Digital Marketing And Social Media PR – The Future Buzz

Recently, Stephen Baker at Business Week wrote an article titled Beware Social Media Snake Oil. However, the article does not deliver on the headline and instead wanders aimlessly throughout several disparate points without delivering much of a punch. Let’s dig into it:

As millions of people flock to these online services to chat, flirt, swap photos, and network, companies have the chance to tune in to billions of digital conversations.

While the business digital divide – at least in the marketing and media industries – feels to be closing, there’s another rift less discussed: a divide between those with digital influence/share of voice and those without. And it’s a rift that grows wider daily.

Many businesses and individuals who embraced content marketing years ago are seeing strong returns and are way ahead of those starting today. I started pondering why this is and jotted down the following list:

Everyone is buzzing about social media marketing. You can’t turn your head without hearing about it at a conference. Marketing and PR professionals are either engaged today or thinking about how to engage tomorrow. Everyone is suddenly claiming expert status (by the way: you don’t need a social media expert, you just need a good marketer).

In Think Twice: Harnessing The Power of Counterintution, Michael J. Mauboussin postulates that a diverse crowd will always predict more accurately than the average person in the crowd.

He takes social scientist Scott Page’s diversity prediction theorem (collective error = average individual error – prediction diversity) a step further to identify the three conditions which must be in place to know when crowds will predict well: diversity, aggregation and incentives:

Face facts: social media isn’t new anymore. Actually, it hasn’t been new for a long time.

We’ve been socializing on the web for well over a decade – long before Twitter, Facebook and the glorification of monolithic walled gardens, which are nothing more than modern versions of AOL and prodigy with bells and whistles.

If you think the social web is new, you’re already far late to the party. And if you are late, the worst thing you can do for your brand or yourself is to flat out ignore or brush off a form of communication that an entire generation already sees as “invisible.”

Social media comments are the new trackbacks.

Enabled by a slew of tools, there is an increasing trend of bloggers aggregating comments about their content from around the web right on their blog. In theory, this is a nice idea – bringing together bits of conversations in one spot – under the original content.