Social Media Marketing is Word of Mouth Marketing on Steroids

There's nothing like a new buzz word to launch an industry and cause millions of resumes to be updated as everyone tries to become relevant to the latest trend.  Enter Social Media Marketing.

In reality, Social Media Marketing is nothing more than Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM), and that is nothing new.  The problem is that Marketing and Advertising people having been talking for so long that they have forgotten how to listen.  This is why Social Media Marketing is so foreign to them.

• Marketing is what you say to people.  It's your message.  

• Word of Mouth Marketing is what people say about you behind your back.¹

The only difference is that the always-on, instantly-accessible Internet has enabled Social Media Marketing to be more like WOMM on steroids.

People have been talking about how crappy your company is, to their friends and families, for generations.  It's just that now, we refer to their friends and family as their "network" and the news doesn't wait until the next family gathering.

Social Media and Internet allow us to share information with more people, more quickly, than any time in history.  If a fat guy got kicked off an airplane because he couldn't fit in the seat 10 years ago, the only people who knew were the passengers (all of their friends) and the flight crew (and all of their friends).  If that happens today, the fat guy tweets about it and the whole world knows within minutes.

So maybe Marketing has now come out of their coma and realizing that this is happening.  If that's the case, Twitter and Facebook have served a noble cause.

Social Media Marketing is also changing the rules and Marketing is having a hard time accepting the rules. The old rules of Marketing state that:

• I own the message.  I control the message.
• It's about me telling the masses what I want to tell them.

Social Media Marketing is about getting people to repeat your message, with their spin (their filter), to all of their friends.  In turn, their friends do the same.

The resulting message that gets received isn't your original message (that you spent days on trying to find just the right words).  It's your message with 2 things important things added that you could never add.  Personal relevance and credibility.

It goes from

"50% off Single Day Pass for Children under 13 for a limited time at Sea World"

to

"Hey Jane, look at this.  This might be a great idea for Johnny's birthday.  - Cathy".

The first message gets deleted and caught in the junk filter if Jane is lucky.  The second get serious consideration.  Your company was trying to sell tickets to strangers and Cathy sold an idea for a birthday party.

So, don't be afraid of Social Media Marketing.  Just don't market to it the same old way either.  The good news (or bad news) is that now you know what people are saying about you!

Thanks for reading.

¹ I borrowed this description of Word of Mouth Marketing from "How to not suck at sales" by Jeffery Gitomer