Do you digg? Perhaps you feel better when you stumble? Does your face (book) light up with a flickr (pun intended, :)) of radiant happiness when you gather your friends for a little social activity online? If I didn’t use a hyperlink, would you have realized that there were at least a couple of social media sites named in the first two lines alone? The names are definitely a little too pedestrian, but the popularity is unmatchable.
So is social media really as big a deal as it is made out to be? If it really works, why is it that many individual professional providers and business owners don’t use it yet?
If you look at any other channels or marketing or brand development like Pay Per Click, Content Strategy and Management, Banner Advertisement, etc., you can have all the answers in the form of numbers, Return on Investments, Click Through Rates (CTR), percentages and weighted scores. Can the results off your social media campaigns be quantified? What is the rate of return on all that time spent in refurbishing your Linked In Profile? What did you get out of all that tweeting on the topic your niche is based on apart from hordes of followers?
I am not trashing Social media at all; I am trying to raise questions to seek hard, quantifiable answers. I personally am a big believer in it, and I know about the big personal brands like Chris Brogan and Gary V. But to the rest of us who are working in other industries, if there isn’t anything like the concrete results we get from other online mediums, are we to conclude that Social Media falls on the softer, unpredictable side of marketing? What do you think about social media? Has it worked for you? Can you place bets on it? Please share your thoughts here.
