This happens to me at parties all the time – I’m regaling Princess Grace and Bill Wyman with stories of my escapades on a sleeper car in the French Riveria when …oh wait, that’s not me. I was thinking of Truman Capote. What does actually happen to me is I’ll get into a conversation about social media marketing and find that we are all talking about completely different things.
There will be one person’s agency which places ads on a variety of social media platforms, another agency that creates assets to be used on social media sites like YouTube, and a handful of other agencies like Reprise Media which specialize in engagement within social media spaces.
It’s like having an English grammar master class taught by Charo, George W. Bush and Brad Pitt in Snatch.
While there is nothing wrong with banner ads and other forms of display on sites like Facebook and MySpace, it’s essentially an extension of the sort of traditional media buying online that’s done on any website. You have access to a different, sometimes vastly larger audience on some social media sites but beyond that it’s really nothing new.
Granted there are new ad forms like Facebook’s polling ads that attempt to bring a level of engagement to the game but so far users seem to find these more annoying than enlightening.
Our point of view is that brands and marketers ought to take advantage of what is unique about social media sites. This is becoming even more crucial as socialized elements pop up all over the Internet, from traditional websites like the New York Times (with their Times People) and Variety (who did a joint venture with Facebook tied to the Oscars) to search engines like Google who are experimenting with ways for users to personalize search results.
So what is unique about social media?
The interactions that go on between people, how they build networks, and what they talk about and with who. For brands, building optimized profiles on key sites can be far more valuable (and cost-effective) than old-fashioned advertising there. We’ve seen firsthand how brand’s can discover their “voice” online, just in the act of engaging in a social space. That voice can then flow through all of their marketing – from TV even to print and outdoor display.
Part of doing this well is understanding where your customers are – not every site or forum is right for every brand. Some products appeal to multiple, very different groups – how you talk to people on a user forum might be very different to how you talk to them on Twitter.
Finally, it’s not all gabbing – a major component of social media marketing from our point of view is listening. There’s a lot to be learned about how people engage with your brand or more widely, with the type of product or service you offer by paying attention to what they say in highly trafficked areas like YouTube, Twiiter, and Facebook, and drilling down to subsets on blogs and forums.
What you learn translates into keyword discovery for paid search and SEO, better copy for all of your advertising and marketing, and even to changes in what you offer and who you offer it to.
So now you know what we mean by social media marketing – what do you mean?
Questions or comments? Feel free to leave them here or check out Reprise Media folks on Twitter.
