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An Overview of Social

Media Marketing

Published April 2010

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reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or

any information storage and retrieval system, without prior

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Copyright © Spice Consultants (London) Ltd 2010 

Eric Swain

Director of Social Business

Spice Wellington House,

East Road

Cambridge CB1 1BH

www.spice.co.uk

eric@spice.co.uk

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What is this paper and who is it for?

This is an overview of social media marketing. As that suggests it aims to be two things: First, it’s an

overview not an in-depth treatment of the topic. It is aimed at the person trying to understand the

basic concepts behind social media marketing. And second, it is focused on marketing, on describing

how a good social strategy can aid your company’s marketing efforts. There are other benefits to be

gained from meaningful engagement with social networks (product development, consumer insights,

and brand management to name a few –  all of which are arguably marketing, but that’s a different 

discussion), but this paper isn’t going to address those topics directly.

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The Future of Marketing

Before getting into the role social media can/should p lay in a company’s marketing strategy, I want

to lay some groundwork about the state of marketing currently.

Traditional (old) marketing is less effective than it has ever been. It is noisy. It does a lot of 

shouting. It’s in your face, interrupting what you’re 

trying to do. Traditional marketing tries to force

itself on us, interrupting our TV shows or magazine

articles or views of the countryside. It’s been doing

it for years. And we are now getting very good at

ignoring the messages.

Traditional marketing broadcasts its messages to

everyone within ear- and eyeshot. This scattergunapproach is terribly inefficient. Marketers fling out

a message with the hope that a fraction of the

recipients will respond positively. Of course, you

can do some targeting - industry specific

publications or programmes that appeal to a specific

demographic, for example - and this can help response rates. But the reality is that most people

who see your ad have no interest in what you’re selling, or it’s not the right time, or have condition

themselves to block out the messages.

Seth Godin refers to something he calls the TV-Industrial Complex. This is the idea that for the past

40 years or so there has been a symbiotic, cyclical relationship between TV (in the form of 

advertising) and big corporations (big brands) where the corporations developed a product, bought

TV ads to promote it, which lead to growing retail distribution and sales. The increasing sales meant

more profits which bought more ads and the cycle continued, growing ever larger.

The overwhelming success of the TV-Industrial Complex was predicated on three things: numerous

growing markets for new products in the post-war West (especially America); consumers with

increasing amounts of disposable income and the desire to acquire things; and a relatively few mass

media outlets to occupy the consumer’s attention.

These three environments are no longer prevalent in the same way today. Most markets for things

we need or generally want are dominated by existing brands and are saturated. We as consumers

have made our choices about which pain relief or soap powder or supermarket we use (or we are

hyper-aware of what’s on offer) and we aren’t looking for anything new. And, the current financial

conditions notwithstanding, our desire to spend has been severely stunted. Couple that with our

increasing consumer savvy brought on by years of being bombarded by marketing hype and we have

become inured to advertisers’ messages. 

While changes in the first two have played important roles, it is the change in the third environmentthat has really impacted the success of the old TV-Industrial Complex and, indeed, traditional

Figure 1 - photo from Tranchis 

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marketing on the whole. The growth of the Internet, cable and satellite TV and radio, and local,

regional, national and niche publications has created an extremely noisy atmosphere and an

abundance of outlets for our attention. We no longer have the time or the inclination to listen to all

of the messages flying around.

Moreover, the success of advertising in the past era meant that agencies exploited the format more

and more. We’ve all experienced this “ad creep”. Remember when there were only a few ads

during a TV show? In America the amount of time dedicated to ads in an hour of TV  has doubled 

since the 1960s. Also, the average length of an advert has shrunk over time from 1 minute to less

than 30 seconds. These factors mean we are being bombarded more ads more often than ever

before.

And we are getting sick of it. And we are ignoring it. From TV, radio, and print ads, billboards, cold

calling and junk mail, we are increasingly tuning out traditional “interruption” marketing.

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The New Marketing

So if interruption marketing isn’t working so well anymore, what is? Welcome to the New

Marketing.

New Marketing is about being found where your customers are looking, when they are ready to buy.

The New Marketing is about permission rather than interruption. It favours interaction and

engagement over traditional jumping up and down and shouting, “here I am! I’m great! Buy me!”

The New Marketing is about being found by your customers and potential customers. This means

being front and centre in two places: on the Internet and on the lips of friends and colleagues. The

first place is the story of Google and the explosion of the web. 10 – 15 years ago we wouldn’t have

given the Internet a second thought when looking for information about products and services.

Now, it is almost universally the first place people look. And it makes for the obvious marketing tool

because you get your company/product/service in front of a customer who is already looking for it.Talk about a hot prospect!

However, this paper isn’t about search strategies and how to rank well on Google (though we’ll

touch on that later). There are other resources and help for that, including Search Engine Watch ,

Search Engine Land , and especially my colleagues at Spice . This is a post about the second place

you need to be to be found by your customers: on the lips of friends and colleagues  – otherwise

known as Word of Mouth (WoM). More to the point, this is a post about the intersection of the

Internet and WoM. This intersection is one of the pillars of social media for marketing purposes.

A study by MediaLab discovered that a recommendation from a friend would make 76% of people

more comfortable with a product or service  – more so than advertising (15%) or even personal

experience (68%). In some ways I find it astonishing that people trust the opinions of others over

their own experience but I suppose we often seek validation. On the other hand, I am not at all

surprised that so few respond well to advertising and other traditional marketing channels (see

above).

One of the ways social media excels, for our purposes, is enabling the spread of information,

opinions and recommendations through people’s networks of friends and friends of friends across

the Internet.

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What is Social Media?

Social media or social networking is people having conversations, connecting and engaging online.

As opposed to traditional broadcast

media, which is a one way stream of 

information, social media is characterised

by two way interaction.

It’s about creating and furthering

relationships using social platforms like

Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace,

Bebo, blogs, etc. Now, we’ve all heard

about these platforms; you’d have to be a

particular kind of isolated not to have.

However, many of us make the mistake of limiting our understanding of social media

to these tools themselves. This is

misguided, as Jeremiah Owyang  of 

Altimeter Group asserts:

“(When it comes to social media) companies focus on the tools and 

technologies, yet fail to understand the behaviours of their own customers

onl ine. As a result, they miss the mark.” 

Don’t focus on the tools!  The power of social media comes from people using the tools, whichever

tools, to create self-organised communities of like-minded individuals. And it’s the characteristics of 

those communities that present opportunities for businesses to inform, understand and connect

with the people who buy their products and services.

We can see this at work all over the social networks. People join particular groups, follow/friend

certain people, and engage in discussions about topics which interest them. To apply some old

terms to this, social media enables and reveals micro-demographic groups with potentially very

narrow, targetable interests. If you sell widgets, it would be very beneficial to be plugged into the

widget fanboy community.

Figure 2 - photo from ktylerconk 

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Why Does Social Media Matter?

By all accounts the growth of social media usage is astonishing. A few statistics:

  By 2010 Generation Y (or Millennials) will outnumber Baby boomers; 96%  of them have

 joined a social network. These are your customers... now and increasingly as they get older.

  Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activity, including beating

personal email. 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on

the internet is on social media sites.

  If Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populated place in the world, behind

only India and China. [In January 2009, Facebook had 150m users; in February 2010 it had

400m].

  Universal McCann reports that 77% of all active internet users regularly read blogs.

  Twitter’s year-on-year growth rate is more than 1000% with 80% of usage taking place on

mobile devices. People update anytime anywhere  – imagine what that means for badcustomer experience!

  More stats like these can be found on Econsultancy here and here; as well as on Jeremiah

Owyang’s A Collection of Social Network Stats  and Socialnomic’s Bigger Than You Think 

video.

While impressive, statistics themselves don’t tell the whole story. More important than the actual

numbers is what we see in the underlying trend; namely that social media is growing fast and

spreading widely and not just in participation but in usage. People are spending more and more

time on social networks and are discussing, and being influenced about, companies, products and

brands.

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Can Social Media Help My Business?

Can social media help your business? I’d like to say “yes” without equivocation but I can’t do that in

good faith. Participation in social media is not a miracle drug, take one sip and all your problems are

solved. However, given what we have discussed so far in this post, it is clear that companies need to

incorporate a social media approach as part of their marketing strategy. [Again, I am concerned here

with marketing  – I believe, however, that we should be looking at making our entire businesses

“social”, incorporating socialness in many or most aspects of what our companies and we do. That

will be a future topic.]

As a marketing strategy social media can deliver value in three main ways:

1. Community and relationship building – Engagement, being part of the conversation around

particular topics or areas of interest, builds familiarity and trust with people, and garners

notice. Being an active, positive brand in the marketplace = good brand image. Customers

want to deal with businesses they feel a connection with.

2. Creating authority - by helping people, giving away info/expertise, answering questions,

providing insight, etc. in the social network arena a company establishes its credibility, its

value, its quality. Customers want to do business with authoritative, quality brands.

3. Search engine success - When ranking for organic search results (e.g. appearing at the top of 

the list when people search for something), Google weighs offsite Search Engine

Optimisation (SEO) efforts (external links to your website) 75% to 25% for onsite SEO

(keywords used on your website). One of the best ways to build quality links is through

blogging and social networking engagement. This is important and will remains so. But, it is

in the collision of search and social media, social search, where things get really interesting.

Generally speaking, there are two parts to a social media marketing approach: content and channel

distribution/engagement.

The heart of any social media marketing programme is content, usually created through a blog but

also can include video, pictures, polls, whitepapers, ebooks, reports, e-newsletters, etc. In general

content is information in one f orm or another that makes people want to pay attention to you. It’s

helpful, informative, interesting. It is through this content that customers or referrers find out about

you, what you do, and how you can help them.

This is a subsection of social media marketing called content marketing. Content marketing refers to

the technique of creating and freely sharing informative content as a means of converting prospects

into customers and customers into repeat buyers.

Creating great content for your marketing is important. But great content doesn’t distribute itself. It

needs vehicles (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) for people to pass it along, discuss its merits, argue

over its controversies, blog it, mash it, tweet it and even scrape it. This is where the social networks

come in. [This is an oversimplification and, in some ways, does a disservice to the real connection

and conversation aspects of social engagement, but bear with me.]

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The best distribution network in the world is

pointless if you have nothing to deliver

across it. You might have a million followers

on Twitter, but unless you engage those

followers, they won’t listen and you will

achieve nothing. Equally, what is the point

in fabulous content if no one ever hears

about it?

Social media is an unsurpassed tool for

getting content distributed. On the flip side,

great content gives social media life, by

giving people something more interesting to

talk about than what they’re ordering right

now at Starbucks.

Figure 3 - graphic from Intersection Consulting 

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allowing employees to be as personal, natural and authentic as possible in their dealings with

others).

Manage

This is the day to day execution of the programme. Depending on the strategy, it may include some

or all of these: content production and publishing, content distribution, reputation management,

community engagement, customer support, business intelligence (competitor activity, customer

insights), brand management, market research, monitoring, measurement and analytics.

Measure

I mentioned measurement as part of the management function because there is a regular ongoing

aspect to it, but I want to highlight it further as it should be a significant part of your entire

programme. It is through proper measurement that you understand if your objective are being met

and, if not, to help you reassess your strategy and/or tactics (or even the people responsible for

carrying them out).

Measuring is defined by both the “what” and the “how.” What are we going to measure? Is it

measurable? Is it the right thing to measure? The “what” question goes back to the strategy

development piece and should have been defined then and there. The currency here is probably

numbers or statistics: numbers of followers/friends, number of social mentions, click-throughs,

comments, website visitors, discussions, emails delivered, and, ideally, sales. But the currency might

also be less defined: positive or negative press, change in sentiment about your brand, company or

product, tone of discussions, and positive or negative word of mouth. 

The “how” begins with monitoring (which should have started even before the strategy work) using

tools and processes that enable you to track the results of your activities. This means social media

monitoring tools, conversion metrics, web analytics,  RSS  feed counters, even things like feedback

forms, surveys, and customer recommendations.

However, monitoring is not measuring. People often get them mixed up. Measuring is how we

calculate the results of our monitoring over time against our objectives to test whether we are

achieving them. Again, measuring is so important because tells us if we are having success.

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Review

As your social media plan progresses you should be analysing your results against the milestone

expectations you established at the outset. Review your plan regularly and if things aren’t working

as you intended, adjust your approach. It is a cyclical process of regular reviewing and refining.

Figure 5 - The Process Flow

I would argue patience. Social media marketing takes time. It needs to build slowly as your regular

interaction and engagement increases familiarity and builds trust. So, your plan should reflect this.Don’t expect skyrocketing results in a few days or weeks. 

We’ve talked here about using social media for marketing, for making connections to “promote”

products or solutions and sell more stuff. However, within the review process is an opportunity to

understand your customers and to tweak your offering(s) to better fit what they want. This may

muddy my “marketing-only” message with something that leaks over into product development but

I’ll risk that because it underscores the important two-way nature of proper engagement in the

social networks.

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Summary

The marketing landscape has changed. Consumers are responding less and less to traditional

marketing messages. Instead they are seeking the recommendation of friends and colleagues and

the familiarity of personal connection and interaction. And this is where social media marketing

comes in.

Participation in social networks, online, and in blogs is growing at an astonishing rate. The most

important thing about this for marketers is the proof that people are gathering in the social spaces

around shared interests and ideals. Organisations and brands now can connect with interested

potential customers by engaging with them in the networks. The overwhelming prevalence of 

people using social networking and looking to those networks for information and recommendations

about products, services and brands means that companies need  a social media strategy today or

they risk falling out of touch with their customers and behind their competitors.

Social media efforts should be treated with the same rigor as other business planning; they should

be properly strategised and structured with end-to-end processes put in place and appropriate

methods established to measure outcomes and success.

I hope that this whitepaper has helped readers understand the rationale for and principals behind

social media marketing. If you have further questions, you can get in touch with me here:

eric@spice.co.uk. For more information about Spice’s range of services, please visit

www.spice.co.uk. We are always happy to have a chat to see if we can help.

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