The recently published Strategic Framework for Applied Social Media serves as an excellent back-drop for discussing our Marketing Imperative: “creating awareness, growing sales and taking market share.”  We presupposed in our earlier discussion that some definite value levers supporting marketing can be positively affected through the use of Social Media:

• Improving the efficiency of creating brand awareness & customer attraction
• Gathering insightful, segmented market intelligence
• Quickly identifying market trends
• Multiplying the effectiveness of campaigns
• Building brand-centered community to increasing customer loyalty

We’ll be talking about these on and off here and ultimately starting a discussion for each business imperative elsewhere on this site.

Let’s take the first value driver for Marketing.

Improving the efficiency of creating brand awareness & customer attraction.

The most expensive aspect of marketing is acquiring and re-activating customers. This means gaining awareness and providing relevancy to affect a sale or conversion. Social Media venues are gathering places for a targeted purpose, allowing companies to take their brands where it makes the most sense. This lets companies more efficiently reach the demographics that best fit their product, service, or need. The location of a company's content has become just as important as the content itself. Traditional models are too focused on broadcasting brand promises where the message is not wanted or heard. Integrating a corporate blog to social media sites where the content is relevant, however, creates a rich brand experience.

SEO and SEM techniques are now complemented by the fact that search engines also read social media. These sites are updated frequently by users, often affecting the conversations that a company participates in being picked up and transmitted to the search engines more effectively. This paves the way for a host of solutions that leverage social media to drive awareness. Unfortunately, there is a temptation to apply traditional marketing measures like cost-per-click to rationalize the effectiveness of social media campaigns. Cost-per-click (CPC) is the amount an advertiser pays each time a user clicks on their advertisement. Google AdWords has a pricing system based on clicks. Even though early research results imply a better CPC return for social media, I have to completely disagree with the premise here.  There can be little debate that the cost-per-click for social campaigns is a less relevant measure. PageOne PR recently published some comparative CPC results that further confuse this point:

      Excerpt taken from PageOne Public Relations at

Limiting social media to traditional measures reduces its context from being truly social. As the social context develops, relevant measures, and the way they relate to Sales & Marketing, will become evident. Think of things like the number of times someone tagged, commented, favorited, or embedded information about your company, brand, product or service. What about the number of fans, followers, and friends? What about the number of discussions that they are participating in? These are better measurements for the social context. These are truer indicators of the quality of awareness that companies are seeking. Relevancy now becomes implicit. If we can devise social campaigns that trigger these behaviors, then we will be well on our way to driving awareness from the audience we are targeting, reaching them in a more efficient manner and converting more like-minded peers.

I'll close with this. The majority of marketing executives now recognize many benefits of using Social Media. 

So collectively, we are seeing results. We know that Social Media has made it less expensive (and easier) to reach consumers. We know that we can now use Social Media to tailor messaging across a range of consumer groups, venues, and advertising channels. We just aren't completely tuned in yet to the measurements that are the new indicators of success. We mentioned some here and we'll continue to explore this topic in future posts.

Paul Stillmank

7Summits