About
Social Media Reality Check is a blog by me, Mark McLaren of McBuzz Communications, and YOU!
I have been building websites and doing online marketing for a long time. Lately, I’ve been looking at the changes taking place in online marketing – including all the free services available online that have appeared since the advent of Google, and now YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and on and on, and the new communities that have formed around them – and I have been wondering about the brave new world of “social media marketing” that has sprung up as a result.
It’s my hope that Social Media Reality Check will be a place to shed light on this transformation, specifically, to see if the so-called “social media marketing expert” is a figment of the collective online imagination, or whether there is some truth to the idea that people can be experts at marketing with social media tools, using tactics drawn from a playbook.
I’ll share my current opinion up front: I think that the business world has got social media wrong for the most part. The power of social media is not about selling, it’s about relationships and communication, of which selling/marketing is really only a small part. Selling through social media, in the old-school sense of getting in front of someone to pitch a product or service, is difficult for good reason. You can only “recruit” so many bloggers when the truth is you wouldn’t even be talking to them if you didn’t want to sell something. You can only give away so much free stuff when all you really want is the recipient’s cash. Wouldn’t it be easier to be honest and act accordingly?
Companies first have to figure out 1) what they are good at, and 2) what kind of relationships they want to create with their customers. These two things are different for every company. In fact, it’s best to think of these two things as totally unique for every company. Until we take this to heart, we are probably going to be using social media tools in ways that don’t serve anyone’s best interests.
A discussion about the merits of social media marketing and social media experts can take place anywhere. In the spirit of social networking, it should take place wherever people want. I’ll just be over here, as they say. Thanks for reading. And now, the real work begins!
