Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Blog 2. What did we do before social media and online marketing?

Hmmm…?


Today it seems like everyone has a blog and has something to say. 

It’s hard to remember a time when we used to phone or actually visit our friends to learn more about their lives. It’s so easy to “catch up” or “keep up to date” via emails, posts and online channels, however has this voyeurism contributed to us losing the human touch? Much has been written about Facebook diminishing our real relationships and increasing our loneliness and has been attributed to creating subsets of groups collaborating online for either good or evil (think internet trolls). An internet troll can destroy your company’s website in minutes or cause disruption to your business causing forward planning and extra security policies to be firmly in place.


We used to speak in whole words and sentences…

Online channels have inched into every aspect of our lives and even changed the way we communicate – Facebook’s “Like” is a term widely accepted in all social circles to describe almost anything and we no longer have to spell correctly with whole words to get our message across (think “LOL” or “OMG”). 

Other cultural changes (across all ages) include the term “Facebook me” when meeting new people rather than handing out a phone number! It seems we’d rather communicate via a screen barrier rather than make F2F conversation with a real person. If your company does not have a website or connection to social media accounts it could spell instant death in today’s competitive environment.


We never gave out our personal information…

Digital marketing channels have been readily accepted by consumers who sign up and freely share personal information to join VIP sites, blogs, e-newsletters and websites of interest to receive direct marketing material. This is great news for marketers as it blurs the lines of “spamming”, however calls into question ethics and privacy of consumers. This single action has changed the way we target our audiences and push out our messages.

We could leave our house without our smart phones (shudder…)

Thinking of the purchase decision process, searching (or “browsing”) is the first step and has been made easier through online channels and digital marketing through the availability and accessibility of information. Consumers are highly mobile and spend a large amount of time on smart phones per day, often multi-tasking between TV and mobile with predictions of “as many smart phones as people”  by the year 2016 in Australia.

This means we can reach consumers anywhere anytime with the push of a button! Whilst it can be hard to measure success and we are competing for attention on a global scale, the ability to send messages and creative content directly to our audiences is very exciting.

As we can now purchase with no human touch points; are we losing the human touch and is social media to blame?


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Credits:


Life before social media – vintage marketing image. Available:  http://informedbyfrank.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/vintage-social-networking-685x548.jpg?w=584


1 comment:

  1. Popularity of social media marketing is sky-kissing. The social media marketing has lots of advantages ans this is the reason why social media marketing is so much popular. There are so many marketer who choose social media marketing.

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