Marketing wakes up

Monday, 21 December 2009 07:38

Recently there has been quite a bit of noise in the form of blogs and articles about how 2010 is going to be the year that social media overturns traditional marketing promotion approaches.  Ad agencies will focus on^*:

• Engagement instead of interruption
• "One to one" marketing instead of "one to many"
• Creating consumer-to-consumer communications instead of brand-to-consumer communications
• Robust analytics and tools to measure effectiveness
• Channel plans instead of media plans.
• Charging for value created instead of hours worked

There seems to be an awful lot of fizz and excitment around.  It all comes down to a basic premise that it's now all about consumer's conversations, rather than selling them messages and information. The TV news last night had a piece about small retailers abandoning traditional promotional methods and utilising Twitter to talk to their customers.

All this will come as no surprise to account managers, good sales and customer service representatives - who have know for years that it's all about forming relationships with customers and talking to them (not at them).

As an aside, this brilliant piece Olivier Branchard Basics of Social Media ROI should be required reading.

^*From "16 Risks Small-to Mid-size Ad Agencies Can't Afford to Take"