Why Advertisers Have to Join the Social Media Conversation

Posted by | Filed under Advertising | Jan 29, 2009 | Tags: , , , | 3 Comments

Old school distraction advertising just doesn’t have the impact it used to …especially when used on new media.  Even the New York times is chiming in on the failure of advertising on social media sites.

As an avid participant in social networking and social media this concerns me only in that successful revenue models for all of those eyeballs has been elusive so far.  That means that Facebook could go away at some point because they never figure out how to make it profitable.

For advertisers this isn’t as bad as it looks.  The solution for advertisers is to join the conversation and stop spending most of your money on pitching ads.

Instead spend some of that money turning your employees into an army of reputation managers on Twitter and company bloggers while hiring outside experts to craft and drive a full fledged social media campaign.  You’ll spend a fraction of the cost for better and longer lasting results.

The truth about social media is that in dollars it is much less expensive than traditional media campaigns, but it does take quite a bit of time if you do it right.

One full time in house person can do an outstanding job for you.  Even having an employee devote two hours a day to Twitter, blogging, creating backlinks, participating in forums, etc. can have a meaningful impact on your bottom line.

If you’re still wondering if it’s worth the time and money to invest in building your brand online consider two things.  One: Dell made $1 Million on Twitter.  Two: Your customers live and talk about you to others online, not on TV, radio or magazines so if you’re not where they are what’s the future of your company going to look like?

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...
  • http://www.webtrafficroi.com ZK@Internet Marketing Blog

    Advertiser have been shying away from social media as they dont see instant revenue for their investment, they need to undersatnd the influence and impact that social media can have on a brand, service or product. Thanks for the link.

  • http://www.blindinfluence.com Sopan Greene

    Great point. They need to wake up to the fact that long term relationships with customers are more valuable now than instant ROI tracking on a quarterly ad campaign. That old school model is going the way of the Big 3 automakers old way of doing business. Thanks for commenting

  • http://www.aicreative.com/marketing-blog/ Angelika Ilina

    I think one of the reasons they’re shying away is because, according to the 2009 Social Media Benchmark Guide by MarketingSherpa, the most effective social media tactics are the least measurable. If you can’t measure ROI very well, it’s difficult to convince business owners, CEO’s, and marketers to invest a lot of their marketing dollars in social media. And to make an in-house person do it is even more difficult – they’re already overwhelmed with the work load as it is.

    But companies are definitely interested in hearing about their options for using social media to promote their businesses. I’m glad there are apps like TweetLater that allow to schedule your Twitter campaigns. With this type of app, I might be able to convince some of my clients to start doing some of it in-house.