Commercial Social Media: Question and Answer

1- Do you think ‘traditional’ methods of marketing are dead? Is social media taking over, or just a step towards the future of marketing? Tradition always dies hard, so I think it’ll be a while until we see newspapers, billboards and media advertising wiped from our marketing arsenal, however what social has taught us, is that the collective voice of the population is a more powerful, more lucrative, more economical means to get your message across, both opinionated and commercial. Social media is really the culmination of what you get when you introduce a democratic system into information resources, where a majority rules, rather than our traditional autocratic media methods, where only those with a financial or political agenda had a voice.

2- What are the benefits of social media in marketing? Social can be as inexpensive as you want it to be. It takes no formal training to pick it up and can have immense ROI. The true benefits of social lie within its inherent technologies. Social has allowed companies to know anything and everything about its consumer base. Take Facebook for example, which has an extremely large pool of data about all 700 million of its users – and it’s readily available for any brand using its medium correctly. Things like geolocation has opened up physical shopping once more, and things like gaming and incentives have pushed the boundaries of confinement to a room, to a more mobile, more streamlined method of communication.

3- Have you seen any trends recently regarding social media? For example, Large businesses using it more? Social media has immense benefits, but it requires traditional marketing departments and traditional top-level management to take a big plunge. This is because Social goes against the grain – it removes corporate control, opens up corporate image based on public sentiment, and there’s really not much a company can do to stop it. For this reason, it has taken large businesses longer to join the social pool than their smaller counterparts – and caused catastrophic damage to these larger businesses. Blockbuster, Borders, Colorado Group, Just Group are now all bankrupt because they either dismissed social as a fad, or they came too late to the digital game. We’ve found at Strongman that our client base is getting consistently larger, with a substantial denomination of Government, Public and Large Private companies eager to explore what is in it for them.

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Until Next Time, Tomer Garzberg (Keynote Social Media Speaker and Social Technologist: http://about.me/TomerGarzberg)

Australia to the World: Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne www.strongmandigital.com.au