• by Peter Prodromou , July 8, 2014

I recently read an article in The Wall Street Journal that highlighted a new Gallup poll that said social media isn’t all it was cracked up to be. The article, “Social Media Fail to Live Up to Early Marketing Hype” highlights the fact that 62% of respondents said social has no influence at all on their purchasing decisions, while 3% says it does. And to this I say: “yawn...”

The problem isn’t that social by itself can’t deliver people to the bottom of the marketing funnel. Those claims have been suspect for five years now. The problem is that many in social marketing continue to promote these theories, even after we have seen they aren't correct.

In doing so, they have exposed this important medium to broadsides it shouldn’t face, like the Gallup numbers. The result? Social media is left to defend itself against things it shouldn't have to, rather than being understood for what it really can achieve.

In earlier published pieces, I said I was intent on taking media back from those I referenced as "charlatans." While my mood and choice of words may have softened, I've doubled down on that gauntlet.

I see social as a critical component of a total marketing and communications toolkit. Used in concert with broadcast, print, email and other proven “conventional” campaign tools, it is high impact and serves a specific purpose (By the way, social mediaise getting a little long in the tooth to consider itself anything but part of what we call conventional by now).

As a standalone campaign program, social simply cannot deliver what a shrinking minority continue to claim. For diehards, promoting the idea of social as a pure standalone is going to be increasingly difficult.

Your choices are: be absorbed by a larger marketing world driven by advertising and PR, work for a large, but slow growth social/digital-only shop or join up with a small social-only boutique.

As I’ve said in the past, I view social as a deeply strategic piece of integrated campaigning. It is the perfect venue for visual storytelling, emotive collaboration and community formation. (There is nothing more powerful than an issue- or brand-based online town square that you create and control as the root of a more broadly integrated program.).Each of these is a critical element of a broader, overarching program.

But I'm equally cognizant of the fact that a Facebook advertising campaign or a bunch of “likes” is not going to shift my business. What, exactly, is the tangible currency of a “like?”

Business is about getting money, not making friends. Rather, social tools like Twitter and Facebook should be used in an integrated fashion to set an agenda (e.g., Twitter, as a news feed) or to promote an already launched message or campaign across a large network into an echo chamber (e.g., Facebook). In the aggregate, these are very powerful tools  — by themselves tactical applications.