Is social media a serious marketing tool?

Clients are divided on the role of social media in b-2-b marketing. Now it seems marketing experts are too.

 Marketing Week has thrown a new spanner in the works with an article titled - "Social Media is for people, not  brands". The article challenges whether social media is relevant to big brands and says, "The results, when compared to the industry buzz we keep hearing, simply do not stack up."  The article looks at the top 20 UK brands and offers the fact that some minor celebrity has attracted more followers on Twitter  than all of them together. Some top brands apparently have more tweets than followers and even the more successful  have attracted only around 0.5% of their customer base. The effort and marketing resource to interact with such a small group of customers tends to add support to those of our clients who see social media as at best irrelevant and at worse creating a frivolous image. After all names like Facebook, Twitter and blog hardly sound solid, respectable business ring to thems. Then again the same clients that laugh at the idea of blogs and the rest at one time saw no role for a web site either.

On the other hand a few clients are enthusiastic about Facebook and YouTube and excited about interacting with their customers, sharing pictures and discussing goodness knows what. They see the whole social media phenomenon as  heralding a bright shiny marketing future. These clients happen to be those that love gadgets - their Blackberries, iPhones, apps, net books, lap tops etc - who are avid Facebook users and get excited when they get a message from their favourite brand. Although hardly Luddites, the other group - at present a majority, regard a mobile phone as just that - a telephone - and if they are aware of social media at all do not see it as relevant to their customers. And this is really the bottom line. If even the top brands are pulling in just half of one per cent of their customer base it hardly suggests it is yet a mass marketing tool. Just who are these 0.5% anyway? Are they representative of the other 99.5% or a minority with an unreasonable fascination for a brand, are they the opinion leaders, or totally disillusioned due to poor product experience? Either way does this justify diverting a whole heap of marketing resource? Can we really expect professional buyers to avidly track the latest tweets about nuts and bolts products and bother to comment and volunteer pictures - are they that interested? Do they have the time?. Do these people really want to be 'fans' of a company anyway? 

The fact is we don't really know. What we do know is that using a number of marketing communications tools that are relevant to a company's target audience is effective and now into this mix is added social media. Technical marketing is about analysing the market, then pitching up with an integrated marketing communications plan that addresses the target audience using the most relevant and effective marketing mix.