Right now, not leveraging social media is no more damaging than not adopting widgets or mobile. All of these technologies just provide lenses into our consumers, but most of them are still too nascent for the efforts required. Yes, you can have great results and show amazing returns on investment, if done correctly, but the closer you get to monitoring the meme, the greater chance you have of damaging something if done incorrectly.
What will happen is that there will be companies that figure out how to leverage it better than others. And when the scales tip, they will have the advantage, and greatly so. The pervasiveness of the social media space will continue to encroach on privacy, thus blending the normal duality that exists between the private and public self of our consumers and our brand. This will lead to a more open, honest work culture and enable a new blending of content and advertising based on truth, shattering the myth of the line between editorial and advertising that has been lost for decades but still pretends to exist. It will just be much more difficult to lie to consumers since they have the tools and the communication ability to weed them out.
One of social media's most limiting factors, however, is the human resources needed to fuel such programs and keep them alive. Too many social media programs languish on the vines. Social media is not scalable in the way some other media are. Yes, a social media program can go viral and get mass adoption, but that is still one program, and it is always hit or miss if one does. With TV, you can do one commercial, and if it resonates, scale without much work on the client end. With banners, it's the same thing, or SEM, or email. The ease at which scalability is possible without many resources is paramount at the client end.
In the end, it still remains an issue of the digital competency of most marketers on the client side. With good content, we can all educate those marketers on the promises and pitfalls of "the new." Be it widgets, viral, or social media, etc. At some point on the client end, there will be the need for social media assault teams, the same way that they have guerilla marketing teams. It is through those clients who embrace guerilla marketing techniques that you are probably going to find the least resistance, and those will be the clients who embrace and use social media correctly because they understand the value of meme monitoring and creation.
It is still an experimental medium for most clients, but that will grow as they understand the nuances. And it is in the nuances of digital media that breakthrough work arrives that we can all leverage.
Start looking for an agency that understands the social media nuances and specializes in this space, for there will be no more profound change to the consumer conversation in the next decade. Media is about to shatter. Are you ready for it?
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Sean X Cummings is director of marketing for Ask.com.