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According to Robert Jones, contributing editor to SmartBrief on Entrepreneurs,
"entrepreneurs dread social media."
He cites a recent poll of SmartBrief readers that found entrepreneurs would rather farm out social media marketing than any other business function.
Jones asked four social-media experts to explain why entrepreneurs would do so. They said:
- Large corporations are commercializing social media so rapidly, they're crowding out small businesses. Small-business owners aren't sure they can have a share of voice.
- Small-business owners mistakenly believe that, to be effective, they have to use every social media platform.
- Social media is time-intensive. Small-business owners don't see the ROI in it.
- Small-business owners lack the skills needed, so they're frightened by social media marketing.
My own opinion?
Small-business owners are stymied by social media marketing because it's content marketing.
And content doesn't just fall off trees.
You have to ferret it out, organize it, and present it in a digestible fashion.
And that takes persistence. Just ask any journalist.
Social media marketing perplexes event producers, according to a survey by Sam Lippman, president of ISM and producer of the Attendee Acquisition Roundtable.
As reported in BtoB, 61% of producers polled said the strategic use of social media marketing is among their top challenges, when it comes to driving attendance to events.
“Event producers haven't found the key to social media marketing,” said Lippman. “Many best practices have been established, but they change daily—along with the underlying technologies.”
A second leading challenge is the effective use of market research to drive attendance, cited by 55% of producers.
Disclosure: ISM is one of my clients.
In an imaginative post on Social Media Today, entrepreneur Jay Deragon asks a daring question.
Are online communes replacing online communities?
"Haven’t you noticed," Deragon writes, "that your real network is actually becoming smaller, regardless of how many followers and friends you think you have?”
Your followers and friends are catching on.
Goodbye community.
Hello commune.
Although the darlings of every new-media maven, online communities leave a lot to be desired. They're large, loose and transaction-oriented (often to the financial betterment of their facilitators).
By virtue of these qualities, online communities make it "impossible to hold true relational affinities."
Online communes, on the other hand, are small, tight and focused on the common interests of their members. They represent "a natural migration of human dynamics, where the membership is designed to have a higher degree of connectivity."
Because they only bring people together in order to fleece them, communities are old school. Deargon cites Internet guru Clay Shirky: “The problems of the past are being leveraged by organizations which have created solutions that preserve the old problems.“
Bazaarvoice surveyed 175 chief marketing officers in late 2010 and discovered they're measuring social media by a new yardstick.
The survey shows that CMOs still put the greatest faith in two hard measures, sales and revenue.
They also put faith in measures like site traffic, number of fans and number of customer comments.
However, a whopping 93% of CMOs now plan to use "customer-generated content" when arriving at new-product decisions.
The preferred forms of customer-generated content are customer stories, product ideas, polls and customer reviews.
"CMOs have moved beyond fear and skepticism to embrace social media as the source for strategic intelligence that can transform their products, brands and business," says Erin Mulligan Nelson, Bazaarvoice's own CMO.
The survey also found that more than half of CMOs currently don't see any ROI from three of the most popular social media tools, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Traditionalists complain that Americans' addiction to "content snacking" signals the death of long-form communication.
But content snacking only means marketers must embrace "lateral media distribution," says PR consultant Angelo Fernando in the current edition of IABC's CW Magazine.
While many Americans still crave the long form, their preference for content snacks presents a tasty opportunity to deliver stories in new and interesting ways.
"Instead of treating each medium as a source of a complete message, we can now treat different media channels as being tethered together, letting a message hop across from one to the other, laterally," Fernando writes.
When the most popular interfaces are smartphones, iPads and e-book readers, inspiring audiences demands a whole new way of thinking about your content.
How are you delivering your story?
