Stress? We don't need no stinkin' stress we're marketers !
01/17/09 10:27 AM
When I give a presentation on new media or social media marketing to clients I always start with some quotes from the Cluetrain Manifesto which saw all this coming a long time ago. The environment in which we market has changes dramatically over of the last 5 years but good marketers could this train coming down the tracks for years. The recession has brought them to light and now marketers are sick and tired of hearing about social media and want to know what the hell people are doing to generate leads and sales.
Welcome to the recession that is going to change consumer behavior forever. There are going to be a lot of marketing people sitting at bars during happy hour remembering the good old days of great big budgets without accountability. As long as sales were up marketers could always work with market research people to show that it was because of great marketing. What did executives know? Hell most of them are finance people and get googled eyed when they terms like reach and frequency, awareness and intent matrix. Ahhh, those were the good ol' days.
Social media is starting to piss off a lot of marketing people because they don't understand it and more importantly they're not sure how to measure its impact on the bottom line. They think they need to do it but they're not sure and they when the light bulb finally goes off they run into the problem of turning on management who is only interested in making the numbers. On top of all that they get the eMail from finance or their managers telling them to trim the budget again for this year and by the way reduce head count but keep all current projects on track. Hey this is why antacids were invented in the convenient club size.
Whether you implement a social media strategy or not one fact you cannot ignore: consumers have more power than you and the environment in which you market has changed forever. What you have to decide now is how to market in this environment but more importantly how to change your organization to better serve your customers and prospects. Change is needed within most companies and those that can change to meet threats and turn them into opportunities are going to do well. Those that are like a big ship in a small river are going to take way too long to turn around and are going to lose valuable customers and time.
Bob Dylan wrote over 40 years ago that the "Times they are changin'" and that is true today more than ever.....
