Socialnomics

Qualman's book had some valid points about the evolution and future of social media. My favorite themes included convincing the critics of social media's effectiveness and relevance, failures of molding traditional advertising into new media, and reasons that social media is here to stay.

The naysayers are everywhere, from co-workers who haven't adopted social media for personal use and can't imagine how it would be relevant in the workplace to executives who believe it's a fad and won't make an impact on the bottom line. Qualman provided various examples of social media experiments where critics were proven wrong, and as any marketer knows, the proof is in the results. My favorite examples included hulu.com's introduction into a crowded online video space and Subway's Jared ads that originated from a customer sharing his experience online. The common thread across both of these examples is that experimenting and doing something is worth more than strategizing and planning everything down to the last detail. Social media enabled both hulu.com and Subway to crowdsource ideas to improve and evolve their product/message.

The second lesson of Socialnomics was that social media is not about molding traditional advertising and business models into new media outlets. Rather, the business models themselves must change to reflect the culture-shift that social media has initiated. A great example of this was the ESPN Fantasy Football broadcasts where Best Buy chose to repeat the same commercial over and over in a very awkward out-of-place fashion versus Charles Schwab whose "Ask Chuck" campaign was woven into the podcast and less commercial-like than traditional advertising.

Finally, I agree with Qualman that social media is here to stay. Although the exact channels may change over time (ie MySpace is a thing of the past and Twitter and Facebook may not always be on top), the sharing of reviews, ideas, and information between consumers will always be present and for companies and marketers this means they cannot ignore social media. As we read in WOMM by Sernovitz, C2C (consumer-to-consumer) marketing is here to stay and although it will not replace B2B or B2B marketing it will always complement and influence it.