Why is Social Media Marketing Hard to ‘Get’?

Just last month I wrote a piece on whether Social Media is past its best which concluded that Social Media Marketing really works for those who are prepared to work at it and there is now a fresh survey which shows that while more than half of small business questioned admitted that Social Media Marketing was important, almost 60% were not using it.

Why? Why is something so obviously effective so hard to implement? There is not much point in asking questions if there is no answer we can look at and the issue, across the board, every time seems to be the same: Social Media Marketing is so new and so different that many companies, large and small, locked in a traditional mindset, simply do not know how to use it.

How, for instance, do you go from putting ads online and in newspapers to allowing your employees to play around in Facebook and Twitter, placing postings and Tweets which do not differ much from musings and interacting with Facebook visitors and still call this work?

The problem Social Media Marketing presents us with is (to use an overused expression) a paradigm shift. Those who ‘get it’ are the ones who understand that marketing itself has changed and consumers are somehow a little different. They do their own research, they are resistant to advertising messages and they are willing to participate and spread their experiences about a product, provided they feel strongly enough about it.

More than that, those who understand Social Media Marketing well enough to benefit from it are the businesses who are also beginning to change internally, become a lot more transparent in the way they work and acquire a web presence which is not just corporate and professional but also human and personal.

This personalisation of goods and services and humanization of business is perhaps the biggest step we are seeing in the 21st century. We, as consumers, are no longer content to buy a product if we do not also have a sense of how it is made, who makes it and what their values are.

This is a socialisation of work in a grand scale. So grand, as a matter of fact, that, it seems, few yet know how to deal with it and what to do next. The same surveys show us that those who do actually take the plunge and engage in Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn marketing see benefits disproportionate to the cost in terms of increased sales and increased brand awareness.

What remains to be seen is just how quickly the rest of the businesses out there will give up being shy or simply half-trying and saying ‘it’s not for me’ and really immerse themselves in Social Media Marketing. There is no telling how quickly this will happen but when it does I am willing to bet that we shall see a much changed mentality in the way we work and how we do that work, yet another paradigm shift, courtesy of a new century.