About Social Media Today
In a word, no.
But if you’re a business, organization, or government agency and think you can continue with your advertising, marketing, and public relations campaigns as you’ve always done without regard for this newfangled thing called “the internet,” think again!
Photo credit: Kevin Steele @ Flickr
An entry in today’s Boston Real Estate Blog questions whether social media tools like Facebook and Twitter can sell more homes than newspaper ads.
The number of real estate agents who write blogs doubled this year from 4% to 8%, and 13% said they plan to start a blog, according to a survey by the National Association of Realtors. Other surveys have 10% of brokers using blogs.
There is one comment so far from Linda who writes, “Radio survived with the TV. Social media sites won’t replace newspapers.”
She may be right but is she willing to stake $500 to $50,000 a year on TV and newspaper ads in case she’s wrong?
Or would she be open to the notion of paying me far less than an ad campaign to build networks and grow relationships with her target customers (or prospective tenants in the case of real estate) to achieve a potential greater ROI?
While you think about that, head across town where president Diane Danielson of the Downtown Women’s Club of Boston attributes Seth Godin regarding his marketing lessons for the election, including this bit that TV is dead.
As Seth writes:
If people are interested, they’ll watch. On their time (or their boss’s time). They’ll watch online, and spread the idea. You can’t email a TV commercial to a friend, but you can definitely spread a YouTube video. The cycle of ads got shorter and shorter, and the most important ads were made for the web, not for TV. Your challenge isn’t to scrape up enough money to buy TV time. Your challenge is to make video interesting enough that we’ll choose to watch it and choose to share it.
Switch to Diane of the Downtown Women’s Club, in response:
It’s true that the first time I watched “TV” on my computer was for the conventions. That broke the dam and now I watch TV shows, movies, conferences, etc. and assume if I miss the Daily Show or SNL, I can always find the good stuff on line.
Like Linda’s comment on the Boston Real Estate Blog that TV will survive social media, a woman named Deborah commented to Diane that CNN and other networks received high ratings for their election coverage, and as long as organizations engage in multi-channel marketing, people will tune in.
Photo credit: Mildly Diverting @ Flickr
The marketing lesson from the campaign, Deborah writes, is “you have to have all hands on deck in order to win.”
Kim Cornwall Malseed, a B2B marketer and copywriter in northern Virginia with her firm, Marcom Ink, understands this. She provides 6 marketing tips gleaned from the election cycle, from which I highlight two pieces:
Most voters I know don’t just view, listen to, or read one source for information on who they’re going to vote for, and the Presidential campaigns certainly know this and take advantage of the available communications avenues: TV, radio, Internet, blogs and social media, telemarketing, direct mail, signs, bumper stickers, word-of-mouth, you name it.
Both candidates used social media marketing via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and several other outlets to “reach younger voters,” but many older voters have also caught on to the value of social media to stay up to date on the candidates and campaigns….Using social media for B2B marketing is valuable on its own but using it to support your other marketing efforts makes it twice as effective.
As you can see from folks in Boston and Virginia (and Seth in New York), social media will not replace traditional forms of media. But when you consider the average age of a primetime TV news viewer is 60, tell me again where TV fits in the consumer dynamic.
I watch TV but less for news and more for cop dramas, food and comedy shows, and on-demand movies. I don’t subscribe to print newspapers, for I get all my headlines online (or during commercials for the cop dramas). And radio? My sole interaction with radio is if I set my alarm in the morning — which these days as I set my own schedule for sleep and wake, is slim.
Traditional marketing, advertising, and public relations rarely grabs my attention. Maybe I’m not the ideal target, but considering the effect of word-of-mouth viral marketing, how am I not? For, if you’re trying to sell a product, service, or idea, and you’re only using traditional media, you’ll never reach me and most likely, neither my friends nor family for I’ll have nothing to tell them.
And you? What do you have to say about the relationship between TV, radio, newspapers, and the internet, social media or not?
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