Cheap social media makes marketers lazy

Just as I entered a meeting with a colleague and one of the founders of The Social Media Leadership Forum I happened up this article on the daily enews bulletin from Marketing Week.

Let me paraphrase the premise, junior marketers are over using social media because it is perceived as low cost and that finance managers care more about return on investment than cost and are by default encouraging this. We kicked it around and although we had some sympathy for the sentiment, I don’t buy any of it.

So as the charge came from with our profession here is my response. The basis of successful marketing stands, and indeed underpins all successful campaigns. I.e. target messages of a well researched proposition at a target audience you understand and will perceive the value they can extract from your proposition - that it is greater than any alternative.

The channel we choose to use to deliver the messages is informed more by our knowledge of the customer not just the cost of delivering the message. Social, and digital media more generally, are just some of the possible channels. A practicing marketer that ignores all possible ways of effectively engaging their client is lazy full stop. Not just lazy because they are using social media at the expense of the alternatives/compliments.Just an aside to this, one of the largest growth areas for use of social media is a s a second screen to TV activity.

No longer do we have to wait until the next day to have a conversation beside the water cooler about what was on the box – we can share it with our network through Facebook and Twitter as it happens. Link this new trend of dual screens (the TV and your social media device) and we could see a major resurgence in big ticket above the line TV advertising. The pursuit of which is anything but lazy.