Traditional Advertising versus Social Media Marketing

While shoveling our walkway this morning, my mind drifted to an article that I read recently in BtoB Magazine about the difference between traditional and social marketing campaigns.

With a traditional offline advertising campaign, the client hires an agency to run a specific campaign for a specific period of time. Most of the work is done upfront and once the budget is used up the campaign typically ends.

But that is not how a social media campaign works. In an online environment in which customers expect to have a relationship with brands and in which search engines insure that content never dies, a successful campaign may run for months or even years.

“It takes time, effort and involvement to create community. Its value is in its long-term impact on sales,” said BL Ochman, a social media strategist whose clients include the American Dairy Association, Budget Car Rental and IBM Corp. Ochman’s campaign timelines typically run a year or more, and she stresses to clients that it may take months for a critical mass of traffic to build.

This was the problem that Toronto-based Social Media Group ran into with a social media campaign for Harlequin Enter-prises to promote the horror novel “Blood Ties.” The campaign generated quite a following on MySpace.com. Until its 14th week. That’s when the budget ran out, new content wasn’t generated and the program’s momentum ground to a halt.

“It just faded,” said Maggie Fox of Social Media Group. “The content dried up, and there was no one tasked with ongoing engagement.”

Social media reverses the traditional advertising process. It may take months for an interactive campaign to build awareness, but if visitors are engaged, a program may run for a very long time with only modest maintenance. Customers come to regard the brand as a trusted adviser and contribute much of the content voluntarily. That’s one reason why the economics of social media campaigns are so compelling compared to traditional advertising.

The bottom line is that marketers need to think differently about cost, duration and metrics for their social media campaigns. The traditional measurements and standards do not apply here.