The Vampire of Social Media Purity Deserves to Die

“And I will have Carfax Abbey torn down stone by stone, excavated a mile around. I will find your earth box and drive that stake through your heart.” ~ Edward van Sloan as Van Helsing / Dracula 1931

Working at the intersection of ROI, marketing and social media in particular has been a topic that has drawn my interest since the early development of social media as a connecting consumer technology.

As social media came onto the scene, a debate cropped up that social media was a ‘tool of the people’ and that to propose its use as a business tactic was heretical.  We still see vestiges of that debate now and then, but by and large, we do not see much of it I think because the flood of early practitioners has subsided and the bar for entry as a social marketer has been raised past the point that creating a Facebook page and opening a Twitter account suddenly launched a new consultancy.  The discussions by marketers has risen to a point that business people recognize that marketing has an ROI that can be associated with it and that social media marketing can have a VERY high ROI indeed.