Social Marketing Puzzle

What I’m learning about Social Media marketing is that every 48 hours the information I thought was cutting edge becomes irrelevant. New tools and technologies are coming online hourly, users are opting in in droves and are finding new ways to communicate, sell and sway opinion. I used to think that Google Adwords was the hardest media tool to wrangle, but strategizing for retail use of FourSquare, Yelp and finding the “best” blog platform and account aggregator have trumped AdWords easily. Social marketing has become a game of endurance. Research, strategize, try, test, learn and start over. Those steps follow one another over and over and over. As professional marketers, we love the challenge, we love teaching our clients about how to use it, and we can’t wait for what it throws us next.

For the most up-to-date presentation and white paper on the Social Marketing Puzzle, see below.

YouTube’s Only Five Years Old?

In advertising these days, the holy grail is “viral video” — a spot that gets hundreds of thousands of impressions online, even if it only runs a few times on traditional broadcast television. Ad agencies spend tons of time and money trying to make the next “viral” spot, because internet buzz proves more cost-effective — and often just plain effective — than spending millions placing an ad on television.

So it’s hard to believe that, just five years ago, the term “viral video” didn’t exist — because there was nowhere for the virus to incubate. But on Valentines Day 2005, the domain name www.youtube.com was registered… the first little baby step in a project that would quite literally change the world.

More than 1 billion videos per day are now viewed on YouTube, and a whole host of imitators and innovators have popped up since. Want TV on your schedule? Go to Hulu. Want higher-quality, artier fare? Try Vimeo. Want comedy? Head over to Funny Or Die. But the queen bee is still YouTube, the place where news, advertising, soapbox and spam collide. Some of the most popular advertisements of recent years (Bud Light’s “Swear Jar,” for instance, or eTrade’s “Trading Baby”) only ran a few times on television, but garnered millions of intentional views on YouTube.

But what does it mean for you? It means, at a minimum, that there’s a low-cost, low-maintenance way to reach potential customers. But what is also means is that “traditional advertising” — print, radio and television — is now just a part of the equation. The other part — a portion that’s growing larger each and every day — is social media. Businesses and brands can no longer rely on a huge ad buy to make an impact, because if it doesn’t connect with consumers in a meaningful way, it will make LESS of an impression than it ever has. The market is saturated: More channels, more websites, and more ad impressions than ever before… it spurs us to tune out the noise, and pay attention only to those things that really connects to us.

It’s a challenge, to be sure, but it’s also an opportunity: To stand out from the crowd by being… well, interesting, for sure — but more importantly, being open, honest and accountable to your customers and clients. It’s a rebirth of human connection via technology, and it’s arguably all thanks to YouTube.

We say “Toolbox.” You say “What?” Let us explain.

At Werkshop, we talk about the Marketing Toolbox. To us, it’s as familiar as the alphabet, and what we pull out of it is different from client to client.

Many companies and small businesspeople come to us with tool malfunction. Agencies, experts or ad sales executives, offering a grab-bag of marketing tactics, led the client to choose a marketing tool without knowing what they were getting into. Now, they need guidance to fix the problem they inadvertently caused.

For example: Over lunch recently, a businessman told me about his experience with a traditional marketing tool, direct mail. He then proclaimed that it “no longer works.” You see, he and his partners had designed a postcard touting their business’s strengths, purchased a mailing list pulled the trigger — and were perplexed when they received not a single response. Clearly, the mailing was ineffective. But what I attempted to explain is that the mailing really couldn’t be effective — in fact, no marketing tactic is effective when undertaken without proper planning. Without a blueprint, the tool can’t be held responsible for its results!

The hammer is only as good as the person holding the nail. Without careful holding, the hammer will only beat the heck out of the object underneath of it! So I asked my lunch companion some questions, attempting to figure out why the mailing didn’t work. Was it the message? The art? When did it arrive in mailboxes? Did the mailing list meet targeted criteria? What did the project cost? And, most importantly, was the company’s expectations of the direct mail campaign legitimate?

He couldn’t really answer most of the questions — which is precisely the point! The lack of planning caught up with the company, and thus a potential opportunity was just wasted paper (and wasted money).

Each tool in the marketing toolbox has its place. Public relations, web communication, interactive media, mass advertising — the list is lengthy, but not every campaign requires every tool. Every tool, however, requires a focused, fine-tuned strategy in order to work the way it was intended.