder and harder. Not a day goes by that I don’t meet someone or read about someone bemoaning the encroachment of “Social Media” on the marketing landscape.

They are easy to spot, these poor souls. They are usually mid-career or older, usually carrying around a paper datebook (remember those?) and clutching a newspaper under one arm. Want to know a secret? Until about nine months ago, this was me. At the time I had a couple dozen employees, and I banned Facebook in the workplace. Now, I get peeved at staff meetings if people aren’t using Twitter as regularly as I would like. I’ve done a full 180-degree turnaround, and you can too. I’m living proof you can survive and thrive in this scary new world.

Let's deal with all the objections in one fell swoop. None of your issues matter. There, I said it. I know it changes your idea of privacy. I know it opens your brand up to people who might say mean things. I know it will take resources to manage. Got it. Heard it all. But instead of worrying about any of those things, you need to be worried about how fast you can jump into the lake.

Social media is happening without you. People are talking about you and you don’t even know it. It’s a radical change in our understanding of the marketing and branding function whereby we can’t control our brands anymore, or at least not with the obsessive-compulsive attention to detail that we are used to with traditional one-way mediums. Those were the good old days, when we could sweat over what a newspaper or TV advertisement communicated and then wait for a few months for the reports to roll in. It was just us talking to them. Now there are thousands of them who are demanding that we talk /with/ them. What’s a marketing manager or VP Sales to do?

You're going to need some help – and I don't mean a bunch of 12-year-old technologists who measure success in eyeballs. It doesn’t matter how many tens or hundreds of thousands of people come to your website or watch your YouTube video. What matters is how you use these new tools alongside the old tools – yes, you need both – and how you blend your efforts across both worlds to achieve your marketing objectives.

You might not need a Facebook page at all. You might need ten of them. You might benefit most from Twitter, but maybe only with an account for your CEO. You need to make strategic decisions about channels the way you always have, and you need a communications campaign that honours and respects the strengths and weaknesses of each medium. 

The key will be for all of us who are a few steps ahead of the curve (or at least aware of the curve) to fan out and tackle the remaining late adopters. Maybe then we can get the conversation back to something more interesting, like generating sales, instead of another round of wistfulness for days and ways long gone by.

• Tags
  • david allison, 
  • Digital, 
  • Trends, 
  • Social Media, 
  • Marketing and Communications