After a long break, here I am: back to my virtual digital land.
I will write today about social media.
Few days ago I was reading news, opinions, business cases about Social Media and I came across the following sentence:
“Social media is like teen sex, everyone wants to do it. No one actually knows how.” – Avinash Kaushik
I have found it so real. Social Media are everywhere: on my desktop, on my mobile, on the cup of my coffee in Starbucks and I find it so exciting.
The digital marketing land is full of experts, people ready to give you advices about what to do there, what to post, how to engage with you clients and stakeholders.. how to make money out of that.
And then there are these "gurus".. they talk about viral campaigns: how to make your campaign viral. I am listening to and reading about people who want to create viral campaigns. Ok, there might be few common ingredients.. but let's be honest here: nobody knows the secret of "virality" (virality itself is a word that doesn't exist yet).
Even the big Google is trying to create a social network viral like facebook.. but.. money cannot buy it!
Did facebook predict its success? Were Angry Birds developers "genius"?
Here there is my opinion.
Personally I think that Social Media reflect the real world in a different environment: there are many cases that show how things are difficult to control over there, as it's difficult to predict people reactions in general. Considered this, they are an open environment without any control and with the total freedom to express and share content, ideas etc, where everything is searchable, reachable and possible. Well.. this is the BIG challenge.
At the same time I think we now have the right tools to listen to our audience and understand what they really need, think and look for.
From a business point of view, Social Media involve all the functions: Marketing, PR, IT, Finance, Logistic, etc.
All of these functions need to be coordinated and follow a unique direction: set objectives behind social media activities (what are these activities? Is it just content? mmm... I don't think so).
Creating a page with Facebook takes 2 minutes, creating accounts in Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. is not that complicated.
What to do with all these DIFFERENT tools, when, how, who... why? This is the main point and I personally think that this is a Marketing issue!
Ok ok.. I am a marketer, I am not neutral.. but.. this is my blog! I don't have to be neutral :)
During the following days I will do some researches and I will write about pro and cons for all the social networks. Stay tuned.
That's it for now..
Actually no.. there is one more question: Who owns Social Media? MArketing or PR? Feel free to be neutral :)
Best,
Antonella
