February 28, 2011
with arauser
This post has 5 Comments, add yours! Tagged under: Social Media
We recently hosted a workshop about social media and we started off with a burning question: should companies focus on their social media strategies or should they focus on their overall brand and marketing strategies?
Then again, should we consider social media as just another marketing channel or is it really changing the marketing scene?
The general agreement was that it does matter to an extent. It's the new "power to the people." As marketing shifts to engagement and adaptive strategies, social media becomes the channel through which we communicate with consumers now and will hold true even more so in the future.
The question is can you really build great brands using social media?
It's a fact that social media can dilute your brand image and do as much harm as it can do good.Companies need to continue building brands using conventional media channels and cannot focus on social media alone. If you were to build your brand using only social media, expect to see your brand vanish as soon as your conversation ends. Brands have to also set strategies in place to help you gain ownership of your online communities. For inspiration, do a Bing on "Nike's digital strategy" for example.
This leads to another important debate: who should manage your corporate social media presence? Your marketing department is already overloaded, sales don't want to get involved and you end up hiring a social media agency. However, are you willing to let someone else manage your personal social media presence? Probably not.
Companies should take a similar approach by hiring consultants, creatives and developers to help them improve their presence, but the actual management should be done in-house if you intend to see effective results.
Great questions you pose, Alexander.
100% agreed that social media does not replace traditional methods of branding.
Great post, Alexander! I think that social media is definitely not good for strategy, like you said. It is a function of marketing, I think this schism develops because most marketing directors and decision makers are generation X, who are not as comfortable with social media being so ubiquitous like us Y'ers. Once Y'ers get to the top, there will be new channels that will raise such debates :)
i am not convinced that social media is as important 2 marketing as people say.
that's an interesting approach, thanks. I'll be writing an article about this taking all your point of views into consideration :)