Has social media become so mainstream as a marketing/PR tool that it has lost the excitement of being shiny and new? Are the early adopters really starting to move on to newer and “shinier” things?

Perhaps – but I happen to think that now is the time when social media marketing will truly thrive and the really interesting stuff is just starting to appear.

So what do I mean by “shiny and new?”

There’s an interesting trend you’ll find in some slices of the marketing profession: Shiny New Thing Syndrome. It’s not something I’m going to bag on, because it can be fantastic, rewarding, even necessary. For all the many marketers and PR professionals that seem to be lagging adopters of new tools and concepts like social media, there’s a far more visible group that is laser-focused on being out in front, spotting the new trends, and leading change.

When that new stuff goes mainstream, their attention shifts to whatever’s next on the horizon while the rest of the industry settles down to developing best practices, refining tactics, and so on. In short, they are focused on whatever is shiny and new, and when the shine wears off, so does their interest.

I was inspired to write about this as Tac Anderson makes this point in a post discussing what happens “When Social Media Stops Being Shiny“:

Social media has made the big time. We’ve crossed the chasm, we’re mainstream, people are finally taking us seriously. We were right and they were wrong…

Every trend, even really big ones like social media, hit  point where in order to be sustained the early adopters have to step out of the way and let people who don’t get easily distracted manage processes and create best practices. Things early adopters aren’t typically that good at.

I agree that for the most part, social media has crossed the chasm. It’s almost impossible to find a marketing, ad, or PR campaign that *doesn’t* include a social media element to it. User submitted content contests, “like” buttons, Facebook tab promos, etc are basically everywhere – many well planned and executed, many not.

From the early adopter standpoint, the point isn’t in if the medium has been perfected (far from it), but that it has simply gone mainstream. They are off to the next shiny, which in all likelihood sits somewhere between your smartphone and a cloud. It reminds me when blogging suddenly became passe, and Twitter all the rage.

Given all that, back to my opening point…

Personally, while I *love* the shiny and new, I also think that some of the most exciting stuff is yet to come in social media marketing.

Why?

Because there’s still a ton of experimentation happening that is well beyond the refinement of yesterday’s ideas. The discipline itself is professionalizing, and lots of incredibly smart people from diverse backgrounds are flooding into it. Big brands, having started to buy into social media as a viable marketing channel, are increasingly willing to bet bigger dollars on it. The tools and networks we use are continuing to grow and evolve at ever faster rates.

Also, the concept of social media marketing is itself extending outwards to embrace the shiny and new, as we can see with campaigns built around Foursquare, SCVNGR, and (soon) Facebook Places and those mixing mobile ads with social calls-to-action.

Throw it all together in one big, creative pot and all signs point to some pretty amazing things on the horizon for social media marketing. I love reading the thoughts of those who dive headlong into the shiny and new – as I myself do fairly constantly – but I’m also looking forward to seeing how social media marketing is going to mature now that some serious talent and resources are being focused on it. Good times ahead.

Photo by marfis75 on Flickr via CC License

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One of the best points made is this one (paraphrasing): A campaign is not a movement. A campaign has a start date and an end date – a movement never ends. However, I’d add one corollary: many campaigns these days seek to develop elements of a movement, by building or engaging with communities – and just like movements, communities don’t just end either. That’s a really critical point for marketers in all disciplines to grasp, as it carries profound implications for anyone involved in word of mouth, social media, or community marketing.

Most marketing campaigns these days – while unfortunately in no way planned out to spark “movements” – do include some kind of community-building efforts. These can be as shallow as attracting fans to a Facebook page or Twitter account, or as deep as actively engaging that passions of established and vocal groups, clubs, forums, and so on. If your campaign actually manages to resonate with people, communities of all size and stripes could start to form around it or the products, services, or brand it’s promoting.

These communities of fans, followers, advocates, and evangelists are paying attention and engaging with your efforts, responding to your prompts, sharing with their friends, and even co-opting the campaigns lingo, creative, and so on. The marketer’s dream situation, right?

Not if you then pull the rug out from under them three months later. As Spike notes, a marketing campaign has a defined lifespan – it launches, cycles through various stages, and then shuts down while the marketing team rolls onto the next big thing. But those communities that may have formed around your product or campaign live on, and if you simply walk away to go focus on the next big thing, you risk anger, disaffection, or outright backlash by the very people who just last week you counted as your most passionate fans.

Even if you’re not wholly adopting Spike’s message and investing the time and energy it takes to try and build a movement around your brand, every marketer needs to be aware that the social and community elements of their brand and campaigns will in many cases outlive the quarterly media spend. If your fans and advocates invest the time and emotion into what you put out there, simply shutting down and moving onto the next campaign could carry some seriously negative effects.

In short: If you’re marketing effort involves trying to reach out to or cultivate communities of fans, advocates (or even skeptics) – which it should in almost every case – you need to be prepared to do it well beyond the life of the campaign of the moment. Like it or not, you’re in it for the long haul.

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A research report from Roiworld (which, oddly, has nothing to do with ‘return on investment’) making the rounds today talks up the statistic that “one in five teens (19 percent) with a Facebook profile has either abandoned the site or visits it less than they did a year ago. The exodus looks to be a recent trend, with 68 per cent of teens who have shifted away saying that’s happened in the last six months.” (Montreal Gazette).

Why? The reasons many would suspect actually all polled under 20% each - privacy issues, the multitude of Facebook UI changes, or even too many adults (or event parents) on the site. These were all trumped by something that should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever raised, met, or been a teenager: boredom (45%).

The fact teens are perhaps getting bored with Facebook isn’t all that shocking – teen trends come and go, and what holds true for fashion and entertainment may reasonably hold true for online social networking sites.

Also, it’s important to recall that Facebook wasn’t originally designed for (most) teens, but rather was set up as a tool for offline communities of college students to take those conversations and connections online. Over time the site evolved to include the 13-18 year old set, and then large companies, before inviting the rest of us old farts in. It started as a niche network for the college crowd, and evolved into a generic social platform designed to appeal to the masses.

As Facebook got more generic, perhaps it simply started to lose its uniqueness and appeal to the teen crowd.

Assuming this trend continues, and Facebook’s demographics continue to skew older while teens find other places to hang out online, this has downstream ramifications for both Facebook and the agencies and brands who currently pour hundreds of millions of ad and marketing dollars into it. If tweens and teens develop real affinity (and deep investment) in other social networks, they may be less inclined to make the switch to Facebook when they hit college. They may carry over their affinity for other networks to college and beyond, eventually eating into Facebook’s growth and relevance, rendering the current social media megalith nothing more than a 10-year wonder.

Whatever that “next Facebook” is – or, more likely in my view, whatever collection of less-dominate networks arise – that’s where the ad and engagement dollars currently targeted youth on Facebook will start to flow, and where marketers and agencies will need to develop new expertise in order to reach them.

Or…Facebook will adapt, tweak its features and find new appeal among the teen and tween set to retain its claim as the de facto social platform for 75%+ of us, sucking up the social media marketing dollars at an even greater rate than today.

The uncertainty all this highlights is pretty daunting for marketers: Will Facebook adapt and stay the hot online community to be for all ages, or will a new generation flock to other as-yet-unknown social networks and turn Facebook into a giant echo box for big brands and their 30+ year old followers?

This simply reinforces a critical point for anyone involved in social media marketing: don’t bet it all on a single platform or site. Watch the trends and don’t get sucked into the false belief that because “everyone” is hanging out at Facebook now, they always will be. Facebook has only been around since 2004, and open to all for just the past three and a half years, which in Internet terms places it firmly in middle age. It’s replacement could arise in less time than that.

(Inspired by a tweet from @TobyDiva)

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Good marketers tell effective, believable, compelling, and *true* stories about their products and brands. They help shape the world around them through truly powerful stories blended with the underlying science that makes up the day to day execution of marketing tactics (social, direct, advertising, etc.). Seth Godin famously nailed this idea, and hinted at the downside of it, in his bestselling book “All Marketers Are Liars” – which he has tellingly renamed “All Marketers Tell Stories.”

Where marketers, and marketing as a profession earn our sometimes poor reputation, is when:

• The stories are false
• The means used to tell them are deceptive or abusive

As Seth notes, the marketer’s job is on one level to help people come to understand and believe a particular worldview through the use of storytelling. When the stories turn out to be false, and worldviews get shattered, people tend to – quite rightly – take that personally. Their offense at being lied to turns into anger and disgust at the ones who tried to make them believe. The marketers.

The same holds for the means used to tell the story, another place where the marketing profession gets tripped up. Bad actors out there who employ deceptive or abusive marketing tactics – everything from black hat web techniques to bait-and-switch discounts, false advertising to spam (in email, comments, tweets, and so on) – constantly remind people that those trying to tell them stories, trying to sell them on something, very often cannot be trusted.

Marketing, when done honestly, intelligently, and with directness and passion is an honorable profession that helps drive the engine of our of society in a positive direction. It’s why I’m proud to call myself a marketer.

Unfortunately, people tend to remember the failures and scandals, the stories born out as false, and the profession the bad actors claimed as their own. All of marketing gets tarred in the process, and the good guys like Mitch have to toil twice as hard as an evangelist for the profession to fight against that negative perception.

In any profession you’re going to have the charlatans and snake oil salesmen who sully the profession, but it’s the nature of what marketers do – try to tell grand stories on a vast stage – that makes the actions of those few loom so large.

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Now, in general it’s easy to rapidly tire of the same rehashed social media tips presentations, typically with recycled titles like “7 CRAZY ideas for TAKING OVER THE WORLD using social media! YEAAAH!”

What matters are the real world examples. I don’t really care to hear about general concepts anymore, but I absolutely love hearing about interesting ways companies are seeing real value in their use of social media as part of the marketing and communications mix.

Which brings us back to Trey. Fortunately, he spent little time on the general stuff and lots of time telling a couple great stories about companies I’d never heard of and how they use (or, in one case, deliberately decided not to) social tools. The one that stuck for me is Carolina Manufacturing, the Greenville, SC manufacturer of…bandanas.

Though bandanas might not be in everyone’s wardrobe, at least since the early ’90s (unless you’re Bret Michaels, of course), they really are a perfect product to build a social media marketing effort around.

Why?

Because they all have a story, and there are small pockets of deeply passionate people who love telling them. You’ll have to see Trey talk to get the full story, but the marketing director for Carolina Manufacturing, @MaddenKim, discovered micro-communities of passionate fans of the company’s distinctive bandanas.

Dog lovers, cyclists, not-quite-retired ex-rockers, celebrity tycoons…even while bandanas generally faded from pop culture over the years, these small groups of hard core fans kept up their love, found each other online, and created their own conversation and communities around the iconic head gear.

The really cool part of the story is how Kim and team found these micro-communities, embraced them, and made their personal passions part of the brand’s story. A small but wonderful real world example of how a company can tap into practical social media marketing.

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In the world of telecommunications, the “last mile” refers to that last bit of connectivity – be it fibre, wire, wireless – that connects customers to the network.

The concept has acquired its own moniker because it represents a major and ongoing challenge for service providers: you can build the fastest, largest, and most robust network in the world, but if you can’t lay wire down the street to your individual businesses and customers it doesn’t do anyone much good.

The last mile concept also applies to business, and is a great way to evaluate how practical and effective social media marketing plans may become. In this case, activation – that final step that actually kicks off a campaign or concept within the intended community – is the last mile for social media marketing.

You can brainstorm out the most creative, engaging, and exciting social tactics and campaigns, but if nobody knows about them you’re not going to get very far. Sure, your campaign may rely on the social aspect of the idea – that those who discover it will kick off their own word of mouth storm. That’s great, but how are they going to discover it in the first place?

Activation, in this context, can be a blog outreach strategy to influential members of the community you’re seeking to engage. It can be a set of content and links that get distributed through updates to your brand’s popular Twitter accounts or Facebook pages. It can be some strategically tagged videos on popular video networks. It can even be more traditional media activities, such as an online media buy, Facebook engagement ads, or very often radio, print, and TV spots.

The point of calling activation the “last mile” is so you don’t forget about it in your quest to build out amazing social media programs. Social media and word of mouth marketing campaigns may rely on users sharing with others to gain steam and spread, but they still need to get noticed in the first place. Make sure all your campaigns and tactics include a concrete activation plan in order to make that happen.

*photo via Flickr and CC, by zachbass

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Well, a sudden need to spend 3 hours every day commuting* has made podcasts one hell of a lot more appealing. So much so that I’m actually burning through every interesting one I can find by the drive home on Tuesday, and spend the rest of the week hunting for more, with many not lasting more than an episode on my iPhone.

Here are a few of the better marketing-related podcasts I’ve been listening to, that have earned a “coveted” permanent spot in my roation – with a couple bonus ones at the end.

If you happen to know of a great one I’m missing, by all means leave a comment:

Marketing Over Coffee – A long time podcast by John Wall and Christopher Penn, recorded as a lightly structured 20-30 minute conversation at the local Dunkin Donuts (with a recent, unhappy try at a Starbucks). John and Christopher cover the big news items for the week in a very friendly, knowledgeable, and conversational tone that make it a worthwhile listen and one of the first on my “dial.”

The Beancast – Bob Knorpp has one of those voices that sounds hand-crafted for radio, or podcasting as it turns out. It’s so calming that if it weren’t for his well structured moderation of panels loaded with top marketing and advertising influencers each week (90 episodes and counting), I’d be worried his voice would put me right to sleep. Not a good thing doing 70 MPH in the dark at 6:30am, my usual listening time. The topics are timely, the panelists well chosen, and the flow rarely slows down. Plus, Bob’s a local to my new neighborhood, which adds a fun extra twist for me.

Six Pixels of Separation - Mitch Joel from Twist Image, a self-described “digital marketing and communications agency,” is up to episode 189 of his weekly 45 min – 1 hour+ podcast (and yes, that is a LOT of talking over the years). So clearly this one isn’t a flash in the podcasting pan. Mitch brings in a nice mix of 1:1 interviews – such as a recent one with Google’s analytics guru Avinash Kaushik – and panel-style conversations to keep the flow going and the variety level up.

An observation: The podcasts above all feature 2+ people (hosts, panels, or host+guest) and have been at it a very long time, so the kinks have long since been ironed out. In contrast, many of the solo podcasts tend to get old fast, and I find myself turning them off within minutes.

Bonus: History and other subjects:

Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History – I just discovered this one last week. If you love history, and have an hour to kill, give Dan a try. From what I’ve heard so far the topics are not for the squeamish, but the research is excellent, the commentary insightful, and the delivery lively. And yeah, Dan does sound a bit like William Shatner.

Freakonomics Radio – Apparently a new addition to the podcasting world, from the guys behind Freakonomics and Superfreakonmics. This one is professionally produced, with cut away interviews and the like. However the first episode I felt wandered a bit from the original promise. That said, it’s from the Freakonmics guys, so I’ll be eagerly awaiting the second installment just to see what other random myths they explode using economics.

Stuff You Missed in History Class – This is the undergrad survey course you always wish you had. Hosts Sarah and Katie jump wildly across thousands of years to cover everything from obscure pirates to famous battle horses to obscure Canadian history. They also have very sweet almost giggly voices that make it easy to listen all the way through. The subject matter is generally fairly PG, in stark contrast to Hardcore History, which makes for a quick, fun way to load up on obscure historical trivia to bust out and wow (or bore) your friends with later on.

*it’s a temporary thing, mid house move

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Companies constantly dust off those classics they have rights to, and either repackage the originals or infuse new products with some defining “classic” elements, to appeal to new and old fans alike. We see it everyday with cars, especially those coming out of a Detroit constantly striving to recapture its old magic. We also see it in music, with covers of old classics by modern bands, or repackaged, remastered originals wrapped up as greatest hit albums.

What’s truly inspiring is when the original classic is redone with an all new light, in such a way that it perfectly delights both new and old fans. From the world of music – classic rock specifically – the acoustic or “unplugged” remakes of the old classics “Layla” (Eric Clapton) and “Hotel California” (Don Henley/The Eagles) embody this perfectly.

Just listen to those songs, and especially the live fan reactions when they were first performed, and try not to get the chills. In both cases, the original musicians tease with an intro that maybe hints at what the song will be, but never quite tips off the audience (except maybe that one guy in the back of the room who starts hooting in joy far to early). Then they play some defining cord that fully and dramatically gives away the song.

The audience reaction is electric, even if the instruments are not. In both songs, once the fans realize what they’re listening to, they scream in delight both at hearing an old favorite and at experiencing it in an entirely new way.

Both Layla and Hotel California are immensely popular classics. They have been packaged up, remastered, and resold countless ways over the years. Fans have bought up greatest hits albums and re-releases of the original tracks by the millions.

Even then, when you would expect fan fatigue to set it at least a bit, Clapton and the Eagles dusted the classics off and reinvented them completely, risking the ire of the purists yet delighting so many more while introducing the songs to entirely new generation of fans.

What’s the marketing lesson in this? If you happen to be lucky enough to be stewards of a classic, by all means keep exploring ways to continue to sell it to fans both old and new. Just don’t be afraid of reinventing it, even at the expense of purists, to give it a whole new life.

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With so much focus these days on how companies can leverage great branding, marketing, and social media to build a passionate customer community, I think a pretty simple underlying truth tends to get overshadowed:

It all starts with a great product.

And not just a technically sound, decent quality, reasonably well designed product. But one that truly and deeply impresses. Three years ago on my personal blog I wrote this:

I don’t want their [customers'] reaction to be a measured, rational, dispassionate analysis of why the product is better than the alternatives, how the cost is more reasonable, feature set more complete, UI more AJAXified. I don’t want them to pause to analyze the boring feature comparison chart on the back of the box.

I want “f**king cool!” Period.

Look at all the chatter on Twitter from the WOMMA event in Vegas right now – the Marketing VP (Rob Bondurant) from Patagonia apparently just presented, and shared wonderful nuggets of wisdom along with a bunch of stories about how vibrant and passionate their community is.

If their products were just average, do you think Rob would have been on stage at WOMMA? No way. For all the cool stuff Patagonia has done to build their brand identity and encourage and cultivate their fans (and it’s seriously impressive), their success all starts with developing kick ass products that customers don’t just like, they adore.

So learn all you can about great marketing. Listen to smart people with great experiences to share. Sharpen your skills around supporting and fostering customer evangelists.

But be damn sure your product or service is awesome first. It all starts with that.

*Photo from the Patagonia home page, hoping they don’t mind the compliment.

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Found via a post over on Virtual Economics (“The growing value of URLs you can easily spell out in dead bodies“), I have to give a hat tip to the spammers (ahem, marketers) behind this little innovation in our field:

Go to any major city (Stormwind, Orgrimmar) [in World of Warcraft] and you’ll see the name of some gold-selling website or other spelled out in dead bodies on the ground.

Yes, all those little red and purple spots in the above photo are, in fact, player character corpses from WoW. Seems to be a rather creative new way to promote websites within the game – just get a ton of accounts, kill off each character in a specific location, and I assume use another character to maneuver the dead bodies into letters to spell out your favorite domain name.

Though yes, it’s spam, I have to say I’m impressed. This is a serious step up from sticking a useless character in a game town square and having him scream out sales pitches to every player that strolls by. I have no idea if it’s effective or not, but these guys get an “A” for the effort.

*screenshot via Virtual Economics

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