It's Just Wafer Thin

Here's a little something to nibble on before the holidays officially start.

In between sculling and cucumber sandwiches, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth's Center for Marketing Research studied social media usage among Inc. 500 companies. Key finding: America's fastest growing private companies are adopting social media marketing initiatives at much higher rates than the not so fast-growing companies. For the third year in a row. At this point perhaps we can safely rule out coincidence.

In 2008, 77% of companies surveyed said they use at least one social media tool. This year, the number is up to 91%. In the race between Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace, it's Twitter in the lead. Among the social media holdouts, 44% of companies without a company blog say they plan to start one, and 36% say it's lights, camera, online video.

So all the cool companies are doing it, or they're going to do it. And you probably should too. But in the headlong rush to the social media buffet, and man does it look tempting served up on a spreadsheet, you might consider tossing everything else out. But don't. Mitch Joel, author of Six Pixels of Separation, would have us believe that social media is a side dish, not a replacement for conventional efforts. (Not that he puts it quite that way.) Three things to keep in mind before slipping into a tryptophan-induced coma:

• Social Media Is Additive: In most cases social media won't be your strategy. Integrating social media into your existing strategy is the right approach. See what works and adjust the seasoning accordingly.

• It's Who, Not How Many: Social media is about niche targeting, so the objective is getting the right message in front of  the right person as opposed to finding the one message that will suite everybody's tastes.

• Consumers Consume: the consumer/producer ratio is skewed way over on the consumer side. So don't expect hopping into the social media world means you can hand off your marketing to the masses.

That should be enough to chew on for now. We'll talk about your mainstream media diet later.

Tags: Facebook, linked in, Mitch Joel, myspace, Six Pixels of Separation, social media, Twitter

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 8:37 am and is filed under business, marketing, advertising, communications. 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.