Reach an audience of 1 million....

That's the Face Book promise.

But will you.

I have been thinking a lot about new media these days. Everyday I receive "news" (hard to discern between news and advertising some times) that if I am not actively exploring "new" media, I will be compromising my company. Well, my business plan is not designed to meet millions -- that would do us in. But I am always open to learn and explore new ideas.

But as I track results for clients on Face Book, Twitter and blogs. And as we watch the direct results from SEO and SEM I discover one critical truth: it's all about strategy.

My observation (for what it's worth), is that a lot of people are playing with social medial. After all, it doesn't cost anything. Except time. Every day more people start following me on Twitter. I'm pretty sure no one actually reads or follows my random tweets, but they are following me. And, yes, there are millions of people on social network, but how many are actually “reached” (still hard to track and ascertain an engaged audience). Of all of the results that we see, very few are actually coming from social media (interestingly). There are some challenges with using Face Book as an organizational marketing tactic. First of all, it's incredibly crowded, so getting attention is difficult. Secondly, it's a personal social networking space, so people are sharing pictures of babies and vacations. Products that intersect with that space should be playing in it. Thirdly, there are a lot of accounts that are duplicate. If you call up World Vision, it's hard to tell which pages are valid. Finally, maintaining social media sites are incredibly time consuming.

ON THE OTHER HAND

One should not discount the value straight away. I think our job is getting harder and harder. Strategic thinking is the most important factor in marketing well. Every organization, no matter what the size, should be investing time and money into their marketing strategies. There are many things that are very important to consider. This past few weeks I have been giving about an hour a day to linked in, my blog, twitter – I ignore facebook because it irritates me and is full of junk (although I peruse it occasionally to see what my hundreds of friends are doing.)

I am neither prophetic or exceptionally visionary, but I think the future of social media is a diversified group of social media sites that have specific uses – liked linked in for business. Compassion for sponsorship... there are a lot of reasons that we use social media – but the pilfering through the information to get what we want (need) is just so hard. I have twitter set up on my desktop with Tweet Deck. I have to say that the plethora of information is daunting (although I did receive that very nice little guitar utube link on it this morning that made me laugh).

The digital world is shifting and changing every day.

Google slips in and out the news. They are creating an i-phone competitor that will not be linked to a cell phone provider – hmmm – that is really interesting. They also just launched the direct payment that can be used by anyone to collect payment through the cell phone (hmmm, no bank? No little pay machine – all you need is your cell phone. You neighbourhood young teen can use it as payment for shovelling snow.) Google has already launched real time data (so when we drive, we can now use google maps to check for accidents when we drive and the traffic updates on the maps is immediate!)


I am trying to foresee the world without TV and advertising as we know it. I know that it is changing, but it needs to financially viable. I quickly moved to e-books.... I think the kindle is dead in the water, but think about the applications for magazines (ads that you click on). Think about the development of content that is real time and clickable.... we have a great future in creative is we can continue to build and grow and develop and imagination beyond the printed page.

BUT social media is only a small piece of that development!