The Google+ ‘A-ha!’ Moment: We’re All Relearning What Database Marketers Already Know: Segmentation Stops Training People to Ignore You

It seems like it took forever, but social media is finally catching up with something that database and direct marketers have known for years: consumers aren’t all alike.

As social networks continue their march toward world domination, a big part of their appeal is that they allow people to share their thoughts and opinions with an ever-increasing number of friends (think Facebook) as well as strangers (think Twitter). And while social media may have brought simplicity to sharing, the truth is, it hasn’t really brought the best marketing smarts to the equation. Facebook and Twitter both default to a scatter-gun approach when it comes to messaging. This doesn’t work incredibly well for engagement on a personal level, and from a marketing perspective, the leading social nets intrinsically ignore some of the strongest components marketers hold dear — like timely, relevant messaging.

Social Media Marketing or Traditional Marketing? It Depends...

One question I constantly get from CMOs and other marketing pros these days is “How much of my spend should I be shifting to social-media marketing?” I’ve read a ton of stuff lately about this topic and I’m happy to recommend an excellent thread on Quora entitled “How would you measure the ROI in social media?” To date, 42 contributors have supplied answers to the question, along with links to many great additional resources. But what’s perfectly clear is that the answer is more or less “It depends.” It depends on what your program objectives are (e.g., cost savings in customer service vs. revenue enhancement?), and as importantly, it depends on what your tactics are to achieve those objectives. So that’s just it, it depends.