Social Media Marketing: Fad or the Future

Social Media Marketing: Fad or the Future

If you've been in business for awhile, you've probably heard about the "flavor the month" syndrome. In never ending efforts to improve themselves, corporations adopt "improvement programs" one after another in a never ending succession. When one fails to produce the desired results, the company simply moves on to the next. In the 70's and early 80's it was "Participative Mangement". Then it was "Total Quality Management" (TQM) which later began to fade away in favor of "Six Sigma". There are some out there who are bucking the rush to Social Media Marketing, claiming it is simply another "flavor of the month." Is it?

Talk to proponents and the answer is an adamant "no." Yet if you study the more successful SMM efforts you'll see that most are more about customer service than they are about marketing. Best Buy has been especially effective with its "Twelpforce." Best Buy has over 2000 employees dedicated to dealing with customer service issues using Twitter. The program is relatively new and is expanding to Facebook. The idea came from their successful "Blue Shirt Nation", which was an internal effort for Best Buy employees to interact with each other over business issues. The program is generating a lot of positive reviews, but what does it have to do with marketing?

Those who see SMM as a fad would say it has nothing to do with marketing. While a high level of customer service is a key component of any business, what does it do to lead to increased sales and market share? After all, customer service is about dealing with current customers, not new customers or potential customers.

Those who see SMM as the future would argue that customer service is marketing, especially in today's highly competitive world where product differences are sometimes small. Satisfied customers are loyal customers and they are more than happy to share their positive experiences with friends, neighbors, and relatives. Word of mouth is still a powerful source of customer referral and if Social Media can provide an efficient and immediate channel for providing excellent customer service, it will generate new customers in the long run. The problem may be than in traditional marketing, there is no long run. A marketing campaign is expected to produce results this month, or this quarter.

Those companies who have the personnel and time necessary to invest in the effort do see referrals from social media participants who have found something useful on the company's profile page. This kind of thing grows over time as company representatives become part of the community and gain respect and trust. It is a slow process but there is evidence that it can work.

So the answer to the fad or future question may lie in your perspective and time frame. If companies get discouraged with the lack of immediate and measurable results, SMM may very well slowly fade away in favor of a new flavor of the month. Some social media sites may fade away as well. MySpace is in serious decline and even Twitter has low numbers of new users staying with the site. But while sites like Geocities may disappear from the landscape entirely, the social media phenomenon is not going away. And if you believe customer service is the future of marketing, you might want to get on board.

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