Two of my esteemed colleagues have weighed in on a misconception that has been promulgating the marketing community: that social media marketing is somehow free. Well, it isn’t. Both posts below make great reading. With many, many successful social media marketing executions for major brands under his belt, Pete knows what he’s talking about.
Continuous Beta by Pete Spande: Social Media Marketing Isn’t Free but it is Terribly Efficient

The benefit of Social Media isn’t the initial cost it is the return. If you invest time, money, and energy into a conversation with your potential customers you build equity with prospects at a scale that becomes extremely meaningful. As you build these relationships, you gain the ability to get more out of that relationship. They will share their feelings with new prospects, they will defend your brand in place you can’t, and they will amplify your message.
Marketers, I share your frustration of many with the expectation that social marketing equates to (virtually) free marketing and the unrealistic expectations that come along with this. This commonly held perception does open the door to a very compelling discussion around efficiency and value and that is one we all must engage in. Let’s have that discussion.

John Battelle’s Searchblog: On Marketing in Social Media, and Meals

Social media marketing is about brands acting, well, social. Which means they need to show up to the party with a nice bottle of wine, if that’s what the party calls for. They need to come ready to have a dialog, and add value to the event.

Here’s a summary of a great piece in BussinessWeek today with a grand-finale in the block quote below.
Why will online weather the recession better than other mediums? Well…
1. Online has come of age as a medium.
2. It is accountable and engaging.
3. It’s an iron law of marketing that word of mouth is the most powerful medium that money can’t buy.
4. Marketers are spending digital dollars to create “earned” rather than “paid” ad placements.
5. Online has the capacity to reach consumers with precision at specific points in the buying process.

In short, Madison Avenue won’t come out of this ad recession the way it came in. Why would advertisers budget on faith when they could invest in measurable returns? Why would brands lavish dollars on mass media when they could target only those consumers who matter most? Why would marketers continue to allocate less than 10% of their budgets to interactive (in measured media), when consumers are spending more than 35% of their time with interactive platforms even today?

Before the holiday, the WSJ published a piece entitled “The Secrets of Marketing in a Web 2.0 World.” Written by a cadre of very astute academics in technology and marketing, this is a great high-level summary of many of the things we’ve been preaching here at FM for some time now – definitely worth a read. Below is a summary of the the “secrets” revealed. For more on conversational marketing, see The FM Guide to Conversational Marketing (pdf).
1. Don’t just talk at consumers — work with them throughout the marketing process.
2. Give consumers a reason to participate.
3. Listen to — and join — the conversation outside your site.
4. Resist the temptation to sell, sell, sell.
5. Don’t control, let it go.
6. Find a ‘marketing technopologist.’
7. Embrace experimentation.

Our merry band of Jeffries-tube crawling, server-engine-room-mucking Sysadmins, network architects and significant others dressed up (sort of!) and partied.. well.. like it’s 2008, at the Harbour Sixty Steakhouse, mere blocks from that great fortress of glass, concrete, blood, sweat and tears we call the FM Toronto Datacenter. Complete with at-table S’more roasting for dessert.

Check out the video footage of the Need a Tech Makeover contest winners. HotHardware and Intel granted three deserving, cash-strapped winners (a sheep farm, a non-profit theater company and a cancer survivor) complete makeovers with laptops, desktops, video cameras, printers and more.
Click here for the press release with accompanying video footage. Each entry received thousands of votes with the lion’s share going to Christine Aerhart with more than 21,000 votes in her favor.
Winning entries:
· Steps Off Broadway, a small non-profit theater company in Bellingham, MA
· MV Fiber Farm, a sheep farm and woolen products producer in Hopewell Junction, NY
· Christine Arehart – a stage 4 cancer survivor from Columbia, SC

Check out Graffiti here. From Time Magazine:

From web applications that enable you to see hundreds of your friends at once, to a way to communicate simultaneously with all your contacts, there are dozens of ways you can scream into cyberspace. These are 10 of the best.

The NY crew (FM is now in SF, LA, Chicago and NY) had themselves an FM get-together last night. Here’s glimpse of our happy party peeps…

Jeremiah Owyang, a virtual fountain of social media activity, today posed a simple question via Twitter: Do you want more, or less, brand activity on Twitter? The responses were swift and numerous. And the consensus? Almost universally, the twitterverse responded (I’m paraphrasing, here) “Yes, give me more brands on Twitter, so long as they are 1) real people, 2) they foster real relationships and they 3) leave the marketing schtick at the office.
Granted, Jeremiah’s Twitter followers are probably mostly media and marketing wonks who are friendly to brand activity (like yours truly), so it may not be a representative sample of consumers. But it seems that media and marketing professionals, at least, have officially come to the conclusion that marketing executions must add value to consumers’ experiences. If they do that, they will be welcomed and embraced.

Everyday there seems to be another study, report or survey that makes a prediction about spending in online advertising for the coming year. This time GroupM and ZenithOptimedia get in on the act. The consensus here, as it was in my post from a couple of days ago, is that while most media sectors will fall, online will grow, but more slowly than in the past.
MediaPost: Online Will Continue To Expand Amid ’09 Global Ad Recession

WPP’s GroupM unit projects online ad spending will expand 10% in 2009, a marked dip from its 22% rate of growth in 2008, but still a double-digit rate of expansion amid a global economic ad recession. Publicis’ ZenithOptimedia Group predicts it will fare even better, expanding 18% in 2009. Despite the continuing slowdown in the expansion of the online advertising economy, its share of advertising budgets will expand significantly during 2009 as most other major media remain flat or decline.