If you are not using social media, you are not alone. According to a recent survey of over 400 senior marketing managers, 4 out of 10 companies are still in the early stages of social media integration, and only 14% feel they have social media fully integrated into their business processes. The bigger question is why haven’t you started using social media? We’ve come across a number of opinions over the last couple of years. “I’m too old” ” I don’t have any young kids I trust to run it” This ageism is a disaster waiting to happen. Does one need to die in order to understand death?
Social Media is a marketing tool. Yes, it is different than your traditional one way newspaper, radio, or television marketing…but it is a way to reach out and speak with your customers and prospective customers. Putting anyone in charge of a product or service because they have used or do use they product is never a smart idea. I’ve flown on many a jet aircraft. You don’t want me to fly one however.
“Social Media is a fad”. Yes, it is. So too is rock and roll, cars, telephones, computers, and television. Some fads last weeks, some for years, others for generations. Social media isn’t going away anytime soon. MySpace, the once king of social media, is a pale ghost of its former self. Today the king is Facebook. Tomorrow is might be something we barely notice today, or something that doesn’t exist today. Just because you never heard of Facebook or Twitter five years ago doesn’t make its power and reach today insignificant. If you are in your 40’s 50’s or even older, think of the changes in downtown and suburban shopping areas you’ve seen over the last several decades. Just because someplace was or something was once powerful, doesn’t make it always so. Conversely, just because something wasn’t all that important 5 years ago doesn’t mean it isn’t today or wont be tomorrow.
” I don’t see the ROI in social media”. Really? How have you measured the ROI of your last newspaper ad, radio spot, billboard, or mailer? Do you ask every customer? What do you ask them? Many many years ago I was a regional marketing manager for the University of Phoenix, overseeing the marketing and advertising in five states. It was very funny how every time we ran a new radio campaign (our biggest advertising medium at the time), our yellow page ads magically grew larger and the lights on our buildings grew brighter. By that I mean in sourcing every phone call, people would rarely acknowledge the new campaign of radio ads and credit the phone book they looked our number up in or would say they drove past the building every day. The new campaign of course was the driving force, but people as we know like to be…they just hate being sold. Social media is an interactive 2-way medium that allows you to keep your name and your brand in front of your customers and potential customers in a non-threatening cordial manner. Best of all, social media need not be expensive. Yes, you have to commit time to it and as we know, time is money….but it is certainly a lot less than the money you might spend on a radio or television campaign who don’t know who might see or hear.
Most importantly social media is where your customers are. Close to 30% of the time we all spend online is spent interacting on social media sites. You wouldn’t open a store in the middle of nowhere just because the rent is dirt cheap. You choose to be close to where your customers are. Hence the shopping center. You pick a physical location based on where you can garner the most amount of customers, why would you not do the same with your message?
