Marketing Podcast with Mike Stelzner
The title of today’s post is one that I could write on a monthly basis. What’s next in social media is a topic that seems to create a great deal of angst in marketing circles.
I suppose the reason is that in some fashion social media has changed the game of marketing in ways that feel foreign to most and it’s not done changing. In fact, the only constant is change and evolution and that creates confusion. Seems like once a social media expert figures out how to tell people the best way to use Facebook, poof, it all changes.
In back to back emails I received solicitations to learn a) Why Facebook is Dead and b) How to Make a Killing on the Coming Facebook Gold Rush. So, it’s no wonder the future of social media seems confusing.
For this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I visited with Social Media Examiner founder Mike Stelzner. We talked about how he’s successfully promoted his big, live event Social Media Marketing World (disclosure: I’m speaking at the event) held in March in San Diego and we talked a bit about the future of social media.
Frankly, I think Mike and I agree that the future of social media for the typical small business hasn’t changed much at all. The big social networks are going public and answering to the cry of stockholders to show ever increasing profits by creating another promotional channel for big brands. Social media for the small to mid size firms, however, has always been and shall remain one of the best places to gain exposure for great content. If the social networks forget that completely there won’t be any reason to use the network.
Shares, likes, embeds and retweets are the currency of marketing in social media and always have been. Marketers like to call this earned media, but no matter what you call it, it doesn’t happen without share worthy content. In fact, share worthy content makes your advertising or paid media more effective as well.
So, the future of social media is integration! Social media drives convergence and in some ways makes all of your marketing efforts more effective when properly viewed as an integration and audience building tool set.
