Social media marketing is not a replacement for other forms of marketing


Relationshipmarketing 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.

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Can we finally conclude that social media marketing is not a hype?

As you know, earlier this week eMarketer.com released a report that leaves no room for doubt: social media marketing and email marketing are no competitors but “friends”.

Many have claimed that with the increasing adoption of social media by people, email marketing would go through rough times, to say the least.

But as I wrote in previous posts, this is nonsense, spread by people that focus on marketing and communication channels, rather than on what really matters.

I am not the only one that has been shouting that social media and other marketing channels work together very well. Several ESPs, for instance, knew that the integration between email and social media was coming (read this excellent post for instance).

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