Advertising – Page 2 – Thoughts on the Ever-Changing World of Social Media Marketing

Imagine finding a new friend at work. This friend is excited to add you to their list for an upcoming dinner party. You can’t imagine the people you will meet. Your new friend seems like she has an interesting background. Maybe has similar hobbies or maybe her partner does. So you mark it on your calendar, buy a bottle of wine or small gift and look forward to the night.

The night of the party arrives. You knock on the door. She opens. There’s smiles around. Maybe a hug or a handshake. Others are mingling and laughing. You walk in the middle and up to a group and say, “Don’t you like my brand and wouldn’t you like to buy my widget right now? Or can I show you the new TV spot we finished on YouTube? Or you should sign up for this email list.” Come on. Imagine if you did that. Better yet, imagine if someone did that to you. You would find every way to talk to someone else and likely about that person. So don’t do that in social media.

Social media is an already-active community that has billions of people with hundreds of times that number of topics. Engage with those people and understand they are not there because they are dying to consume your message. Create interesting content that will give them a smirk or a piece of information. Engage in small conversations that over time “build a friendship.” They know you are posting on this platform, and others, because you have a product or service to sell.

The long play will be far more fruitful and actually open you up to so many more social stories and types of content you can engage in. And hopefully, you have friends who, through social media, invite their friends to your dinner party.

I have been reading so many social posts and articles saying, “Fail hard and fail fast” and every time I scratch my head.

I work in advertising. Failure is not easily digested. Even when a client suggests we “test and learn” we all know we must test something that has a great probability of succeeding. With this the upside isn’t as high as if we take an idea with huge upside and really put effort behind it. That effort includes finding the right place on the calendar, the right partners and a fair amount of budget for production and amplification.

I have engaged on Twitter with many people on this topic. It seems to me this “rebellious” concept is better suited for the startup and inventor world. There you need to get to proof of concept and raise funds to take it to scale. Failure there seems to be black and white. Your concept is a game changer or it’s an also ran. Marketing has so much grey area.

In the agency world is is difficult reporting a “fail” to a client. But no more that a client has presenting up the ladder. So maybe we reset this thought. Maybe it’s one of those passing fads that agency people grabbed onto for a while and will let it go. I have.