By: Brian Jacobs

Brian Jacobs — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:03:43 +0000

I have some comments and builds on this which will I hope be helpful. To make it easy to follow I’ve placed these comments within the context of the original text.
‘If we are having a conversation about coffee we don’t want to be interrupted..’
Why not – if the message can be integrated within the conversation and is relevant to it? It is true, we don’t want to be interrupted with an ad – but the skill of using social media forms as a marketing medium is to integrate the message into the medium. Engagement, and relevance, not interruption.
‘Marketers like predictability like CPM…’
Yes – but today in traditional media forms CPM is a very rough and ready metric. Also this seems to me to be a non-sequitur, it has nothing to do with the appropriateness or otherwise of being interrupted.
‘Not only does the audience hate broadcast advertisements…’
Do they? Where’s the evidence for this? Many ads are liked, spread virally, parodied. Of course, there are good and bad ads!
‘Google has successfully placed advertisements against sacrosanct communication and today we take this form of advertisement for granted…’
‘Successful’ against which criteria? And do we take these ads for granted, or do we just ignore them/not notice them?
‘Social media marketing incorporates social media advertising…’
I think this is a very important point. Of course, marketing per se incorporates advertising per se. ‘Advertising’ is a narrow term, which does tend to conjure up images of interruptive (if sometimes entertaining) TV spots, or pages in a newspaper or magazine.
Social media ‘advertising’ (if the word advertising is appropriate) has to be much more subtle, much more integrated into the two-way dialogue that takes place within social media forms, whilst at the same time being transparent and truthful.
A basic and not very good parallel might be the magazine advertorial – within which paid-for messages appear (and are labelled as such) within a layout similar in design to the editorial pages amongst which it appears. But of course the dialogue aspect needs to be added.
‘A chief data officer…’
There needs to be a link between research and data. At the moment there is far too often no link between observing how people actually behave (via data) and how they feel, or say they will behave (via market research). These are complimentary aspects of marketing, and yet they often exist in silos. This is a waste of time, and money; much research spend could be saved if existing customer data were properly explored; and many marketing dollars could be saved if all targeting avenues were examined.
I think the fundamental dilemma is that social media forms need advertising funding in some shape or form; but traditional advertising approaches don’t and won’t work (not least because they will jar with the audience/user; and advertising that jars doesn’t work, it just annoys).
We need to develop new skills – the right metrics are absolutely key in that they will help us understand the medium, and how (not just how much) it’s used. That’s a key step in being able to create for it.

Comments on: The ten steps to creating a Social media marketing campaign

By: Brian Jacobs