No matter whether you’re working for a large company or a small one, chances are you’re not using social media/social networking to promote your business. You’re not alone, but you need to understand the tremendous opportunity that using social media for your business creates.
A day before I stuffed my belly full of Thanksgiving turkey, I read this survey from Epsilon that found that over half of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs for short) aren’t interested in social networking sites. I have a couple of perspectives on this. First, large companies are like large ships — they don’t react quickly to emerging marketing because it takes time to learn about it, run ROI models, etc. — the same way you can’t turn a ship on a dime.
I’m also sure that there are a lot of CMOs simply dismissing social media because they don’t think it’s widely used and not worth adding it to the marketing mix. Also, CMOs might not have time to learn about emerging media. Something tells me that if you asked ten CMOs what Twitter is, you’d probably get blank looks and hear crickets chirping.
Here’s why your company’s marketing officers and managers should learn about social media. Years ago, the internet was an emerging marketing medium. So was e-mail, so was pay-per-click marketing, and so was affiliate marketing. Social media just might be the next big thing. And if it’s not, it’s still a great way to connect to customers.
I can understand why marketing officers don’t “get it.” I didn’t get it either until about 18 months ago when I signed up for a Facebook account. Then, I got into Twitter. Granted, these are still “micromarketing” tactics (”micromarketing” is my word — means that it doesn’t have wide appeal or is still an early adopter technology). But placing efforts in these areas can yield results. This month, social networking sources brought more readers to this blog than Yahoo or MSN search.
Why? It’s all about the network. When my network sees my new blog posts, they tweet them on Twitter and share them on Facebook. Their network is exposed to it, they share it, and so on. That’s the power of social networking.
For my business, it’s blog posts, but a retail business (national or local) could post back-in-stocks, exclusive sales, coupon codes and more. Some companies, such as Comcast, use Twitter for customer service. So check out social media and social networking sites, and beat the corporate CMOs to the punch.
