I think TM and SMM are both about influencing a want into a need. It’s how they go about it that’s different. TM can be interruptive, or informative, as SMM can be interruptive or informative. SMM is learning quickly that interruptive is less acceptable.

Of the 4 elements that define TM: price, product, distribution, and promotion, SMM is more about promotion.  Many social media marketers continue to use social media as an advertising, sales promotion, publicity/public relations tool.  You can find broadcasts for sales, buying reminders, and commercials all over the social media channels. This is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole: traditional marketing into the social media model. It can work as part of the mix, but if that is how you define social media marketing, it isn’t going to fly.

I think it’s greatest value is for personal selling, with the emphasis on the personal. What you are selling is you!

As consumers, we have always valued doing business with people who know us or at the very least, demonstrate an interest in us and our purchases. Genuine or not, and we prefer genuine, that interest goes a long way. There is a reason why contact software, particularly that which is designed for sales people, includes information about an account’s family, birthdays, etc. We should all be able to think of someone we prefer to do business with. It’s about relationship, engagement, and social media has changed the way in which we can engage with our customers. More and more it became about price, but social media reintroduces the concept of customer loyalty.

Within promotion, personally selling and sales promotion, as distinct from promotion as a category of marketing, can be both marketing and merchandising. Social media can be both marketing and merchandising. If my definition, and I’m open to challenge, is that marketing is what is done to get your market to step in – traffic – and merchandising is what is every activity you engage in after your market steps in, to generate a transaction, then social media is both marketing and merchandising. If you follow me on Twitter, and you click on my blog because of a tweet you received from me, or someone retweeting my tweet about a post on my blog, that’s marketing. Upon reading my blog, not necessarily Social Media Made easy, but any blog I write, and it encourages you to take an action: buy my book, sign up for a workshop, that’s merchandising. Where it gets a little confusing, but not of any significance if my tweet drives you to my blog (marketing), my blog drives you to my website (marketing) and at my web site you  buy my book or hire me (merchandising).And speaking of born of the same mothers.

Social media marketing is all about personal selling and promotion. We may call it customer service or engagement. When and if you read my blog, and are impressed by my expertise, I’ve sold you on me or my product. It’s different, but it’s also the same.

I remember, many many years ago, having recently left the hallowed halls of   the University of Georgia with an MSW, and feeling all know-it-all and accomplished with my sparkling shiny new degree. I was at a party and just chatting with a fellow party-goer, I asked, as one does to get a conversation going: “what do you do?” His answer: “business.” At that moment, I was stumped what to say next because nothing seemed less interesting as a way to make a living than business. Then I discovered marketing.

For me, marketing was like creating great art or playing with a band on stage. It engaged both the left and right sides of my brain. It felt, and it still does, as one would feel leading the charge. Years later, again, many years later, I’ve taught marketing, developed marketing curriculum for a community college,  consulted to businesses on developing marketing programs, developed web-based and multimedia marketing campaigns, marketing campaigns for non-profits, and marketing strategies for my own company.  One example of a campaign I developed can be found at Enzymedica, a leading supplement manufacturer, which, four years later is still running the campaign I developed for them. Not every marketing program I’ve developed has worked, but enough that I would describe myself as a successful marketeer (not to be confused with mouseketeer).

The marketing that I have known, as to be differentiated from social media marketing, is now called traditional marketing. Some make the distinction between new marketing and old marketing. Call it what you will: traditional marketing and social media marketing are born of the same mother,    and must complement each other.  That may change in the near future, the 12/16/09 blog post 2010: The Year Marketing Dies,  but now, most marketing strategies include a mix of traditional and social media. Which leads me to my next post: Marketing 101: A Basic Foundation.

Interruptive Advertising

In the beginning there was the television commercial. And it was good. We’ll it wasn’t that it was good or bad, it was that we understood, as we have understood with radio commercials, and print advertising before, that these interruptions – ergo “interruptive advertising” – were bringing us information, as in the case of a newspaper and entertainment. It was a tradeoff.  Then came e-mail and spam and we took back control.

While we tend not to think of e-mail in the same vein as The New York Times, NPR, or Lost, those with an inclination to sell us something did, and so permission advertising evolved and advertising without permission, aka spam, reared its ugly head as well. It is spam, and the behavior of the insidious purveyors of everything from Viagra to enlargements to dirty pictures that have brought us social media.

Social media is a reaction to interruptive advertising. While we the audience had an understood truce from time immemorium, spam pushed us over the top. Social media channels gave us, the audience/consumer back our power, one of the basic tenets of social media, if you, as the marketer, push it too hard, we turn you off. Blogs, websites, Facebook pages, tweets etc. that step over the line are deal killers. We as audience/consumers determine what is acceptable. It’s the new paradigm, and this power we are not going to give up.

It’s also thousands of other lesser-known networking platforms, Nings, wikis (as in wikipedia), touch points, metrics, SEO,  influencers and raving fans, crowdsourcing, open sourcing, Klout, Squidoo, Posterous, Google Analytics, Biznik, and on and on and on. Not to worry. This blog should begin to make sense of it all soon enough. And you’ll be able to pick and choose what you need to know.

The place we want to start is to relate social media to what we already know: traditional marketing, word-of-mouth and testimonial marketing, and relationship marketing. There is a separate Page on traditional marketing: Marketing 101. If you have never taken a course in marketing, read Marketing 101. It’s very basic, and if you’ve been successfully marketing your business (which means you get bang from your marketing buck and you know how much bang) you may already be familiar with the Marketing 1o1 Page.  If not, your knowledge and understanding of those concepts will be critical to understanding how to best use social media to market your business.

Word-of-Mouth

In the beginning there was word-of-mouth, and everyone understood that nothing, expensive commercials, sales, nothing, could have as strong an impact on a decision to purchase as word-of-mouth.  If you know me at all, or can relate to me in someway, my opinion on a product or service is likely to matter to you.  In your community, multiply that opinion by as few as two or three. It counts for a lot. Now multiply those opinions by 10, 20, 100, 1000, 10,000. Welcome to social media.

Testimonial Marketing

Not a whole lot different from word-of-mouth. We see testimonials, by people we don’t know, all the time in print ads, radio and tv commercials. Sometimes it’s someone we do know like the elderly actor Wilford Brimley (was in Cocoon) or John Tavolta wearing a Tag Heurer watch or Tiger for Nike (maybe not so much now).  Social media is very much about testimonials, but in social media its not the celebrity or “guy next door” that influences us, its the Influencer/Raving Fan (more about Influencers/Raving Fans in a later post).

Relationship Marketing

I’ve long been a fan of Martha Rogers and Don Peppers, who wrote the NY Times bestseller The 1:1 Future.  Martha spoke at a conference I attended and equally impressed the other 400 retailers and manufacturers in the audience. One quote, among many, stands out in the book: “It takes 5 times more resources to create a new customer than it does to keep a current customer.” Everything Martha and Don wrote about 12 years ago is what social media marketing is all about: engaging with your customers and building relationships.  Today we call it CRM: Customer Relationship Management. One of the best examples is Comcast, and how it has aggressively used social media to build strong relations with customers. Customer loyalty may not necessarily be a thing of the past.  Social media allows us to do it on a larger scale and in meaningful ways.

So, as a means to begin to wrap your brain around this social media phenomena, think (1) it has much in common with the marketing that we know (2) there is a strong word-of-mouth element to it, as there is a serious element of (3) testimonial marketing, and (4) relationship marketing. You may see other anchors as a way to help grasp the whole concept, and your input and comments will be valued.

Coming on strong and unavoidable

The general consensus is that social media and social media marketing (SMM) is in its infancy. Think about how everything from tv to the Internet to cell phones have evolved, and quickly. The evolution of social media and SMM is akin to being on steroids or Red Bull, whatever your poison.  Everything you knew or understood about how technology evolves, and for our purposes we can start with Moore’s Law (Gordon Moore of Intel: 18 months for each generation of technology) has been reduced to a nano. Social media is like something that feeds on itself, by its very nature, as a communications and community-building tool.  It’s self-educating, continuing to build upon itself. What you see now, won’t be recognizable in six months. Every application of social media, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, MySpace are adding to new features as you read this. The marketplace expects nothing less.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO was recently quoted in a Fast Company article as saying: “What’s very dangerous is not to evolve.” Amazon.com is expected to do well over a billion dollars in sales this holiday season.

It’s coming down the track like a freight train; you either get on board or get left behind.  Every day new applications and tools are being introduced, only to be followed by that many more the next day.

To better understand social media and its use as a marketing tool, I’ve created a very basic primer on traditional marketing and its relationship to social media marketing. The Marketing 101 page is located under Pages in the right-hand column. Taking the time to read this page(s) insures that everyone is on starting in the same place.

Also, please note your feedback in the form of comments, is always welcome.  What is your sense of how social media marketing will grow over the next 12 months?