As a technology marketer, you are probably under pressure to either explore or develop a social media strategy if you have not done so already.
For those tech marketers that have not yet committed to using social media within their marketing mix, take note of some of the many myths that surround social media as outlined in an article by B.L. Ochman, a well known social media expert in BusinessWeek Magazine Debunking Six Social Media Myths – BusinessWeek.
1. Social media is inexpensive or free. Many of the tools that can be employed in social media marketing are free to use. These include Google, YouTube, Flickr, and content aggregators such as Digg, StumbleUpon. As well as Free blogging tools like WordPress, Twitter and friendfeed. However, integrating these tools into a corporate marketing program requires skill, time, and money. The budget for an effective social media marketing campaign can start at $50,000 for two to three months.
Building a site that incorporates interactivity, allows user-generated content, and perhaps also includes e-commerce doesn’t come cheap from anyone who knows what they are doing. Even taking free software like WordPress and making it function as an effective interactive site, incorporating e-commerce, creating style sheets that integrate with the company’s branding, takes more than time. That takes skill, experience, and money.
As a rule, a $50,000 to $100,000 budget can cover the creation of a simple multimedia microsite that becomes the center of an online community. Add in some widgets to help distribute the content and form a credible group on Flickr, Twitter, or Facebook and other networking groups to enhance the community aspect of the campaign. Complex functions add to programming and design costs.
A high-yield, highly targeted blog advertising campaign to kick off and support the program will cost an additional $25,000 to $100,000 a month. Advertising through Google’s AdWords, e-mail support, co-registration, and other tools that drive traffic would be additional costs.
2. Anyone can do it. A successful social media campaign integrates social media into the many elements of marketing, including advertising, digital, and PR. Opinion and theory are no match for experience, and the best social media marketers now have more than 10 years of experience incorporating interactivity, blogs, forums, user-generated content, and contests into online marketing.
3. You can make a big splash in a short time. Sometimes a social media campaign can produce substantial and measurable results quickly. But, this tend to be true for established corporate or brand entities. The reality for most brands and companies is quick results don’t happen overnight.
4. You can do it all in-house. You need strategy, contacts, tools, and experience—a combination not generally found in in-house teams, who often reinvent the wheel or use the wrong tools.
It is rare indeed to find an in-house team that can not only conceive and execute a social media campaign but also drive traffic to it with effective e-mail segmentation, search optimization, blogger outreach, blog advertising, Google ads, and more.
5. If you do something great, people will find it. Quite simply, that never was true. Until you can drive traffic to your social media effort, you’ve got a tree falling in the forest, heard only by those standing nearby.
6. You can’t measure social media marketing results. You can use a variety of methods, including mentions on blogs and in media; comments on the content; real-time blog advertising results, and click-throughs to your company Web site. You can get very precise statistics from a variety of sites, including Google Trends, Twitter search, Google Analytics, BackType, and Compete.
