Social Media Metrics Archives - Social Email Marketing

Fact: social media are good for book publishers. And I’m not talking about social media strategies for book publishers. I’m talking about the tsunami of social media marketing books.

There are so many new books that I don’t even bother looking at them anymore. Of course there are exceptions. But what I notice is that I stick to books from the 40+ generation, like Jim Sterne and his excellent “Social Media Metrics”. And now and then to books of people that I know have something relevant to say.

The overabundance of social media marketing books has nothing to do with the topic as such. If you want to know everything about social media marketing, I can resume it in a list of 5 books, 5 videos, a few papers and a handful of links. From dummy to expert in two weeks.

The fast evolutions in the digital landscape (social media, mobile, online video, etc.) give a lot of marketers a hard time adjusting their marketing mix in such a way that they create more value for their company and for their customers, prospects, and all other people in the ecosystem around their business.

This often has to do with a strong focus on the channels and the technologies, a lack of clearly calculated examples, models, and user cases, and the rising pressure to account for everything using the almighty ROI. But I think that above all, it has to do with the change in mentality, and the failure of existing communication models in a world where people define a brand.

Adopting the media and channels, that are used by people nowadays in the marketing mix is therefore taking very long.

A survey from Omniture points out that a mere 14% of the questioned marketers nowadays use mobile, social media, as well as online video in their marketing mix (so, all three together).