Partner Article

Social Media: do we need to detox?

Yesterday’s news was the explosion of social media, toppling the time-honoured tenets of marketing one by one. The latest credo to fall is ‘typical consumer engagement’ with a brand, or the ‘template’.

Just as businesses were grasping the concept of two-way marketing, or at least creating a Facebook page and / or a Twitter account, Pinterest roared into centre stage, on a VC hire-purchase 18 gear Roadranger, driven by the WI.

Getting to the future first…

Pinterest has yet to develop a business model, let alone prove its commercial potential and staying power.

Does that really matter when the new marketing diet is a Pollock-like spray of tasters, samples, and Blumenthal experiments, with few dependable staples?

The race to swallow it all down and be first at the future (none of us want to be caught following the trend if we think we can lead it), just gives us indigestion, without making the point of it all any clearer. I think we’ve got the wrong perspective.

Upside-down and back-to-front thinking

Forget about joined up thinking. Digital interfaces have taught us visual thinking, and a whole new form of logic. Brands need specific rich media mixes, hand-picking the most appropriate platforms, even for specific products. The key is to know our audience, wherever in the world we are.

Adobe allots 20% of its marketing budget to experimental campaigns, creating unique mixes of paid, earned and owned media exposure for each product. Like many forward thinking businesses, it sees the new marketing as an “online dialogue about companies”, a two-way or multi-channel conversation.

Consumer anthropolgy

Social media might have displaced ‘typical engagement’ and ‘consumer templates’, but they offer incredibly detailed records of individual user behaviour, from shopping habits to personal taste; to social, economic, demographic and geographic data, for those companies who can aggregate it, see patterns, and exploit them.

How good is your data analysis? To get to the future first, you’re going to need it…

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ann Winter .