Just my two cents Archives - Page 9 of 22

When talking about social media marketing, many people look at the social media themselves, focus on the seemingly endless opportunities of social media marketing and forget the global picture.

Many people also seem to look at social media marketing as a replacement of other forms of marketing.

That is one of the reasons why I don’t want this blog to become known as some social media marketing hype kind of thing but why I try to focus as much as I can on the integration of social media marketing with other forms of marketing (like email marketing) and on the cross-fertilization that social media marketing enables when you use social media the right way and in the right phases of the customer life cycle.

Yes, in social media marketing, people (customers, prospects, partners, fans,…) are key and relationships are crucial but this does not mean that social media marketing is some kind of relationship marketing 2.0.

Using marketing terms to describe people, their needs and the way they communicate, makes us, marketers, reduce the reality of communication into a linguistical cloud that troubles our views on people and the way they connect.

Marketers are not the only ones using their own dictionary to capture reality in a very specific speak, of course.

MDs have patients or clients, governments have citizens, marketers have target groups, recipients, fans, prospects, leads, consumers etc.

Language is powerful but it can also be destructive and reduce complex realities to simple words that enable us to see clear in the chaos but at the same time make us blind to the reality.

Why don't we just talk about people and dialogues instead of customers, prospects, leads and media?