Most articles/blog posts on social media marketing are short churns of phrase. The motivation being..."Gotta post something today, keep the page views up, become a thought leader, add some followers, engage my hoped-for audience"....and 90% of the time the post is merely a regurgitation of the acknowledged fundamentals of social media marketing. The dearth of actual original thought in SMM "thought leaders" is...I would say "alarming" but it doesn't warrant the use of a word that should be used in conjunction with something far more serious.
I'd like to start a meme today about how so much of the writing today on SMM is based on nothing. The same people saying the same things to each other in....well, it's either an echo chamber or a vacuum. It's the same, conceptually, as the NASDAQ bubble, the housing bubble, etc., a whole lot of activity, word churn, energy and money swirling around a mountain of expectation and perceived (or imagined, or hoped for) value.
We shall henceforth call this "The Thought Bubble".
Sure, SMM, and social media and the conversation is all good stuff. And I love, and agree with Gary Vee-WineTV, yes, it's a revolution. But an economy cannot be built on a lot of experts singing to a bunch of other experts the same old song in the hopes that a few companies will hear the siren song and pay to hear it as well. There's a lot of back-slapping and McLovin' going around.
Now that I've said that...here's a great article on Social Media Marketing from a bunch of the usual suspects! Seriously though, it's a long, pretty in-depth read. A lot of it, of course, can be boiled down to "Learn to Listen", and many of these thought leaders lapse into agency-speak that is tortuous, and comic. Hey, expert, read your thing out loud. Does it sound smart, or like a load of crap-speak? OK...it sounds smart...still, does it mean anything other than learn to listen? If not, just say learn to listen and leave the 10 dollar words in your novel.
One of the good points made in the article is from Geoff Livingston - Senior Vice President at CRT/tanaka. He speaks to the importance of companies having a larger communications strategy that social media is a part of...he says, in part:
I think they should nail down a higher strategy first. It’s a common error, and one I face often where I have to unify and re-activate littered social media properties that have been abandoned due to little interest. Going back to that core strategy, that core value an organization has to offer is the heart of where social media strategy begins. Not playing with Twitter because it is hot.
The best stuff in this article is from actual companies talking about their challenges/successes i/r/t SMM, like HP...but it's all worth a read.
