1. Two-way communications
Social media is a conversation. Mass media is a monologue.
The simple fact that the audience can talk back in many social media venues is both thrilling and frightening to many marketers. We all hope that the result will be a productive conversation but fear it will be the media equivalent of a heckler at a comedy club.
2. Volume
The really attractive thing about traditional media is that you can reach a lot of people with a single ad. When you can get your message to millions of people with a single media purchase, that makes things much simpler and much easier. This works really well if you are Proctor & Gamble or Ford Motor Company. It works less well if you are Billy's Bait and Tackle Shop.
For Billy's Bait and Tackle Shop to take advantage of the more democratic virtues of social media, they need to have someone who has some tech savvy and the time to keep their message in the social media. For P&G and Ford, they have the people, but they have to develop the ability to talk to people at an appropriate volume. Marketers who grew up talking at mass media volume sometimes have trouble switching to their inside voices.
3. Social Media is Free...sorta
Facebook and Twitter don't charge companies to set up accounts. Companies can set up all the Pinterest boards they want without forking over a fee. However, to participate in these "free" social media opportunities effectively requires ongoing input and updating. For most organizations, this inputting and updating is not done for free.
Furthermore, more and more organizations are recognizing the value of having professional input into the set-up and execution of these marketing tools (not that the son of the guy in payroll wasn't doing a good job...when he wasn't in school.). As someone pointed out to me recently, if we understood social media and what we have to do, we could figure out what it costs. Since we don't understand it, it has the potential to be a big money pit.
4. Measurement is easier with social media
One of the "truisms" that I grew up believing about advertising is the John Wanamaker quote about knowing that half of your advertising dollars are wasted. The trouble was there was no way of knowing which half. Social media provides a lot more data about who is seeing your message, where they are coming from and what they do after they receive your message.
The thing about data is that it is only numbers until you do something with it. To marketers who have spent their careers channeling Wanamaker, suddenly having detailed data available about our marketing decisions feels a little like being called to the Principal's office. It could be that you are going to be praised for doing the right things, but the odds are against it.
5. Social Media Allows You to Target Your Audience
The common analogy used is that mass media is a shotgun shot and social media is a rifle shot. Social media allows you to target your audience more precisely. That means that marketers need to know who they are trying to reach and what message each audience segment should get. That is hard. That requires a marketer to know details about his target audience and detailed message that he didn't really need to know before.
If you are marketing in Chicago, you could buy ads in the Chicago Tribune and on WGN and pretty much figure you are reaching your target market. Sure, you are also reaching 80 to 90% of the audience who AREN'T your target audience, but when mass marketing was your primary option, what could you do? When you can slice and dice the audience a million different ways, your opportunities are endless, but so are your opportunities to miss your audience.
6. Social Media Keeps Changing
If you were buying advertising nationally 25 years ago, you were most likely buying advertising in the same media as the guy (and it probably was a guy) who was buying advertising 50 or 60 years ago. That is not true for social media. 10 years ago, most social media marketing options didn't even exist. Facebook isn't 10 years old yet. My Space, a marketing "has-been" by most accounts, will celebrate it's 10th birthday in August.
New social media channels and options are opening up all of the time. Reading the business and marketing literature can be intimidating, as they are frequently citing the next big thing in social media. Add to that the challenge of identifying which options best meet the needs of your organization and your target audiences and determining which options best support your marketing strategy.
Keeping up with the Zuckerbergs can be exhausting!
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