Social Marketing Conversations

If a marketer relies on social marketing to help drive awareness and driving consumer behavior, does it lower the demand for good creative?

I read an article today over at AdAge.com by Pete Blackshaw titled ‘Who Owns Social Anyway?’ and enjoyed one thing in particular in his article.  Pete pointed out the left-brain, right-brain battle many of us feel in social media. 

For me at least, there is a desire to place some structure around our behavior and activity while simultaneously wanting to rebel and rail against structure in the pursuit of a social presence that is genuine and honest in the content and thus, often produced in the spirit of a just-in-time, get it our the door to share mentality.

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The behaviors in social media are broad, but not so broad they cannot be identified.  When you visit a blog, you can only do so many things –

These options assume a text blog, but even if it is a video blog or any other type of social platform, we agree that the actions that might be taken are not infinite. 

Is One Action More Valuable Than Another? I think so.  Subscribing to a blog, or opting-in to receive more content from the same author or source, is a much higher value action than just dropping in to consume a single article.  Thinking enough of the content or the author to share with others in your network begins to establish you as an advocate of the content, not just a visitor that consumes the content – this is a holy grail of online marketing, to have advocates for your brand, not just consumers of your content.

The process that takes a content consumer from one level to another is worthy of evaluation by the marketing community and as the content consumer moves along the continuum, ranking the value of one activity over another becomes meaningful.

Why Try to Establish The Value of an Activity or Mention? By assigning a value to the activity, you can develop a more easily conveyed ‘score’ that allows you to determine in non-financial terms, how well you are doing in the effort to leverage social media as a marketing tactic.  The score needs to be couched with other data I imagine, such as number of posts contained in the score and some factor that recognizes the age of the post, but if we are intent on establishing an ROI at some point of the effort, this kind of key indicator data serves a meaningful purpose.

Meet the Social Interaction Scoring Table.  My associate, Guy Powell and I have been discussing and working on the ROI of Social Media and during the conversation this notion came to me.  From that point I developed this table as an example of the scoring that might apply to not just a blog post, but a wide variety of social media platforms.

I share it here for your comment and to open a community dialog on the concept of being able to score the Social Interaction and how it begins to support the process of measuring mentions.

I had breakfast with a friend this morning who thinks strategically about social media and I restated an idea other friends and colleagues have heard me utter and that is that ‘Social Media is dying, long live media that is social’.

They were coming from a position that they were getting tired of the mainstream usage of the phrase ‘social media’ and I was coming from an observation that in the very near future, all media will be social and that as a culture, we will expect, nay demand, our interaction with the media around us to provide the opportunity to be social.

The model of interaction and development of advertising, marketing and corporate communications is destined to undergo still even more radical changes based on the principals and paradigms of what we call today, social media.

The dampener on the explosion of social media is the inability of brands and corporation to control the messages related to their brand.  When this comes up, I find myself stating that “control is an illusion, at best, you can try to herd cats” when it comes to social media.

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