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Quick Summary: Brands should embrace social media because social media will soon be the only cost effective to reach consumers.
Question: Why should brands embrace social media?
Answer: Brands should embrace social media because social media will soon be the only cost effective to reach consumers.
I have noticed two trends both as a marketer and as a consumer –
Trend 1: The cost of interrupting people with advertising is increasing.
Tired of the over-clutter of things in their lives, people are going “off” consumption. Tired of the bombardment of commercial messages, people are learning new ways to block out advertising. At the same time, media consumption has become more fragmented. Therefore, it has become more costly to interrupt people with advertising.
Trend 2: The cost of engaging with people via social media is decreasing.
“Listening to” consumers, “engaging with” consumer, and “touching” consumers has always been the holy grail of marketing. For the first time, social media allows marketers to “listen to”, “engage with” and “touch” people, both as individuals and consumers, in a cost effective way.
Today, it’s still more cost-effective (in terms of time + money + goodwill) to interrupt people with advertising than engage with them via social media. That equation will change tomorrow.
Very soon, social media will be the only cost effective way to reach consumers.
If you don’t learn how to listen to people today, you’ll discover that you are blocked out of their lives tomorrow.
Comments (7)
So what`s the tipping point in timeline you are seeing from now ? One year , two year ?
And if i say Technology part in Social networking Industry is at saturation , Will it be wrong ?
If not, How do you see technology helping in Social media marketing ?
I doubt it will flip the model but there will be greater benefits from interactions with social media.
Particularly fond of the notion of free:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/02/may-i-have-your.html
@Gaurav: I think the tipping point is 2 years away internationally and 5 years away in India.
@BB: I think the trend will tip. For instance, I’m already impossible to reach via traditional media. I’m sure there are others like me.
The “economics of free”, by the way, is an altogether different post.
It’s about the tools gaining critical mass and maturity. Some (in fact, many) need to drop out on the way to clean up the clutter before we can see effective usage. Right now, it’s all fragmented (even with the tiny traffic we have, therefore fragmenting it some more).
Cheers.
R
@Rajesh: I’m setting a really high bar for the tipping point –
- When interrupting people with advertising becomes costlier than engaging with them via social media (in terms of time + money + goodwill).
- When the automatic inclusion of social media in the marketing mix becomes ubiquitous.
- When brand managers are fired for not having a social media strategy.
For me Social Media has proved to be a tremendous benefit to my home business. It allows a cost effective way to reach millions of people, what more could you ask for. I figure that one day it will be the only approach marketers use to target customers, as many of the social media sites continue to grow by leaps and bounds.
I think there is a danger of social media strategies by brands becoming “interruptive” as well. There are low barriers to entry in social media marketing so everyone seems to be jumping on to this bandwagon but not everyone necessarily understands these qualitative principles.So in a sense there people who are enagaging in interruptive/ disruptive social media engagements are killing the goose that lays the golden egg. There is no doubt that consumers like to be engaged, and that they would undertake an action if need be; at the same time a really large number of consumers are getting increasingly aware of social media marketing and are doubting the credibility of social media related forums as a whole. Social Media forums are one tiny part of social media but you can see where the trend is headed. Care must be taken to ensure that social media marketing does not become “interruption” - and it does when you have a “home business”
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