Social Marketing

Not sure how many of you were able the attend ASAE's Annual, but the audience interest and total number of sessions on Social Networking was amazing.  It seems to me that social networking has become the latest, in a long list, of miracle cures for marketing ails -- just like the web and email were just a few years ago. 

A client of mine, American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) presented a session with me that shows how they the new media not only to prospect for new members, but engage and create a sense of belonging and community with current members that they then hope will lead to both high renewal rates, but also increased non-dues produce sales.

Plus they are using the discussions that erupt on their FaceBook and Linked-In sites as ways to spot emerging trends and/or trouble spots that the association needs to know about.

The simple fact is that social networking is not any miracle cure, rather just another useful marketing tool that should be part of a full-circle of media to interest, engage and close our marketing offers.

Rick Whelan
Marketing General Inc.

Comments

[Maddie Grant]

You nailed it!! It's SO important for associations to figure out exactly what their objectives are - setting up the shiny tool is not the goal in itself.

[Jeff De Cagna]

"The simple fact is that social networking is not any miracle cure, rather just another useful marketing tool that should be part of a full-circle of media to interest, engage and close our marketing offers."

Rick, I must respectfully yet strenuously disagree. The more we think about social technology as "just another useful marketing tool," the more we diminish the importance of the fundamental global shift that is taking place in how people collaborate and create value for themselves and others.

Far too much of our community's conversation about social technologies revolves around their implications and applications for marketing and communications. This is merely one facet of a much larger revolution that far too many association leaders don't fully understand and, as a result, are more prone to fear. We need to engage this dialogue in a different place and recognize that while we will use social technologies to advance our marketing goals, we must not limit our thinking about the potential they create for unparalleled innovation in associations and the association community.

[Rick Whelan]

"… fundamental global shift, larger revolution, dialogue in a different place..." Jeff you took my comments on a trip they did not pack for. There is no revolution here, just another in a long series of communication evolutions that as a marketer I am thankful for. As the telegraph lead to the telephone, as mail lead to the fax and then to email to now to instant text messaging, so too will something one day eclipse social media. As a marketer, I appreciate this new media as just that, a faster, more in-your face way for me to interact with my current market and prospect market and for them to interact with me -- yet another way, another channel over which to sell my products and wares. In a way we are coming full circle, heading away from mass marketing and towards mass customization, and back to the face-to-face and person to person selling our grandparents took for granted, just now brought to us electronically and possible on an instant worldwide scale.

[Jeff De Cagna]

Rick, that there is a global revolution taking place online, driven in large measure by new socially-oriented technologies, is not a matter of personal opinion, but a fact well-documented in books such as Here Comes Everbody by Clay Shirky, Wikinomics by Don Tapscott, We-Think by Charles Leadbeater and others. So the question for the association community isn't whether the world is changing in irrevocable ways--it is--but how our organizations will adapt and change to the new realities of a shifting marketplace.

I recognize that some association leaders prefer to dismiss the broader impact of social technologies because the strategic implications are scary. But this is a time of enormous opportunity for associations, not to do what we've always done using new tools, but to reinvent our organizations for the 21st century from the ground up.