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Last Monday I participated in Frost & Sullivan’s Marketing World as a thought leader on social media. The role of the thought leaders is to share practices and insights as part of interactive sessions. The one on social media was faciliated by J.K. Rohrs, VP of Marketing at ExactTarget.

Social media is better known by the growth of user generated content and online social networking services. What’s relatively new is the fact that businesses are paying attention to public discussions taking place on the web which can positively and negatively impact the company’s brand equity and sales.

Most marketing executives are still wrestling with understanding how relevant any of these emerging communication tools might actually be to their company’s top line. If that’s your case, I suggest considering the following:

• Some forms of social media have achieved a level of professionalism that now rivals traditional marketing and communication channels.
• Traditional media is embracing blogging, open online discourse and cross-platform syndication (share this) for messaging and content which used to be confined to the company’s official corporate site.
• Many marketers feel overwhelmed by the number and scope of the online dialogs, these being social media conversations which involve their brands.
• Embracing the level of openness that social media entails is seen as counter productive when customer complains overpower a silent majority of happy customers.
• Conservative practices mostly relying on mass marketing and traditional market segmentation might no longer to a good enough job. While some forms of social media will come and go, the fact is that its underling communications paradigms have already permeated mainstream marketing.

As a result, tools addressing: social media listening, data mining, analytics, semantic search and social graphs across online platforms will help marketers reach a higher level of customer engagement through significantly improved recommendation and social communication engines.

Patricia Hursh, President and Founder of SmartSearch Marketing, discussed how to make the most of available search tools to gather customer insights. Her presentation included a reference to SM2 from Techrigy, whose service covers: real-time social media monitoring, sentiment analysis, clustering and customized reporting.

Basically, this means that we have to through not just more but also better, smarter technology at this new opportunity. Having said that, technology alone will not do the trick, innovative marketing will.

J. de Francisco blogging from Chicago on Nov 8

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