Among the social media cognescenti, Paul Gillin stands out for his clear thinking, and for asking the questions that need to be asked.
Great piece on the Social ‘hangover’ – which echoes numerous conversations I’ve had with clients and other companies over the past few months.
As I mentioned in my comments, I question whether the Marketing department should be the place where social is ‘owned’. The companies I see having the most success with the social channel tend to be most focused not on Marketing but on Customer Support, which is where true one-to-one conversations more often take place.
I was recently quoted on Internetnews.com making the following prediction:
“Look for marketing’s love affair with social media to give way in 2011 to the sobering reality that a Facebook fan page and Twitter account don’t solve problems of poor products or positioning. Stories of social media failures will become more frequent as practitioners realize that customer conversations are time-consuming to maintain and that peer conversations present as many problems as they do opportunities.”
Social media marketing can never match the hype that has been heaped on it for the last three years, so it must go through a correction stage. The discipline will be better for the experience, but only after a lot of business people realize the ugly reality that this stuff is really difficult.
I’ve recently noticed that the questions marketers ask me have changed. A year ago, people wanted to know how to start social media campaigns. Now they want to know how to rescue the floundering campaigns they already have. Disillusionment is starting to set in.
[…] prediction of a coming Social-Media-in-Marketing backlash. Riffing on @pgillin, he calls for a Social Marketing Hangover. I think folks calling for this backlash are right, but perhaps not in the way some of them are […]