Social Media is No Place for Good Marketing Anymore | PROFITguide.com.

The premise of this article by Bruce Philp,  is that social media is now fully automated so genuine conversation just don’t exist anymore. The truth is that there is a lot of automation, but real people still answer messages and make useful and meaningful contributions.

In one case I know personally – The Barbados Tourism Encyclopedia, with several thousand active fans, has a dedicated set of real people responding to question. in addition real people create information updates which are scheduled out by automated services. The COO of the company will take photos of things that crop up and are interesting and post them manually at anytime. So to do others within the company. Its a case of using tools and being real. Social certainly has a growing importange in content marketing in the digital age.

social media in information marketing

As the chart shows, Social media is just one part of marketing, in my mind it is growing in importance yet changing in its role. I can’t agree with Bruce Philp that Social Media is no place for good marketing or that you are “Probably Wasting Your Time on Social Media”. But he is right about a lot of the details and increasingly poor engagement on social media and Facebook’s plummeting organic reach is a concern.

As he says “If the number of genuine consumers using social media isn’t dwindling, there’s an increasing sense that their level of interest is—and that they’re finding more agreeable company in a growing constellation of more socially intimate mobile apps.”

He also adds that “For the size of its audiences, social media marketing is labour-intensive and high risk. Marketers do it in hopes of getting “influencers” to sprinkle their brands with the pixie dust of peer endorsement. But this logic falls apart when social media communities turn anti-social. When that happens, companies are risking their reputations to impress the wrong people.”

Then on the bright side he tells us that “Not all social media marketing is a waste of time—when it works, it offers some hope for a post-mass-media world.”

I like his parting words of wisdom: “If your brand already has a social media community, cherish it. But if you think you’re going to find one now, be careful. That ship might have sailed—and the people it left behind might have had it coming.”

Bruce Philp is the author of Consumer Republic, winner of the 2012 National Business Book Award. He is a brand strategy consultant building effective messaging systems for clients. It takes time to do it right and it can’t be done as he says by Trolls. Still apps, systems and process are vital in today’s marketing. We cannot do without them and to ignore systems and technology is just missing the boat. I wrote about the 4 Ps of marketing in the digital age, way back in 2008, and will be updating this with a new blog on the 4 E of Engagement soon.

For more on Bruce Philip Read his article on PROFITguide.com

Also see realted post on the Death of Social Media and my rants on being anonymous in the social age