Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Online Social Media - a "Meatball Sundae"?


Panicked because your company doesn't have a blog (like this one) or ongoing social conversations that attract online commentary from near or afar? According to marketing titan Seth Godin, adding "new marketing strategies" (read: online or Internet-focused tactics) to existing marketing programs without strategic direction may well result in a "meatball sundae." The result?

"Messy, disgusting, ineffective. The result of combining two perfectly good items that don't go well together," writes Godin in the 2007 tome Meatball Sundae -- Is Your Marketing Out of Sync?

Godin's primary advice is to make sure that your service or product doesn't represent a 1964 commodity that doesn't fit well with the delivery attributes associated with new marketing.

Further, given today's eMarketer research disclosure that more than half of Americans (see above chart) presently don't even GET social media thinking, we'd better all take a deep breath (and some in-depth planning) before committing sizable budgets to venturing into a social media strategy.