I just read another interesting post by Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester Report: Best and Worst of Social Network Marketing, 2008. I see this as an affirmation of previous posts of mine, The Fallacy of Community and Where the Hell is Matt (2008) Probably Won’t Proceed, along with Chris Abraham’s Community Leaders Make Communities. There’s caveats, of course.
The report seems to look how effective a social network marketing campaign was in terms of creating actual social networking (and what some would call community development) as opposed to how effective these campaigns were on actual sales or perhaps on longterm brand enhancement. That’s key, because we’re talking methodologies here, not results. So we’re looking at the opinions of influential industry analysts vs. the strategies developed by marketing professional who may or may not know what they’re doing when it comes to social networking marketing.
Turns out the industry analysts aren’t all that impressed with the work of the marketers.
Says Jeremiah, “many brands are wasting their time, money, and resources to reach communities in social networks without first understanding that the use case is very different than a microsite campaign.”
So let’s clarify that. What Jeremiah is saying is that too many marketers are, in their attempts to implement a community style marketing campaign, faltering because they are too focused in bringing the visitor (and potential community member) to the product website as opposed to actually fostering community development. Hence, a community never really develops in this community development effort. It’s not a criticism of interactive marketing…it’s a observation that marketers are too interactive marketing focused in their community marketing efforts.
In other works, if it ain’t a community, it ain’t community marketing.
But let’s first take a look at the report… Read more…
4 Comments » Posted on July 25th, 2008 by Jonathan Trenn
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