social marketing thoughts

maybe there is a better place to post this…

I was thinking, about marketing with respect to search engine optimization and social media this week as I suspect many owners of design consultancies often look to market themselves in a tight economy. We all realize social marketing is powerful. The first thing one thinks of is facebook, linkedin, twitter etc. What do you think of http://digg.com and http://www.stumbleupon.com and how many utilize these mechanisms to the overall components to the engine?

Thought I heard someplace digg was dead.

Maybe I’m old school, but undone buy into the social marketing hype. Linkedin for contacts, sure.

When I see a company advertising with a “like us on facebook” or follow us on twitter" personally they loose credit in my book. I’m not on twitter and I hardly use facebook. I dont think I’m missing anything.

My impression of most of these tools is that they are a failed attempt by mid level old marketing people to get with the cool younguns. It’s like ads with skateboards or graffitti for no particular reason. Or adding an “xtreme” or “i” to a product name.

I’m sure there are maybe valid uses here and there but I don’t understand why anyone would sign up to receive what is essentially spam.

Just my 0.02$ worth

R

Digg made some radical changes that made most of their crowd leave. But digg is mostly for news stories, so if you had a writeup on your business and it became popular on digg, you could get a lot of views from that. But usually the articles that get the most exposure are dealing with current events. I can’t really see how you could effectively use it to generate buzz, that depends on having a big network there and having all of them digg your story and it being passed along that way.

It’s almost like on The Office when Michael made a video, posted it to YouTube, then asked someone in the office to “make it go viral”

It doesn’t just happen. There’s a lot of factors out of your control. “Double Rainbow, all the way” for example…

Richard: Glad to see I’m not the only doubter.

I’ve heard that Obama got elected and Conan O’brien got his new TV show all because of social marketing. Really? No one knew these guys before they were on FB? That seems like a stretch.

Here’s how I use the web 2.0:

Linkedin has replaced the IDSA directory
Twitter is my news feed. The things I look for the most are posts of articles from Core, IDSA and Autosport. Sometimes I see an interesting post from someone on the Core Boards.
FB is essentially mental masterbation. There is nothing of value. Time kill central.

I’d like to hear from someone on the other side. Is there really anything we are missing?

Saying you don’t get value from social media is a little like saying you don’t get value from writing a letter to a friend, receiving a postcard from a distant relative or a phonecall with your mom. You are confusing the medium with the message. Online Social Media is just a channel for communication. You can talk about your life, your experiences, make real connections, share new ideas and be connected in surprising ways. Or you can just post photos of cats. What makes any channel of communication work for you is how you use it.

Social media for a design firm shouldn’t focus on pushing out your message (social marketing). Instead focus on building community and conversations with clients, the industry and with society. Check out http://gapingvoid.com/

I don’t know, I’ve gotten a lot of value out of facebook, it’s all about what you do with it and what your purpose is. I have a lot of friends from various places in life that would be impossible to keep in touch with to the same level.
I don’t see much value if you’re just talking about business though, Linkdin is better suited for that. Facebook is for your personal side.

I am with Skinny on this one. I have a friends all over the country and it is simply just easier to stay in touch with everyone. I use the IM feature a lot on FB. It is really nice to be able to have a short conversation with someone just to see how they are doing.

Linkedin is great for business contacts and stay up with were people are in there careers. I would say that my FB accounts and linkedin accounts differ greatly with who I am connected with on each site.

But the social marketing thing IMO is crap. I have never cared about any of it. I don’t even care all that much about the company I work for post. They asked me to join for social media marking purposes that was fine there pretty much the only company I follow. But I don’t think it gets them very much. They get really concerned with how many people they have following them. I don’t think it matters if you have a million people following you or hundred thousand it makes little difference.

I love the cynicism from designers towards social media. - Frankly I feel the same way because I used to be a lawyer.

Nevertheless, the fact is that even if you design the best mousetrap in the world. No one can buy it from you if they don’t know that you exist. Having a reputation online is important now and becoming more important every day.

+1 to everything rkuchinsky said

Also to add: places like Digg and Reddit are supposed to be these crowd-sourced aggregators where news is submitted from a neutral standpoint and promoted by the masses. If you tried to “game” either one of these to promote your stuff, it’d be kind of low. It’s actually taken extremely bitterly on Reddit in particular.

But yeah my overall sentiment is that social media in its current forms degrades the dignity of a real studio. Twitter is alright as long as its kept mostly informational and not spammy.

Pretty sure the reply above 10 years later is spam, but nonetheless happy to see this topic revived.

16 years into running The Directive Collective Studio I’m always working on business development and of Kate have been doing a huge overhaul and review of activity on social (IG, LI) and elsewhere.

LinkedIn definitely remains the most professionally productive.

IG is more of a portfolio substitute but is mostly young footwear designers looking for useless 3D rendering and fire emoji not real design. YouTube is too full of garbage content to be useful.

We’ve experimented with google ads, IG ads and recently implemented a booking CTA for better conversion.

Anyone else have thoughts to share?