Usually it’s along the lines of – “I can’t understand why anyone would want to (tweet / post on facebook / join a linkedin grou). What a waste of time.
I hear this a lot – and I can’t say as I blame the people who are saying it – from the outside these social media networks look like a colossal time sink, with very little ROI. There are an awful lot of unsubstantiated fad marketing tactics, and you’d be crazy to not be skeptical. My response is usually something along these lines:
“It may be asinine to ‘tweet’ that you’re heading to the bathroom. But if you’re Charmin, it’s a great opportunity to interact with your brand.”
I got this full force while I was doing some research for marketing automation providers. This is an amazingly complex undertaking – with suprisingly few areas where you can compare vendors. In any case, I happened to post on my twitter account that “Evaluating Marketing Automation solutions at 11:15 on a Friday night. WTF is wrong with me? :)” My boss reads my twitter account. 🙂
Next Monday – I got three calls from marketing automation vendors.
If you’re skeptical about social marketing working for your organization, do the following:
- Head over to search.twitter.com
- Type in your brand
- Add the Feed to your favorite RSS reader.
- Repeat a couple of times for keywords of interest for your product.
If you watch these feeds over a couple of days, and aren’t convinced you need to be interacting in social media, call me.
