Return on Intention

There is quite a conversation going on right now in the marketing departments across America. There seems to be a new (well … sort of new) bright shiny object that seems to be causing some trouble. It’s called social media.
With Comcast and Zappos on Twitter and Nike on Facebook, social media is the place to be. Every day we hear about another traditional media source losing revenue or shutting down and more reports saying that advertising isn’t working the way it once did. From the other side of isle we hear the social media crowd saying that the new read/write web is the future. Social media or die, or so it goes.
Compounding the problem, there are rumblings that the top referring sites for many successful websites aren’t Google, Yahoo and MSN anymore. Now it’s Google, Twitter and Facebook. Something’s afoot. So, should all businesses rush to social media as a means to succeed, or is it all hype?
Given all this noise, it’s easy to see why so many marketers and business people are trying to figure out what a “FaceTube” is. How about advertising? We get that. Do it online? Get me some banner ads!
Social media is supposed to enable groups of people with similar interests to get together and … hang out. It seems to work great and brands want in on it. But even if the company manages to figure out the technology, then what? Well, they engage the group. Does that mean sell more stuff? Does that mean more “Top of Mind” awareness? It’s not clear, but people like it.
So it seems that customers want companies to get in on social media. Most companies seem to think they should, but they also don’t know why. The main reason is that while the internet is much more measurable than other marketing communication channels, it’s still hard to figure out if your Twitter account or YouTube video is closing sales. Many people have done amazing things for their business, brand recognition and bottom line using social media. So it stands to reason that it works and companies should do it. People like to do business with people like them, so getting involved and engaged with customers has to be a good thing, right?
Hold on a second. This conversation sounds familiar!
It seems that social media is widely regarded as “the right thing” for companies to do. There is some signs that it works but it’s hard to tie to direct sales. This sounds a lot like brand awareness advertising. We do it (or did it depending on who you are) because it was “the right thing” to do to be successful. It seemed to work, at least all the big successful companies did it, and it seemed to work. It’s just kind of hard to directly tie it to sales.
Is social media the “new” branding? Does it make a difference in this ROI driven world? What do you think?

Tags: advertising, branding, media, social

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 3:50 pm and is filed under Management, Mar Comm, New Marketing, The Wild Wild Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.