Social Media a Marketing Mix Must

I came across a great article on eMarketer discussing how social media has gone from an afterthought in marketing campaigns to becoming an absolute must. The social media space has exploded over the last ten years and reaches an inordinate amount of engaged users (e.g. Facebook).

After working in entertainment, I find it astounding the number of companies that have not gotten 'tech' savvy and still rely on conventional marketing techniques. Traditional methods definitely have a high level of consumer penetration, but social media is becoming a much more organic environment in which to engage users.

Furthermore, as discussed in class (and all across the blogosphere), Social Media itself is becoming a lot more savvy in the hyper-targeted advertising instruments and opportunities it provides. Sites like Facebook, MySpace, etc. are taking their aggregated profiles and compiling a wealth of knowledge about their users. And it seems that these same sites are/will be using this information to allow advertisers to hone in on a very specific consumer (i.e. a 35 year old woman who plays the trumpet, lives in Iowa, is single, like Seinfeld, and listens to Death Cab for Cutie).

The use of personal information seems a bit Big Brother/1984 but on the flip side it may help consumers de-clutter the massive amount of information that traverses the 'interwebs' and help them find the things that are most relevant to them. As this tech era of data trafficking/manipulating gets going in full swing there will clearly be a big Privacy debate and the verdict is still out on wether this information will be regulated by policy, users, or by the sites themselves.

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007508