Since you’re reading this chances are you know I’m a big fan of social media, and while I do like to ‘get down with my bad self’ keeping up with all the latest trends, I see lots of other people beating up on social media because they can’t correlate actions directly with profit.
Making profits quickly and directly attributing them to your actions is the Nirvana of web marketing. However in a post florida Google trustbox world you need to take a more long term view. Sure you can post a bulletin to 10,000 MySpace “friends” but is the only value you can get a direct sale? Do you think there is some value in getting your URL to pass through the all the toolbars out there? I’m certainly not niave enough to believe toolbar data makes up a significant part of the algo but I bet it’s a secondary or tertiary indicator or signal of quality used to corraborate other factors (man did that sound cool or what). How about all that linkage data, social media sites are really big on linking back to other sites. The trick is figuring out what trigers that linking mechanism and what you can due to “attract it’s attention” so to speak.
Lastly what about all those people? Your audience is a moving target, constantly evolving and changing( see Is Advertising Dead?). Many pundits like to say the market is becoming more “sophisticated”, I prefer to think that they have just built up an immunity to older forms of advertising. Walt Disney used to walk in his theme parks regularly and ecouraged his staff to do the same (see Re-Imagineering: Walking in Walt’s Footsteps). So if you’re not visiting and using the MySpaces, Squidoos, 43Places, Diggs, Deliciouses, Netscapes, Reddedits, and blogs where your customers are, and interacting with them, how effective do you think you are going to be at speaking their language without alienating them?
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{ 6 comments }
Brilliant post, Michael. I have been trying to convince my employer to embrace social media as a link dev vehicle for some time, but the main drawback is the lack of an immediate measureable of the effectiveness of those activities. Thanks again for clarifying some of these points. I will be referencing this post in my next meeting!
I think you are right on, except many sites/businesses don’t have customers that even know what social media is..yet anyway.
Hey Mike,
I know I don’t comment here too often, but I ran into a situation of a Blogging friend being Dugg (or is it Digged?).
He had a link to my site and my hits and PV’s increased dramatically.
The unique visitors have dropped a little, but the subscriptions and return visits have stayed pretty constant at the higher level.
I wrote a post about the ripple effect of social bookmarking. I think I got more out of it than he did with the repeat readers.
Visits=Readers=Clicks=Profits
At least from my standpoint.
Joe
I agree with your take on the long term effect of social marketing. However, I have somthing of a metric that can be added. I have searched recently for my company name and I found that my del.icio.us page came up in the SERP in Yahoo and Google. This tells me that those links on social sites are counting as IBL. Further, I check my referers for social sites to see if I get much or any traffic from those sources.
Do the bookmark sites use the nofollow tag on postings? If so, how do they help anyone with their website promotion?
Thank you for your blog. I really like this new social web stuff as well and your blog helps me to understand what is real and what is hype.
Sincerely,
Robert McCulloch
http://attorneycollect.com
I still think that SMO has long way to go…..
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