I found marketing to be highly descriptive and prescriptive, without much of a foundation in deep research. I brought in economics, organization theory, mathematics, and social psychology in my first edition of Marketing Management in 1967. Today Marketing Management is in its 15th edition and remains the world's leading textbook on marketing in MBA programs. Subsequently, I wrote two more textbooks, Principles of Marketing and Marketing: an Introduction.
A large social-media presence is important because it's one of the last ways to conduct cost-effective marketing. Everything else involves buying eyeballs and ears. Social media enables a small business to earn eyeballs and ears.
Social media isn't the end-all-be-all, but it offers marketers unparalleled opportunity to participate in relevant ways. It also provides a launchpad for other marketing tactics. Social media is not an island. It's a high-power engine on the larger marketing ship.
Content-based marketing gets repeated in social media and increases word-of-mouth mentions; it's the best way to gather buzz about a product.
It doesn't matter if it's social media or radio media or television media - it's all media, and it's all marketing. It's about understanding where your fans are. And when you have infiltrated them, and they're satisfied, and there's demand, how do you grow it from there?
There's the good and the bad aspects to Social Media. What I do find great is how much social media has changed businesses and the way they structure their marketing.
Social media is alluring, tempting, frustrating, etc. We mistake our interactions in social media as community, but is community possible when you don't even know what someone looks like or what his or her voice sounds like? I've enjoyed connecting with a lot of poets through social media, but do I truly know them if I haven't even met them yet?
We live in a world where the laws are getting so tight that management has changed to micro-management to quantum-management to paralysis.
We have our own internal version of Klout. We do rate people in this way - their effectiveness on social media. Tying social into a performance measurement works. The productivity of a sales who has an effective social media presence is 3x an employee who is not active on the web.
The goal of content marketing is to create content that people actually want to read/view. If you're being blatantly promotional, there's a good chance your content marketing efforts are falling flat.
Thanks to Twitter, Reddit, web media, and social media, we have the opportunity now to kind of blur that line between the people who produce the content, the people that watch it, and instead make it a conversation, make it a real community.
Just about any growth company is going to need smart salespeople, account and project managers, business development, marketing, operations, customer service, content creation, communications, analytics, and social media.
I've learned from numerous sources that e-mail marketing is still far more effective in driving book sales than social media. That's why we all get those e-mail blasts from Amazon every morning.
To be truly effective at content marketing, we need to excel at promotion.
We do everything from community management to specific marketing promotions.
Content marketing needs to be at the heart of your SEO efforts. It has always been that way, but is even more so now because Google is so much more effective at understanding the context of content and how it is shared, etc.