It is a common human psyche that whenever a new thing emerges and explodes in the social circuit, there are lots of opinionated views about the same, and some of them result in myths being born. Social Media is one such example, which has been examined by a plethora of enthusiasts to the minutest of details. In the process many have concluded that there are some ideas which are a complete contrast to the original ideas and thus they have resulted in the myths being formed about Social Media.
Let’s get to know – What are the most common Social Media Myths and the truths in them?
- Social Media helps us calculate various media metrics; but all should be in the form of data. Let me remind you, this is the era where data is available, we are still to reach that Utopian era where knowledge is available on the social media front. To come to a conclusion after fair amount of examination, only data is needed, and not knowledge, because data will never trump the simplest of theories and behavioral models.
- Social Media is free, but the implementation of it in a corporate program is not free. Some free social media tools include Google’s (GOOG) video-sharing site YouTube, Yahoo’s (YHOO) photo-sharing siteFlickr, the social-network building tool Ning, and content aggregators such as Digg and eBay’s (EBAY)StumbleUpon, free blogging tools such as WordPress, Twitter, and FriendFeed. But, proper integration of all these tools to build a classy and effective corporate marketing program requires skill, time, and money. Some companies have invested less and some have more, but the price factor is always involved in the implementation part.
- Not just another ’somebody’ can be a social media expert. A Business week post says that “Search the bios of Robert Scoble’s 56,838 Twitter followers using Tweepsearch, an index of the bios of Twitter users, and you’ll find:
- 4,273 Internet marketers
- 1,652 social media marketers
- 513 social media consultants
- 272 social media strategists
- 180 social media experts
- 98 social media gurus
- 58 Internet marketing gurus
I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find half a dozen with real track records“. I hope the message here is loud and clear.
4. Customer Engagement is the key to success in social media marketing, but the place to find the correct set of prospective customers is the most difficult answer. Unlimited targeting is how both B2B and B2C social media marketing work, but the problem here lies in the same unlimited targeting. Customers these days have become too unpredictable for it to succeed and moreover grouping of similar customers based on behavior as a scale again involves costly technology.
5. The phrase ‘Old is Gold’ is true and the proof of that is Mass-marketing still exists and is very effective too. If you think that mass marketing is inferior in social media marketing, beware, because then you should need your product to be used by a million of people and share recommendations for your product to be able to rake in the moolah in a significant way. Viral marketing creates just a sniffle and a raise of an eyebrow, nothing more than that. Sure, you would dis-agree but that’s what the truth is. If you operate in a concentrated market in a B2B domain, viral might be the way for you, but other than it, quite less chance. Just check what JibJab is doing these days.
For sure, you’d find at least a million articles on the web about the myths in social media today, but all these posts have something in common yet something new. And, so has this one too.
One last thought – The media has stated boldly that social networking is the “in” thing, but does it mean that customers are there and a sale is guaranteed. I doubt. Social Media Success may taste good now, but would it be feasible in the long run is for Time to answer.
