Everyone Thinks He Can Be a Social-Media Marketer

I agree completely. As you suggest, it's really a larger question of whether an organization is ready to commit to a social media marketing program. Unlike traditional marketing campaigns, you cannot just flip the social media marketing switch on and off. It doesn't really work that way. An organization must commit to always keeping information current and relevant.

I really believe that successful social programs start with the development of a holistic social media marketing strategy, which begins with a fundamental question: Is your audience even using this medium? If not, spending dollars on a large scale social program is not going to get you the results you're looking for.

Companies must evaluate all of these questions before entering this space because nothing looks worse than a corporate Twitter account with three lonely tweets from last fall.

Kevin Sonoff
Digital Marketing Buzz
http://www.digitalmarketingbuzz.com

Despite the click-baiting title :) to this article I agree - the CMO's job has actually gotten much more difficult. But it isn't limited the CMO.

Agencies (the real kind - not the 1-3 person shops that have sprung up in the past year offering bargain basement prices and "experience") have been hit hard by all the white noise about social media.

B.L. - this page deserves a link to one of your previous articles on how to identify a good partner to develop salient and profitable customer relationships via social media. We, as an industry, need to keep reminding marketers and agencies alike that in order to take advantage of a new and exciting medium (social media), it takes expertise, time, and money, just like every other kind of marketing.

Sometimes that means taking a risk as a CMO and allocating budget that would have gone to more traditional media (TV, Radio, Print) to integrated social business strategy. If you don't have the core competencies then you need to find an agency that does, and is willing to help build them into your company for you.

Nicholas E. Kinports
Digital Integration Manager
Blog: http://admaven.blogspot.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/admaven

This social media shift has placed a greater emphasis on the concept of "inside-out branding." Consumers expect brands to consist of passionate individuals -- sneaker freaks, coffee mavens, movie buffs, running enthusiasts, etc. Brands that can deliver on that expectation are the ones who are likely to succeed in the social space. Zappos, Jet Blue, and Starbucks succeed because their social media presence reflects precisely what consumers expect and demand them to be.

Brands who can't deliver on that experience have a more difficult challenge. They need to operate with a different goal in mind, not to open up their companies to the public, but rather, to facilitate an interaction between the people who DO live those lifestyles.

More than any medium before it, the social media revolution demands authenticity. Brands need to determine how they can deliver authentic social experiences if they hope to survive.

Brian Chiger | AgencyNet
www.ANidea.com
twitter: @brianchiger

I wouldn't worry too much. The new crop of marketing interns is coming out of school right now, and they'll be be able to pick up your slack in the social media department with their Master's degree in social media from the University of Salford. "Really!?!" you ask. Yes. Really: http://kl.am/MKM

In my 10 years doing interactive marketing I find social media to be the hardest marketing strategy to implement. It's harder from every angle: the client, the "internal champion", the budget, the strategy, the segmentation, the community management, the relevancy, the competitive, the creative, the measurement, the resources needed to implement. We are still in the lower part of the learning curve, exploring and testing new methodologies and tactics every day and shifting thoughts back and forth from being "social media evangelists" to complete skeptics of the "fad". One thing is certain, Facebook and Twitter continue to rise in ways never imagined, now omnipresent in most communication efforts from brands and entities of every sort, and somehow making the old corporate www site almost irrelevant to the "social citizens" who, besides snooping into their colleagues' weekend pictures and tweeting with Shaq, are now also interested in the weekend pictures of Gatorade or tweeting with Mr.Clean.
Let's see how much bandwidth a user will have to accomodate friends, news and brands -many brands- under the same happy roof. (Let alone the spammers).
Jury is out. In the meantime, I'll continue to be an evangelist.

The question about social media is the shift of paradigm from braodcast to socialcast.
In our agency, we have it clear that broadcast is about spread the word to everyone, while socialcast is dialoguing with the ones that matter. Interactive media is the way not the destination to social media.
Traditional advertinsing focus on speaking, speaking and speaking and now the industry has to learn to dialogue and listen, and more importantly, to allow co-creation in a collaborative environment.
But this is only the beginin of a new kind of people connectivity and everyone has to be humble to say "I don´t know. I´m learning".
All the Best to you All!
Marcos Souza Aranha

Kevin - All demographics are adopting it in their own way. What companies need to learn is what their audience cares about and wants to hear from them. A lonely Twitter account is usually results from failing to follow the 12:1 rule - 12 times you offer information, respond to other people's tweets, answer questions; once you promote yourself.

Nick - "Agencies (the real kind - not the 1-3 person shops that have sprung up in the past year offering bargain basement prices and "experience")" - the reason 1-3 person shops can thrive is that they often cut through all the posturing of big agencies.

Brian - I agree that authenticity is the key, but disagree that you have to have a "sexy" brand to succeed in social media. There are all kinds of ways to interact with the public.

bduebelbeis - let me know when they get some judgment, contacts, resources, and, oh yeah, experience. and maybe ahem, jobs.

There are a ton of people out there claiming to be social media experts. Some-- can be effective in 1-3 person-- "experienced" shops, however, the big company CMO is more than likely with a bigger agency and will look to them for advice.

They will probably take dollars from the digital budget to carve out their "social media" line item on the flowchart and test it. Many of the big agencies don't get it at all and are srambling to build decks claiming their expertise. They might have "emerging technology" departments and staff claiming successes and maybe even some case studies, but most will continue to push messages to answer to the ROI call set upon them by the CMo, who in turn is getting pressure to test social media, but needs to quickly provide metrics of success.

And since the CMO may not have been haven't properly educated about having conversations in social media to build loyalty and brand value and that it takes time to build these relationships, the program will probably be listed as a test pilot for 3 months and then considered a failure because it didn't turn into sales/acquisitions, whatever.

I'm not going to claim to be an "expert" on social media, to me that title is so ubiquitous now that it's like spam, but I've been to enough social media conferences, read the books, articles, etc, and have been implementing the strategies learned for my personal website http://www.thethreetomatoes.com, that I at least know what NOT to do. Having started in internet marketing in 1994-when the first onlilne ads appeared online, this is reminiscent of that throwing darts to see what sticks. It's just another way to get your message to people, however, this time it's not all about you (the brand). It's about them (the people).

The Mayfly lifespan of a CMO can be tracked back to two things:
1. CEOs (and their HR's) who can't spin their wheels out of the manic rut of hiring CMOs who are either metrics-driven MBAs...or new-media/social-net-driven "marketers"

2. CMOs (and their HR's) in either of those manic states who can't make the big-picture-big-idea connection

Answer: Hybrid strategic-creative chops, with proven case study experience as a brand positioner and creative brand leap taker. The CEOs (and their HR's) who rethink their CMO search to find a hybrid-experienced marketer, with strategic and creative chops and a counter-intuitive sense of branding...will gain the Paid+Organic CPM value others just won't approach. It's art and science both. Not one or the other.

http://www.janzlotnick.com

Is this an article?

Dear Breedlove - this is a blog post. :>)

True marketers make it look so easy that the rest of us think we can do it. Because some of it is instinctive, this also feeds the illusion. Working with excellent marketers over the years, some of their knowledge has rubbed off on me and I have greedily (and gratefully) applied it, but this has also taught me that it is both art and science...far beyond merely technique. There is a discipline involved. It is unfortunate that the immense value of true marketing is often missed, but the organizations that "get it" do seem to have the most sustainable and synergistic marketing efforts in the end...and this applies to social media marketing as well.

I think the concept of how to use and why to use social media is largely a perception issue. For one, much of the strategy work I do for brands and agencies becomes much larger than building out a SM outreach program or developing a community platform - this work really takes inventory of and calls into question the marketing efforts that are being considered or implemented across all disciplines - search, online advertising, print or otherwise. For another, as some folks here have pointed out, in looking at how various targets consume media, it becomes clear that often times some very unexpected channels or methods of outreach are appropriate... these may not be considered your "standard" SM channels, but they usually have a very strong social bent nonetheless. These could come in the form of an experiential component, a DR component, or even something broadcasted to us.

Most clients I've worked with don't look at social marketing from a transmedia perspective. Most agencies I've worked with don't allow their various departments to talk to each other in this way. Many CMOs or DMs haven't had access to those that do.

The point is that real conversation ultimately transcends the channels we use, and becomes something greater than what we initially represent to our audiences. This is precisely why so many brands struggle with SM - because they want to control a message as opposed to letting it spread organically and creatively.

Best,

Gunther Sonnenfeld
http://thinkstate.com
http://www.welcometonow.blogspot.com
http://www.twitter.com/goonth

@nickkinports wrote "Sometimes that means taking a risk as a CMO and allocating budget that would have gone to more traditional media (TV, Radio, Print) to integrated social business strategy."

What's scary about social media from the perspective of CMOs is the lack of defined ROI metrics that exist elsewhere in other marketing channels such as advertising. Putting myself in the shoes of a CMO, I'd be more reluctant to invest in social media for this reason. Although social media is certainly about more than driving traffic and click-throughs, I've attempted to nail down a relatively simple metric that would allow CMOs to at least compare social media with other marketing activities in common terms: Cost per Click for social media campaigns. Would be great to get more feedback on our corporate blog:
http://www.pageonepr.com/blog/2009/06/11/using-cost-per-click-for-social-media-roi/

David Robbins
Page One Public Relations

David, don't encourage CMOs to get any more frozen in the headlights than they are....check out the case study of what Deep Focus did for HBO's Flight of the Conchords....perfect balance of brilliant strategic and creative thinking...WITH the ROI metrics every CMO can, or should learn to, love. I hope these links are it or will quickly get you to it....it

http://www.deep-focus.net/

http://ow.ly/9Rm6

-- jan zlotnick