by Rohit Biddappa

Social Media has changed for good or for bad depending on the way in which human beings interact. The technology and concept may be new but they feed into deep-rooted human tendencies to be voyeuristic, narcissist and social. As such there is no turning the clock back, especially with literally a billion people on one single platform alone. This socio-technical evolution has created disruption for business leaders because information is today hugely social, viral and transparent whether one likes it or not.

Consumers today want to be engaged and choose what and whom they engage with. Consumers are also more discerning and look for utility fitment of a product and service not just brand loyalty. For example, a consumer may have brand loyalty to a luxury product but buys a more affordable one that does the same job.

This is where social media comes into play. The biggest and most strategic shift in Marketing practice today is the move from outbound marketing to inbound marketing. Fundamentally, outbound marketing sought to have as many company to consumer individual touch points by force and utilised tactics such as hard copy and electronic direct mailers, print and broadcast and later web advertising, public relations via the media, events and sales promotions and so on.

Inbound marketing
Inbound marketing seeks to engender a feeling of community and entails leveraging neutral, useful content to drive brand connection and a feeling of utility gained by associating with a business’s messaging. Social media today provides an amazing platform to do this, but has shifted the onus on companies to create high quality engagement tactics and change from communicating with individual consumers in the market, to holding an interesting conversation in a very public space with multiple consumers at the same time. This paradigm shift is from company to consumer traditionally to company to consumer, consumer to consumer and consumer to company today.

The usage of social media for business is something I refer to as social marketing and broadly covers brand and offering propagation, image protection, crisis management and consumer engagement and support. Social marketing is unavoidable for two reasons: It marks a fundamental shift in the ways human beings interact…the first news the world had of the recent tragic Air Asiana crash in San Francisco was a tweet from a Samsung executive on board David Eun that said: “I just crash landed at SFO. Tail ripped off. Most everyone seems fine. I’m OK…surreal”. This was probably as SFO control realized an aircraft had gone down and emergency crews were running for their trucks as klaxons began ringing to alert them.

Secondly, even if your business does not believe in using social media, the majority of your existing and potential consumers do, and your brand is being discussed positively, neutrally or negatively, as evidenced by the large number of anti-company, senior executive and product/ service social media pages out there. I recently alerted the CEO of a large global corporation to a very refined anti-Twitter page that very carefully lampooned him and his company, but was subtle enough to run for 18 months unnoticed and had built up a sizeable number of followers. Though it had a disclaimer stating this was a satirical “fan” page, I am certain many casual followers believed it to be that of the CEO and were negatively influenced.

Why SEO is failing
Social marketing is the evolution of digital marketing where trends such as search engine optimization are failing due to similar companies spending more with the same online advertising platforms aimed at the same potential consumers and confusing the market while cancelling each other’s efforts out. It will evolve into social mobile marketing with the advent of cheap smartphones and data plans globally. It is a trend to recognize and engage with and I foresee trends such as social employee intranets, social PR bypassing agencies and media, social customer support and peer to peer learning, social brand building and much more.

Social media is not a technology revolution, it’s a social evolution and it’s time to build the truly social enterprise.

The author is business and social marketing consultant, Bangalore. rohit@sprysocial.com