New Age Word of Mouth

I can’t say that I was particularly interested in digital marketing until very recently, being that I consider myself to be a journalism purist. However, learning Social Media Optimization seems to be part and parcel of new media and so I thought I might dedicate yet another post to the idea.

Long before Twitter began its sponsored tweets, I received unsolicited messages about various (American) products from companies that obviously search tweets looking for key words to react to. (This has sharply decreased since Twitter introduced the Geographical location tool.)

The last one I received was in response to a tweet about my aching back after a long day at my computer in the form of what looked like a perfectly innocent remedial suggestion, but Twitter isn’t that innocent.

The Google Marketing Competition, and my experience working for Cue Online both proved to me that not only is social media marketing pervasive and part of even the smallest marketing strategy owing to its free-ness, but it is covert and damn-right sneaky. My own tweets and facebook statuses started to seem like marketing as what-boils-down-to advertisements for my work creeped into my personal twittersphere and facebooksphere, again, unsolicited.

The Google Online Marketing Challenge is the ultimate get-them-while-they’re-young-inexperienced-and-broke tool. Giving students free credit to advertise a product or service seems to be the perfect way to trap people into using the system, since the companies have to have not used Adwords before and are therefore probably a start-up or small business.

The system is based on various complicated algorithms which do a million and one calculations every time you enter a search string to return exactly the results you were looking for, in theory.

So with all this magnificent mathematics going on it seems ridiculous for companies not to invest in a social media manager and get tweeting, facebooking, youtubing and the rest of it. (And, what a great job that sounds like. But wait…)

Market leaders

Even GreenPeace have a YouTube channel they use to get their videos out around the world (the latest and most beautiful one to date is embedded in my previous post. Pop over to their YouTube channel and ‘like’ it, or embed it in your blog). Cell C only recently cottoned on to the ideas of talking to consumers rather than advertising at them.

“We’re revamping our whole way of dealing with customers,” said CEO Lars P. Reichelt. “We’re looking at lifestyle and what is needed, rather than just pushing packages.”

And it seems that ‘lifestyle’ includes doing a Jobs/Gates and tweeting furiously about how he spends his days. This is, in its least manipulative form, is social media optimization.

The Dark Side

But there are pros and there are cons to being able to talk to those who provide you with stuff. The fact is that if companies are on social media websites, you can be damn sure that they’re trolling the channels for references to their products and services. It’s not like you can hide from them anymore. Of course, we need not be silly about it, but there are things about libel that journalists have known for years that the average tweeting public, and indeed the average tweeting company now has to learn.  

So, when I recently discovered a ladies’ product that was well below the standard I expect from such an important product, one of my first reactions was to tweet about it. I had a little think and decided that the company could probably afford to sue me out of my soul if I said something to make them cross and so decided rather to simply tell every woman I could about how unhappy I was with their product.

Which was when I realized that ‘Social Media Optimization’ is just the fancy new term in the digital age, for ‘word of mouth’. We’re going to have to learn all of the new rules for what we can and can’t say, especially when it’s those multinationals themselves who are touting their own products via digital word of mouth.

Because, multinationals are people too, and let’s face it, none of us is completely immune to criticism. Thing is, they have more money than you. So be careful what you say. 

Thanks again to 姒儿喵喵 for the wicked pic. Follow 姒儿喵喵's photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/crystaljingsr/.