Is Social Media a Marketing Thing?

In the last couple of weeks, we've been talking about leveraging content to start or continue a conversation with your customers or prospects. Offering something of value in exchange for attention towards a mutually accepted goal or direction goes to the heart of communications.

There is still plenty of unrealized opportunity for B2B companies to unlock this value through social media. That's because the greatest value to the organization that gets involved in social media is not the cool promotional glitz.

We talk about customer support regularly. What about customer acquisition and real time retention? We kind of know about new product ideas. What about strategic business intelligence? These more operational business ideas go along with humanizing the organization, establishing yourself as a thought leader, and tracking marketing effectiveness.

We touched upon these topics in our conversation yesterday at the Web 2.0 Expo with Jennifer Zeszut of Scout Labs, Peter Kim of Dachis, Shiv Singh of Razonfish, Randy Ksar of Motorola, Aaron Dignan of Undercurrent, and James Smith of Disney.com.

The attitudes and approaches remain the same:

• (degrees of) transparency
• ability (and tools) to listen
• openness to dialogue (and data capture)
• humanness (as in being human and injecting human experience in correlating and interpreting data)

It's possible that what you're currently doing, the way your operation is organized, are great. And that you're a perfect fit for your customer, prospects, and the market as a whole.

But here's the thing, sometimes when you get out there and start talking with customers through many levels - and lenses - in the organization... once you start not just seeing, but experiencing the behaviors of your partners and even those of your competitors, you will know whether that market alignment is real. Well, you kind of know already from your sales numbers, if they're really bad one of the options could still be a communication problem.

Unless as an organization you bring back what you learn out there inside, unless you change the way you create the ultimate value - that of your products and services, how you deliver them, what they are in the first place, then social media is just window dressing in the same way as a lot of marketing has come to be considered these days - making a splash with glitzy or shiny objects, and backing it up with little substance or sustainable value over time.

Social media could be either the biggest bubble that ever hit us all, even bigger than the dot-bomb. Or, it could be the best thing that ever happened to your business, if you learn to make it operational. In that case, you could say it is a marketing thing after all.

The whole business from product conceptualization to its internal functions, to the go-to-market piece, and everything in between. If that's what you mean, then you see right away how B2B companies have indeed a very rich opportunity to become useful not just to customers looking for information, but to the marketplace in its entirety by becoming better organizations.

What do you think? Is social media a marketing thing?

© 2006-2009 Valeria Maltoni. All rights reserved.

Comments

[gianandrea facchini]

Valeria, to me Social Media is well over marketing. I do not agree on the definition of marketing thing because it is operational (hope I got your point, indeed). I think that trying to name it with any of the current company function is limiting the real impact Social Media can deliver across the company itself.

[nbond]

Thank you for this post Valeria -- it inspired me to write this post...

http://whalelines.posterous.com/social-media-an-emotional-revolution

[Russ Henneberry]

"Offering something of value in exchange for attention towards a mutually accepted goal or direction goes to the heart of communications."

This is a very profound statement -- and I think the key word is value. Too often, organizations misread the opportunity that social media provides -- using it as just another platform for promotion.

Social media (IMO) is indeed marketing but a different kind of marketing. It requires that the organization be human in a way that is unprecedented. The core of humanness is providing value and benefit to each other, this should be the main goal of an organizations social media strategy.

[Ryan Waggoner]

I think social media marketing offers an opportunity to get back to true marketing, rather than marketing-as-a-synonym-for-sales. The American Marketing Association definition of marketing is this:

"the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large."

I think too often, we focus on the communicating and delivering part of that, and we really ignore the creating part. One of the growing movements in the startup world is Customer Development, which you can read more about at the links below, but essentially, it's the idea that you should be talking to your potential customers about your products before you have a product. It's the idea that your marketing process should run the entire length of your product development cycle, rather than being tacked onto the end. And social media offers organizations great opportunities to connect directly to their markets and learn how better to serve them.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0976470705
http://www.startuplessonslearned.com

[GR Hansen]

This is an insightful post, touching many of the most important points of B2B communication.

And your closing question - in my opinion - is no longer valid. Social Media = Marketing Thing? Of course, that's the most popular question asked these days when discussing Twitter, Blogs, and other new media formats. It would be like asking - 20 years ago - is cable TV a "marketing thing"?

The business term "marketing" has been around for years, but has meant different things to different organizations, some leaning more toward communication and some more toward sales promotion.

Social media continues its evolution as a communication platform and tool for individuals as well as enterprises large and small.

Social media is certainly changing the way companies do their "marketing thing." Social media is helping some companies find a new way to communicate, to trade their things of value directly with others who want to make trades.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Gianandrea - marketing equals business, though. I know that today we find it in a small and usually underfunded and stretched part of the business, but that doesn't change that fact.

@nbond - very interesting. I could not make a direct correlation with this post, but I can see overall the ideas and conversations here as inspiring it.

@Russ - in many organizations, you have all sorts of people suggesting marketing how they should be doing their job just because they might have taken a class, or read an ad. You don't see people telling the accountants what to do just because they can use a spreadsheet, right? It all starts with a misunderstanding of the term "marketing" in the first place. Sales should provide value and not be a push to sign on the dotted line, accounting should provide value to the rest of the organization by collaborating and not being a complex bureaucracy that demands to be fed... and so on.

@Ryan - that would be super! You would not have products that mean nothing to end users who will never search for those names ever again.

@GR - rhetorical questions do have a place in writing ;) I get your point, terms get overused, or used poorly, and then they lose their meaning. Is social media changing the way companies do marketing? I see many examples of digital marketing extended through social media channels... not so many about the business benefiting from market conversations. There's opportunity for sure, and we're definitely very early in the cycle. I just hope it won't be a bubble before it starts yielding the real results, when the tools finally become boring.

[Chris Ross]

Social media can provide value to virtually every group within an organization of any size. Marketing is clearly where most companies have dipped their toes into the water, but as the possibilities of social media begin to become better understood it's clear that customer service, sales, product development and other groups within every company will begin using social media.

As you point out so well Valeria, social media about a news ways of connecting and new methods of utilizing the value that comes from those connections. An idea like that is certainly not limited to marketing.

[Akash Sharma]

Every point highlighted above is quite true,Social Media conceptualization is not just for B2B firms but for every individual who is trying to get something out of web 2.0 as a whole.

I don't think its a bubble anymore as its been proven that if you understand the real sense of it that is to build a mutual relation by adding value to each other, you can easily go a long way with social media.

@GRHansen Rightly said on Valeria's last question, It would be like asking - 20 years ago - is cable TV a "marketing thing"?

[Adam Needles]

Thanks for this post, Valeria.

So my opinion is that it most certainly is NOT a marketing thing.

This is a new communication medium, and it should make our companies more transparent and buyer-focused than ever.

I think the challenge, though, is less about engaging every department in social media. Rather, it is the organizational change when it comes to better engaging with the buyer and making that a cross-organizational thing.

Great call-out and great item to be talking about right now.

Adam Needles
B2B Marketing Evangelist
Silverpop

Twitter: @abneedles
Blog: http://www.silverpop.com/blogs/demand-generation/