Is Social Media Marketing the right thing for you?

It is interesting to see all the mixed reactions you get when you start talking about Social Media Marketing, and introduce yourself as someone who works with it.

You get the “yeah right, you are just someone who gets paid to goof around the Internet” look, the “oh, not another one of those geeks” eye roll, and on a rare occasion even an enthusiastic “that is totally awesome!” glance. (Yeah I got one of these teaching a Junior Achievement class and it felt great).

The Social Media “in-crowd” however, tends to frown upon us marketers. They say Social Media Marketing is ruining it for them just as email marketing ruined email for everyone. And you can’t really blame them for thinking like that. Just like happens with email, there is a lot of Social Media marketing abuse out there. The obnoxious self-promoters, spammers and the like ruin it for us all. But I would hardly qualify spam as marketing.

I have a 25 years marketing background (oh my… I just gave everyone a hint on how old I am) and back in the day we were taught to seek, understand, target and please our audiences, not annoy the heck out of everyone in the hopes of hooking an unsuspecting vict… I mean, customer. Advertising and marketing were serious business back then, maybe because it cost a lot of money.

So here’s what I have to say. Social Media marketing did not ruin Social Media. Spammers did. I would even say that if Social Media is any fun at all is exactly because there are people out there “marketing” effectively: be it a cause, a job or themselves. We love Social Media because we love the people we meet out there who are consistently creating, filtering and sharing content that we like. That is marketing 101 for you. The mom with the wonderful blog about scrapbooking, that Twitter whose witty posts you avidly follow, your favorite Etsy store owner, they are all marketing. Some of them even monetizing.

Bottom line: in the past 25 years a lot changed in terms of advertising media. Yet the main ingredient of any marketing campaign didn’t change at all: people. They still want to be respected, helped, pleased, and , if possible, “wowed”.

So if you want to market in Social Media, put people first. Be a people person. Be gracious, polite, helpful, humble. Make them love you. Continue reading →