Image via Flickr Creative Commons – juaniraola
The world of social media has transformed the way marketers interact with their consumers, moving away from previous tools such as email marketing. The idea of sharing something isn’t new these are the the equivalents to ‘word of mouth’ and latterly the ‘send to a friend’ function.
Whilst checking my Twitter feed this morning I was drawn (and subsequently re-tweeted) an interesting article by Econsultancy: “Why your best social media strategy might be not having one.”
The article details the risks involved with adopting a social media presence for a brand. However, it wasn’t long ago that these types of articles were being written about email marketing and online marketing generally. Indeed whilst at a previous job, I experienced the difficulties associated with consumers trust towards email marketing, when personalisation and segmentation of email marketing were at its peak. In fact it would be fair to say that trust was issue with online marketing from the outset. It is only now that we are more familiar with the process that we have begun to trust and in some cases rely on the web.
There is undoubtedly a difficulty in obtaining ROI figures for social media, and as mentioned in the Econsultancy article companies are effectively giving away their personal relationships with consumers, whilst the Social networks develop based on the data gathered. Can this behaviour be attributed to social media as a tool (and perhaps even a weapon) being an unknown entity.
Further from this are we creeping from personalised marketing, where marketers could suggest, to consumer controlled marketing where the brand has little impact on persuasion. It’s easy to see why brand’s are adopting social campaigns, equally it is obvious that brands are adopting them without having any kind of strategy. It may well be a case of jumping on the bandwagon, and the consumers are driving it.
Fantastic!