Social media: the silver bullet of marketing strategy?

It is a fact that most businesses are by now convinced about the potential of the social media as marketing tools and the need to integrate them into their marketing strategy. Many do this already: Look for example to the Social Media Monitor (report5): In the Netherlands the adoption of social media marketing strategies by the top 100 businesses* was 92% in 2012  up from 14% in 2008. 70% of these companies have a Social Media Manager while this position din not exist 4 years ago. In any similar report you read you see the same picture emerging: the social media is hot!

These positive news however should not detract those who are seriously working on this topic either as academics or practitioners from the real issues:

-          Do marketers really know how to exploit the full potential of the social media as marketing tools? And do they use them the right way?
-          Is social media marketing the comprehensive answer to the challenges of the marketing field today? Some of these challenges: empowerment and techno-savvy consumer, depletion of effectiveness of the traditional marketing tools, market globalization and increasing technological progress bringing new techniques and technologies to the market every day. Some of these techniques and technologies are: mobile computing, Internet of Things, wearable technologies, RFID, cloud computing and Neuromarketing.

My answer based on my personal observations to both these questions is simply “No”. I think that businesses have gone some way on the social media strategy arena but they have to go much further. Next to this I do not believe that social media marketing is the single answer to the challenges facing today’s marketers: there are many more issues to be addressed.

What these challenges and issues are and what are my personal views on the future of marketing strategy? This will be the subject of my talk in the E-Travel Summit on 30 October in Almere.

 *Based on their advertising budget

En route to Social Media 2.0?

On 2007 I wrote an article co-authored by my Master student Stefan Fountain* (published in 2008 in the Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice) arguing that businesses could use efficiently the Social Media (the term Web 2.0 was more popular at that time) as Marketing tools. As you might remember at that time businesses were looking puzzled and helpless to the alarming signs of growing customer empowerment through the Social Media Revolution. For me and those following the developments closely at that time, was clear that the Social Media will be the next big thing in the Internet evolution and the next frontier for business strategists.
Today, just four years later, the Web 2.0 / Social Media movement (described as Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernhoff) has been firmly embedded in the minds and hearts of online users and business strategists alike. The Social Media have also become substantial channels of political expression and tools of citizen empowerment beyond the control of states or regimes.   The online users using social media as part of their daily routines has reached the hundreds of millions. With more than 50% of consumers using “smartphones, social networks and other emerging tools” McKinsey talks in a recent report about the customer becoming a media junkie. On the other hand the staggering adoption rates of social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and LinkedIn by businesses has created a gold rush atmosphere reminding the dot.com age. In a recent report published here in Holland presenting the results of a survey about the adoption of the social media by businesses (Social Media Monitor, 2011) we read that by now 90% of the top 100 brands in Holland have now adopted the Social Media as part of their strategy, up from 67% last year;  48% of them has already a Social Media Manager in place. This has happened for more businesses very swiftly: only 5 from the brands that participated in the survey were active in social media longer than three years while the majority (56%) was active between six months and two years in social media.
While the picture looks encouraging we could ask ourselves whether the social media as marketing strategy is reaching its maturity stage and more importantly what will be the next step. I am afraid that soon we will detect the first signals of saturation: Any marketing tool when adopted by everyone is losing its effectiveness and uniqueness. The same I would expect to happen with the Social Media soon, mainly as a result of the unbalanced focus of businesses in 4-5 social media platforms and the very limited use of the social media as tools for promoting innovation, co-creation and mass customization. In the above mentioned Social Media Monitor we can clearly see that social networks are hardly used for R&D purposes. Furthermore there is little attention on the identification of Brand Promoters or Super Promoters as customer influencers while the social media domain is underutilized by most SMEs as (free) source of market intelligence.

Al in all a mixed picture on the status of social media as strategic marketing tools. On one hand the threat of saturation due to one-sided focus, on the other hand opportunities hardly utilized. Time for the Social Media 2.0 era?
* Constantinides E., Fountain S., 2008, Web 2.0: Conceptual foundations and Marketing Issues, Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice, vol 9, nr 3, pp. 231 – 244