More on Social Media

Is social media really advertising?  Or it is a partnership with brands?  Who has the upper-hand?  Is it an equal relationship where one contributes to the other and vice-versa or do advertisers still trickle into the minds of the masses and influence their purchase decisions?  

Well, for my sake, I hope advertisers still have a hand in the game.

Michael Ramah of Advertising Age says of the transition from marketing to marketing against social media: "The real value of the marketer now is to delve into the conversations and reams of information and build a strategic framework -- to discover how, in a medium dominated by navel-gazing narcissists, we can insert a brand in a meaningful way."  He says of the millions of all-age contributors to social media, "it's true that individuals are empowered to become marketers. By virtue of their online savvy and assertive personalities, they can put their stamp on a product or service and send their message of like or dislike far and wide, to the networks they've built from their living rooms."

Luckily, Ramah shares the same viewpoint with me:  People are contributing to media through online networks, but there is definitely room to create a strategy to purge this new over-sharing, crowded market and take advantage of the ears-wide-open, constantly engaged online audience.  

Ramah acknowledges that while the hype from certain networking sites might some-day die down (i.e. Facebook with the inclusion of parents), he says, "... The medium and the conversations and the personal influence as-powered-via-connectivity are here to stay."

He notices that since the introduction of sites like Facebook and Twitter, brands have 'scrambled' to secure fan pages and twitter accounts in order to seem 'young and nimble" and secure an audience in the social media world.  He says, "Indeed, most of them have succeeded in setting up their presence, branding it and starting conversations."  

That's where we (marketers ready to delve into the new medium) come in.  The space left for marketers (the real ones with degrees; not kids tweeting away about what they ate for breakfast giving Cheerios a  free plug) is a space that allows us to use our creative strategy skills and interact with a consumer to personally influence their brand decisions.  

Social media strategists can operate in this new field to conduct those 'conversations' that a brand's membership to online sites allows.  They will guide the exchange choosing what is said, how it's said and how the audience responds... thereby increasing their client's sales and thriving in the new realm.  

The challenge then is to evolve faster than the online media - choosing how to break through the consumers' noise and reign supreme.  This is where we stand now.  Will there be a formula to fall back on for social media marketing?  Something to teach in universities?  Or is marketing calling for true innovation and challenging its producers to truly shine?  I'm hoping for the challenging option... back to good ol'fashioned ingenious breakthroughs.