The other day I was asked if social media was just a ‘phase.’ This was not the first time I had heard the question and it is one that deserves some discussion. As companies continue to reassess their current marketing and branding campaigns, the question of how much to allocate toward social media campaigns is becoming a bigger issue. Not only is cost being taken into account when companies review social media, but also how it will affect their branding as well as customer relationships.
What Is The Trend?
While more and more companies begin engaging their online communities through social media, the question is how much will they increase by in the coming year. According to Forrester, they predicts that interactive marketing will have a 16% compound annual growth rate through 2014. Additionally, according to research reported by Ravit Lichtenberg , “48% of Marketing and PR moving money out of advertising into social media with only 18% moving money out of PR.” This is significant because this will be the first time that more money is being taken out of advertising budgets than in PR.
So what does this mean? While the numbers show a growing trend toward social media, the answer toward the question if social is just a phase remains unanswered.
Look Around You
Perhaps one of the best ways for us to determine if social media has impact value is to look at the world around us. Today, Facebook and Twitter’s logos are everywhere. From television commercials to billboards, the logo may not be huge and direct, but the message is still driven home to the consumer: Want to learn more? Find us online.
Instead of seeing how the number of registered users on Facebook are growing or how long the average Twitter user spends each day tweeting, perhaps we need to look at the impact that social media is having on the development of other sites. By this I am referring to looking at the way businesses are now building products, websites, and more. If you look the basic features of phones today, most are equipped for Facebook and instant messaging capabilities. Websites are also joining in on the fun by allowing users to login to their site with their Facebook, Twitter or MySpace accounts. As we continue to move forward with technology and products, social media sites are not only becoming a networking tool platform, but they are influencing the way we build, share and interact.
What Determines A Phase
So what determines what a ‘phase’ is? According to the dictionary, a phase is “a particular point in the time of a cycle.” If we apply this definition to social media, that would mean that social media is just a dot on the business timeline. While this is technically true, it also holds true then that business is all about phases. Up until the late 90’s, print dominated the advertising and marketing side of business. Following that, up until recently, commercials provided impact value. Now, we have social media. Perhaps social media is just a phase, but my felling is that it is more than that and will grow into something bigger and better.
Joseph is the Director of Marketing at Viralogy.com & works in social media & sports consulting. Read more about him at http://JosephAYi.com
Tags: Advertising, Marketing, Phase, Social Media
