I suggest you see this video…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8

And follow this presentation:
http://www.slideshare.net/ianstewartmtv/asia-youth-2009-2029534

It a way of living. Kids will find a way to incorporate, in their normal life, online social activities.

ciao!

Fun fact about the consumer as spectator!

AL

I do know, via some of the contract work I’ve done in digital advertising, that advertisers do want more measurablity all around in their campaigns. Very tough challenge even for simple online advertising, when we know that a good deal of consumers view or click ads online, but end up buying the products offline. Can’t track those kinds of conversions, yet. If we can’t even get that down, it’s hard to see how to get to clear, measurable ROI for social media marketing.

But I’m not sure from your comment whether you think we should be striving to measure ROI or not? Are you saying you think marketers aren’t really looking for those kinds of measures?

Usage, consumption versions content production are important, glad you pointed it out. Why? “Once you’re busy working and raising a family … you don’t want to spend what free time you have networking online.”

I know so many people NOT on Facebook or Twitter and that is why: they have lives. They do however read tons online (almost no one I know subscribes to print mags or papers) and seek out content as needed. It’s inbound marketing, organic searches leading folks to hotel reviews or the best local mechanic.

Agree with you about it not being about “conversation” and those relationship-building models don’t always apply. It’s not a dating game, it’s business. If I followed Dell we could have a great relationship and dialogue, but I’m still buying MAC.

Social Media Marketing DOES need to grow up. It’s out of its infancy, just starting to crawl, walk and run. SM will continue to grow, evolve and mature.

Thanks for a fantastic post with a lot of ground covered. I think the new social marketing possibilities are great, but also need to be put in perspective.

The global share of digital advertising is about 10%, although in some countries like UK and Denmark, it’s in the mid 20’s. If you assume that Social Marketing has a 10% share of that (a BIG assumption) you are talking about at most a few percent of marketing investment will go to social marketing over the near to medium term.

Which brings me to my latest pet peeve:

These people believe that what everybody really wants is to know their Social Media ROI and spend lots of time figuring out about how to compute it.

So, without knowing anything about the overall marketing investment picture, much less about things like margins, competitive environment, brand structure, price elasticity they think that they will be able to tell clients whether their social marketing campaigns are profitable or not. It’s an astounding conceit.

(And having worked with major global agency networks, I can tell you that marketers are very careful about sharing internal data, even with longstanding partners)

This might seem to be a bit off topic, but I believe it’s all part of the same phenomenon. Social Marketing people need a dose of reality.

They need to realize that not everybody wants a conversation with every brand, the “old media” that they seem to disdain does have much to offer (like content that people love and marketers pay serious money to advertise on) and Social Marketing has to integrate itself with other types of investment.

Thanks again for a great post.

- Greg