War, huh, yeah

What is it good for

Absolutely nothing

Uh-huh

There’s an increasing chorus of voices that, somewhat like the lyric from the ’60s hit protest song War, wonders whether social media may be good for “absolutely nothing” when it comes to business.

Oddly enough, for a fellow who runs a Calgary social media agency, I agree with a lot of the naysayers.

Take for example a recent Marketing Magazine article by Jeromy Lloyd entitled “Feeling Unsocial”.

Lloyd initially cites Seth Godin, “(who) preaches that the age of interruptive marketing is over. It will be communities of people forming direct, one-to-one relationships with brands that market products in the future.”

Now Godin is no slouch in the marketing arena, having written eleven books, many of them bestsellers with titles you might recognize such as “Tribes”, “Purple Cow”, “Unleashing the Ideavirus”, and “All Marketers Are Liars”.

I find Godin’s writing a bit hyperbolic for my taste, more tent-revival “come to Jesus” than fact- based. While occasionally refreshing, I have a hard time drinking Godin’s KoolAid®, even if it did come from a purple cow.

I mean, do I really want to befriend laundry detergent and the muffler shop? Really? I think not, and Lloyd’s marketingmag.ca article concurs:

“… if you look closely and listen carefully you’ll discover some doubters asking whether this change is as massive as billed. Is it so wrong for marketers to try to figure out social media before diving in, leaving all they’ve previously known behind?”

Absolutely not. I spent twenty years building up some modicum of competence in communications, including stints in this newspaper, web publishing, product marketing, and at a national newswire. I’m not about to throw that away for the shiny new thing, nor should you.

That doesn’t mean I reject social media, by any stretch, it simply folds it in to the mix where appropriate.

Lloyd goes on to quote Canadian social media luminary Danny Brown, also a media mix proponent:

“Danny Brown, founder of SRM Group and a former British Telecom and FedEx marketer in the U.K., sees similar patterns in Dell’s very successful Twitter campaign, which after about two years Dell said generated more than $6 million in sales through its @DellOutlet channel. ‘They also had millions of promotional dollars behind that tied into print ads, newspaper ads, industry magazines,’ Brown says. ‘If you look at the most successful social media campaigns, you can bet your bottom dollar a lot of them had traditional campaigns running alongside them.’”

And there’s the rub – social media divorced from your “regular” marketing becomes the ugly- stepchild of marketing, ignored and abused with no Cinderella-like happy ending.

The July issue of Alberta Venture magazine (AlbertaVenture.com) did a spread on social media for business. In one article writer Scott Valentine quotes digital strategist Roger Kondrat:

“’Don’t fall for “I Twitter therefore I am”,’ says Kondrat, ‘There’s a huge gap between someone who’s a power user of tools like Twitter and Facebook and someone who is an expert marketer or PR person.’”

“According to Kondrat, the disciplined business approach to social media strategy … including a healthy dose of market research, analytics and ROI measurement – while patently un-cool with social media super users – is absolutely necessary. ‘Transfer the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can from your existing marketing practice and understand what new ones can be added to support your business goals,’ he suggests.”

Yep, “business goals” – how dreary to the “shiny new” set, and yet how necessary to long- term success.

Social media – what is it good for? Relationships, customer service, brand and image building, lead development, demonstrations of expertise, and amplification of other channels. What is it not good for? Standing alone.

As Lloyd says in the Marketing Magazine article: “Maybe those old media paradigms are still worth something after all.”

Huh.

As usual, send me your feedback on Twitter at @dblacombe or via e-mail doug@communicatto.com.

Doug Lacombe is president of Calgary social media agency communicatto.

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