Converging social media and traditional media into your marketing.

If you still haven’t heard or refuse to accept that social media is here to stay – our suggestion is to take a deep breath and count backwards from 100 to 0 while hopping on one-leg, with your index finger plugged firmly into your ear.

Sound silly? Well, so will you  if you refuse to accept the significant impact of social media and how others are leveraging this new, dynamic, self-efficating content medium.

Look, just because the guys who own these properties (Twitter or Facebook) don’t know how to properly monetize their products, doesn’t mean you have to do the same … learning to integrate social media into your traditional ‘purchased’ media is not only evolution — its necessary.

Change can be a scary thing — we know. We’ve been scared sh-t-less too. But change can also bring disruption to the market place that no advertising campaign or massive media purchase could ever produce. How to capitalize and leverage your brands and products through the use of both social (‘new’) and traditional (‘old’) media is a complex question — but there is only one simple conclusion…it must be addressed.

Unlike television, radio or even the web; the valuation of social media into your budget is always in flux. Because social media is really not a media at all, but content based within several emerging media environments (web / mobile), you aren’t investing in buys, but rather a specific brand.

To put it into perspective imagine placing all your ad dollars into a popular television show. What would happen if suddenly tomorrow it no longer commanded the audience it once did? Best practices suggest buying ad time on other ‘hit’ shows — easy enough.

With social media, it isn’t so predictable. The demise or rise of a ‘hit’ social media platform isn’t easy to gauge. In addition to that, each emerging social media may require a different strategy and method to enter. Implementing the wrong strategies within the social media playground (i.e. Twitter, Facebook) can have a devastating effect to your brand at most, or annoy your customers at the very least. Either scenario isn’t pretty.

Contact us for more information on how to budget, plan and execute traditional media purchases (here and abroad), as well as converge new ‘social’ media into your marketing mix.