Is social media ‘dead’?

I presume it might be a case with likeness to the electric car vs oil giants. Not so much social media, but internet marketing as a whole. BUT we’ve managed to prove otherwise with traditional online advertising. We’ve proved that there does lie real value in online marketing and as with all new technologies, the early birds will catch the worm.

The problem comes in where companies make use of service providers that don’t really know how to utilise the power of social media marketing / Web 2.0. And it doesn’t work for everybody I might add. But  when implemented correctly these strategies can add immense insight into your consumer markets. Especially where we’re talking of large corporates with big databases that have responsibility to maintain a good profile on the CRM side of things.

I agree that social sites will come and go (like with all fads), but the principles and application thereof will live on and surely it is also up to the owners of such sites to innovate and improve their offerings to keep their subscribers happy? The fact that there’s such large buy-in to new media like video (YouTube), Photos (Flickr) etc opens up new avenues of marketing at much lower budgets than traditional advertising. And to top it off we have the advantage of real time stats with return on investment. Tracking is what makes online advertising so popular, plus the market is growing by the day.

You might ask the question, where does the value lie in social media and its marketing principles?

Well, it’s measured in different ways, but you can look at the following (to name a few):

• Brand Loyalty/Awareness Building
• Word of Mouth Marketing
• Consumer Generated Content
• Consumer Data Profiling
• Advanced CRM Principles
• Viral Marketing Aspects
• And More…

The problem will always be implementation and finding service providers that understand the methods and can implement those principles to drive social online strategies for clients.

It guess it’s true that the early adopters will pay some school fees and that the corporate world is sitting back to see what happens, but dead, it’s truely not…