PR 101

After posting last week’s blog (In case you have noticed, social media has already taken over), I was curious about those people who still either oppose using social media, or think it’s a fad. I know there are people out there who just aren’t too sure about it. For instance, I had a conversation about a year ago at a function where the director of major public relations agency told me he didn’t think social media was going to last. I wasn’t as adept as I am now, but I still knew he was wrong.

I think a lot of people out there who feel like the residents of Oz (no, not Australia – the mythical place created by L. Frank Baum). They look up in the sky and see this skywriting witch demanding they surrender Dorothy Gale. The residents of Oz all run to the see the wizard. The doorman assures them the wizard is going to deal with the issue.

Well, Social Media is not the Wicked Witch of the West. And the wizard cannot stop it anyway, although some executives are apparently still trying.

In my research, I found this: “51 percent of … executives fear social media could be detrimental to employee productivity, while 49 percent assert that using social media could damage company reputation,” in a research brief from the Center for Media Research. The brief reported on a study done by Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law that found that “senior US marketing, management and HR executives are concerned about the risks of increased use of social networks within their companies.”

A study by Equation Research and reported by eMarketer.com found these reasons for companies not adopting social media.

I think Walter Schwabe did a good job of explaining the resistance in the blog “fusedlogic.

“The truth is, most organizations despite the decline are still spending large dollars in the traditional advertising space and are justifying these expenditures on metrics that are estimates in many cases,” Schwabe wrote. “Then those same executives look at social media investments with risk in their eyes, a lack of understanding and claiming there’s no way to measure.

“What they’re really saying is “we don’t understand,” Schwabe explained. “Then they provide a media buyer with $250,000.00 or more to go fire away at the big three, print, television, radio for a 90-day campaign. Why? Not because it’s necessarily the right answer but because it’s what they understand and the safe move.”

Of course there are ways to measure Social Media impact. I have to say first that I have never understood some of the measurements of traditional marketing. I have heard marketing people say: “well, 10 million people saw that commercial during the game.” Or, “that magazine has a 800,000 readers.” So what.

To me, there is only one measure of the effectiveness of a marketing campaign in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketing: did sales increase? Anything else is just commentary. If a campaign doesn’t increase sales, what’s the point? Yes, brand awareness has to built. People have to know about a product before they will buy it. But, I think a lot of marketers stop there. They forget the goal is the sales funnel – not getting people to watch some cutesy commercial.

Social media can drive sales – I think more effectively that traditional methods. But I digress. That is the subject for another blog.

The other fact that surprised me was that Twitter is for adults. Teenagers and tweens just don’t use it, according to The Participatory Marketing Network (PMN), an organization that helps marketers transition from push and permission marketing to participatory marketing.

“Just 11 percent of its (Twitters) users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore, the New York Times reported. “Instead, Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations.”

The Times went on to report that: “In fact, though teenagers fueled the early growth of social networks, today they account for 14 percent of MySpace’s users and only 9 percent of Facebook’s. As the Web grows up, so do its users, and for many analysts, Twitter’s success represents a new model for Internet success.”

Studies have found that tweens and teens prefer texting to Tweeting. There are two primary reasons, the studies found: tweens and teens do not want their parents to know what they are doing and it turns out Twitter is optimized best for marketing and news. Teens and Tweens have little use for those activities.

In other words, Social Media is maturing. Don’t worry; you won’t have to surrender anything. And you might just find Social Media is the key to the City of Oz.