I recently saw the film Atonement, the story of little girl who sees something she doesn’t understand. By not understanding what she saw and reporting it to authorities she effectively ruins the lives of a couple. As she grows up she realizes the mistake she made.
Now I know this may sound a bit funny at first but just stay with me on this. The scenario above reminded me of how large (and even small/medium) companies approach social media. The problem with the approach that a lot of companies take towards social media is that they do not understand it. A large company will usually make a weak attempt at a social media campaign and will then chastise social media for being a useless tool. Then, later on down the road, the company will grow up and realize that social media is not just a fad and not just a useless tool. The company will realize the mistake they made by not joining in the conversation.
In my opinion the problem with a lot of modern marketers is that they just aren’t being clever. I mean take a look at all the social media channels we have available, Involver, Facebook, Youtube, etc. Most marketers today believe that all of you have to do to succeed is upload content to one of these sites and then sit back and relax. (buzzer sound) WRONG! Picking the platform to use is only a very small portion of the battle. The real strategy comes from how you utilize the social media platforms to market. How can you use the social media channels to engage with the users and not just push content at them? For example, companies try putting up videos on youtube in hopes of driving traffic to product pages, the marketer upload the video and then says “youtube sucks we aren’t getting any traffic.” Well, essentially what the marketer has done is…nothing. Uploading a video isn’t marketing. Engaging the user is marketing.
Anyone have any good examples of clever marketing? Did I miss something here?
Thanks for reading
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