Social Media - Leapfrogging our business systems backwards or Turning
10/02/2011
An earlier article written by Dr Rachel Cornish, suggested that social media will have as big an impact on internal business systems as on marketing functionality. The article, called 'The disadvantages of social marketing' concluded that:
"social marketing is a nuisance. It is a risk. It threatens how existing business systems operate. It has no immediate benefit, only promises of great returns, yet needs monitoring and is wasting large amounts of management time."
Th article above also suggested that:
"... social media is taking a radical leap frog backwards. Social marketing seeks to bring back the two way communication. Social marketing will reduce the neatly ordered workflow that other parts of an organisation seek to introduce."
At the end of 2010 the above article looked at how
"Social Marketing is bringing chaos into order. It is taking neatly ordered systems and introducing some unpredictability."
There was one slight error in the first article. The last line read: "But social marketing is not going to go away. It will become more important in the next few years."
Rub out "next few years" and write instead "next year" or "this year".
Recent changes in standard Google search algorithm mean all forward looking businesses must embrace social media whether they want to or not. It now impacts mainstream search.
There will no doubt now be a rise in outsourced offshore social media activity. Sensible marketing strategy will use a well thought out, maybe small scale social media plan to have a social media presence that helps SEO but does not harm the business. And in the long term one with a marketing aim that actively helps the business.
The challenge is to allow some chaos to develop as required by social media, but in a maneageable way.
