Social Media & Recession

The facebook campaign has quadruples; are we talking about an emergence of an imperative social media marketing techniques. Statistics on advertising during a recession are not promising, and market(s) | economy (s) | company(s) worldwide are either facing a dramatic downturn or virtually collapsing. So is the recession a boost for social media spending? The answer is a simple yes.

Many ask me that how people with social technologies are changing everything, and as a marketer I still opine that the window is open for all to make money with social media, provided you are ready to effectively brand with social media. The top brands in social media report (2008) clearly articulate & showcase the importance of social media branding.

Things like blog marketing has become a central to online marketing or twitter essential for business, which I am sure many marketers like me never dreamed of, in its early days.

However is it good to just dive down into the pool of Social Media? I am sure questions like is blogging and community a ‘real’ work, is social network-based relationships shallow or stronger and so on pops up either in our mind or in management meetings?

The Art of Listening in Social Media plays an important role in ensuring a fundamentally strong social media base for your organization. Here we are even talking about Barack Obama, the social web, and the future of user-generated governance or how auto marketers should use social media in a downturn or even social media helped reporting in the recent mumbai attacks. The virtue of the “right” social media is enormous. This may even explains that the attribute of social media relies on the most fundamental and effective technique of marketing, which is the word of mouth marketing. Or is this why santa’s marketing works better than ours!

Hence it is imperative to engage in social media while ensuring that we take the "me" out of it and identify the ROI in social media.

As e-mail open rates plunge, social media marketing makes even more sense, as this is a podium where you meet or interact with your prospective customer at the time and space when he/she is looking for either you or what you sell. As marketers it is our fundamental duty to know about our prospect(s) and customer(s), though I wish much like how google knows where i am and everything else i do.

We cannot let our brand to commit suicide by not applying the new rules of marketing. While we can be judgmental to evaluate that why social applications will thrive in a recession but the truth remains still as naïve that we need to keep branding during a recession to reap benefits in stronger or fruitful times.