Jason Cronkhite’s Blog

What is Efficient, Elastic and Effective?

// August 20th, 2009 // Social Media Marketing

Social Media is Efficient, Elastic & Effective for finding new customers!  Why do I believe this?  And, why is this important to you?

Well for one thing, social media recently helped a little company called FriendFeed get acquired for $50 million by Facebook.  How so?  Well, for those who do know him, Robert Scoble is an influential technology evangelist.  IMHO, Scoble was a major promoter of the service helping to raise its popularity and valuation as a company because of his social influence on the internet. Of course, that is not to say that the FriendFeed team did not do a fantastic job building a valuable company, they did and that’s why Facebook bought them.  But, Scoble helped them gain traction by bringing over lots of users, who brought over their friends and so forth.

In the famous Cluetrain Manifesto Doc Searls & David Weinbergersaid stated that, “Markets are nothing more than conversations”. If you understand this and that transactions are primarily influenced by reputation and recommendations from people’s influence, then you can appreciate the power and potential of socialized marketing.

Since marketing is all about influencing people, social media is naturally designed to encourage conversation where people are, by their permission and by their interests. The key is finding out where the people are and engaging in relevant and meaningful conversation that can influence a business transaction if you have something to sell. Ok, how?

This is where Efficiency comes in!

The internet as a marketing medium is highly efficient. The problem is most of us don’t know how to harness its data efficiency and intelligence power.  Search marketing has proven the power that internet marketing has and it will continue to be a powerful marketing tactic. However, search marketing takes more technical prowess, time and energy to produce results, although things are being made easier. Whereas various forms of social mediums have the power to produce impactful results quicker because of the human influence element involved. By leveraging internet intelligence tools one can quickly discover where relevant conversations are happening on the internet and begin to participate and influence such conversation.

Elastic & Expansive

Social media has an elastic benefit in that when one group of people are influenced chances are high that this group of people will go off and influence others with similar interests.  This is how most products and services are sold.  This elasticity of influence has a ripple effect like dropping a pebble in a pond.  The practice of calling things “viral” comes from medical attribution of a virus. Like a virus you can spread influence through the web sharing via people quickly.  How do you hear about the funny videos on YouTube?  Right, your friends tell you about it and share it.  Then the ripple in the pond gets exponetially larger.

Effective

Beyond its elastic and data efficiency benefits, social media is effective in terms of cost and reach. Compared to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to achieve 97% failure rates and 3% success rates as is common with most traditional marketing mediums, look to social media strategies to produce much higher success rates with more effective targeting in terms of cost and specific marketing reach. With proper audience identification and engagement tactics you will be able to fish where the fish are. Then, focus on making your new customers your most effective marketers.

What do you think?  I’d love to hear from you.