- Knowledge Base
- Charities and Social Media
- External Insight
- Categories and Classifications
- Facebook Techniques
- Marketing Techniques
- Mobile
- Social Media Ethics
- Social Media Legal Issues
- Social Media Strategy
- Reasons Every Business Needs to be on Twitter
- 10 Proven Applications For Social Media
- 10 Small Business Social Media Marketing Tips
- 10 Ways a Start-Up Can Use Social Media to Market Itself
- 5 Social Media Myths
- 5 Warning Signs of a Weak Social Media Strategy
- A Blog is a Better Social Media Hub Than Twitter
- Are You Taking Social Media Shortcuts?
- Are You ‘Living’ or ‘Existing’ in Social Media?
- Brands need to be careful about joining the social media bandwagon
- Business Development
- Creating a Social Networking Strategy
- Curating, not moderating, the flow of content and participation
- Don't Be Transparent, Be Authentic Instead
- Europe View: Coke, Unilever Drop Campaign Sites in Favour of Social Media
- Evolution: The Eight Stages Of Listening
- Financial Services: Branding and Trust
- Five Benefits of Social Media Marketing
- Free Tools for Social SEO
- Having A Punt On Social Media
- How To Increase Your Business By Relinquishing Control
- How to Use Article Marketing as Part of Your Social Media Strategy
- How to maximize revenue through social media
- How “Social” is Your Bank?
- How-To: Influence Influencers- Bloggers, Tweeters & Others
- Medical research and social media: Can wikis be used as a publishing platform in medicine?
- Opporunities and Risks with Twitter Advertising
- Optimizing Brands for Social Search
- PubCon 2009: How Major Vegas Hotels Are Using Social Media
- Should a Blog or Twitter be Your Social Media Hub?
- Social Media Checklist for Small and Medium Size Businesses
- Social Media Is Not a Condiment
- Social Media Success In 1 Step: Education
- Social Media: Engage and Change
- Social Media: The Science of Eavesdropping
- Social media: the best and worst of 2009
- Ten Things Social Media Can't Do
- The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration
- The Awareness Scale: How Social Media, PR & Advertising Now Work Together
- The Big Three Social Networks Have Emerged as Professional Networks: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter
- The Brand Dashboard: A Window to Relevance
- The Four Spheres Of Social Media Strategy
- There’s an I in Twitter and a ME in Social Media
- Twitter hasn't hit the mainstream yet and won't for some time
- Use Social Media to spot issues before they hit the Contact Center!
- Where Brands Can Engage Customers On Twitter And Social Networks
- Why Social Media Is Vital to Corporate Social Responsibility
- Word of Mouth from non-loyal customers has the biggest impact on sales
- You May Monitor For Crises, But Do You Monitor For Opportunity?
- Social Media Techniques
- Social Media Technology
- Social Media Time Management
- Social Media Traps and Risks
- Social Media and Blogs
- Social Media and IFAs
- Social Media and ROI
- Social Media and Search
- Transforming Your Organisation for Social Media
- Trends and Statistics
- Twitter Techniques
- Membership Organisations and Social media
- Social Media Tools Defined
Email
Many of the major developments in marketing practice over the last 50 years have been about customer data. Creativity may have grabbed the headlines but it has been advances in customer databases, CRM, loyalty, direct mail and customer profiling that have changed the way marketers think and work. Why, then, is the industry on the verge of throwing this all away? I fear we could be sleepwalking towards disaster as marketers hand over control of and access to customer data to distant and unengaged third parties. I’m talking about social media marketing. As the hype around social builds, more brands seem to be putting a lot of their customer data eggs in one basket. They don’t seem to care about building an accurate and well-maintained email database; instead they want to build Twitter followers. They don’t want a well-managed CRM campaign, they’d rather have a Facebook page. Social has its place and its role, but the risk is that brands are increasingly losing control over the information about their customers. If you have your customers’ email addresses and opt-ins, alongside whatever demographic data they’ve given you, you have a huge range of interaction and targeting options, as well as the opportunity to build a long-term relationship. If they’re a Twitter follower, however, then you can tweet them and that’s about it. You hold little or no information about them and all your interactions are limited to 140 characters. The downsides of social don’t stop there, either. With the incredible dominance of Facebook and Twitter in the social media marketplace, it’s an established ‘truth’ that these sites will be popular for ever and are a reliable place to invest your marketing dollars in building up a following. However, many thought the same when they pumped tens of thousands into building their Second Life shop or their MySpace page, and I’d be interested to see how the ROI has panned out on those. If you’re building your marketing strategy around a third-party channel, you ideally want to be 100% sure that the channel in question isn’t going to go out of fashion. If you’re managing your own customer data on your own terms, then the risk is all yours; if you’re looking to a social network, then there’s a new level of uncertainty. I’m not saying that all social media marketing is by definition bad, but brands need to make sure that if they’re going to jump on the bandwagon they shouldn’t forget about the marketing basics that have got them where they are today.
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