Social media is everywhere you go today. It’s what everyone talks about. It’s what many people use to describe lots of things (even when they don’t have a clue what they’re talking about). So to you, this may sound a lot like 1999 when a whole bunch of people were talking “surfing the web”, “monetizing eyeballs” and the buzz was that companies like The Globe, GeoCities, and Broadcast.com were taking over the world. And look what happened with that? Bustado and most of them gone. So is Social Media pretty much the same thing? Is it the hot fad like Boy Bands– here today and then we’re going to laugh at how silly everyone was a few years from now? Recent articles in pubs like AdAge and essay’s from folks like Malcom Gladwell have started questioning this “outsized enthusiasm for social media” and its impact on our world. And in the middle of some of the debate going on right now, it might be easy to crawl under the covers and feel encouraged that this facebooky-tweeter stuff may just all go away and life will go back to its safe and predictable orbit of the sun. So is that what you should do?
I’ve been working in marketing and advertising since 1985, online marketing since 1992, and had my first experience with the revolution that is search working with the pioneering AltaVista search engine in 1996. I’ve run $100 million TV campaigns for Fortune 500 companies and lived the wonderful, reliable era of mass advertising and long client lunches by the Four Seasons LA pool. And what I can tell you having done this for a while is the safe and predictable orbit of your marketing universe has ended. If you are a marketer, advertiser or just a business trying to get a few customers, disruption is here. All that you need to do to get done what you need to get done, is changing very quickly. Social Media, Content Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Paid Search, Analytics and Mobile Marketing are revolutionizing the way you get people to buy whatever it is you’re selling. And you either need to get on the bus and starting tooting the horn, or at the very least figure out how not to get run over. This blog is here to help you do that.