Social media is a new word. Yes, we have people trying to drag it back to early 2000 or the earlier days of the internet, but as a concept, you really have to start looking at it around 2006 before it caught on. At that point, you could begin to say there was such a thing as social media marketing, and it was awful. I know because I was there, and the only metrics we had at the time were SEO and PR metrics.
That's why everyone used to complain, and why "engagement" and "authenticity" was talked about at conferences. It's also why so few people made money at it.
Social media marketing, as we know it today, is an extension of digital marketing, which is to say the branding, promotion, and sales funnel activity of a product or service. If you're in social media marketing, by necessity, you need to understand marketing. That's because you're judged by the metrics of marketing - leads, conversions, and branding.
That is not the full range of social media, and those who pretend it is do so because it's all they know.
Here are some business aspects of social media that need their own definitions:
- Social Media Recruiting: The use of social media to find, connect with and hire employees.
- Social Media Sales: The use of social media in researching, understanding, connecting with, and closing a client based on their Social CRM profile
- Social Media Politics: The use of social media to build coalitions and messaging across likely voter populations. Activities include fundraising, organizing rallies and protests, driving stories for reporters to cover and opposition research.
- Social Media Public Relations: The use of social media to replace reporters with other voices that carry influence in a subject, as well as attraction of reporters to topics through proving their interest to the public. This can include philanthropic efforts.
- Social Media Customer Service: The use of social media to create an alternate channel for customers to offer positive and negative feedback. Used to cut traditional infrastructure and personnel costs.
- Social Media Training: The use of social principles in internal organizational development that include communication, knowledge transfer,reward programs, and legal compliance.
- Social Media Education: The use of social media for educational purposes, from schools to self-learning to target populations.
- Social Media Advertising: The use of social media in buying, selling, placing, tracking, and measuring ads on social sites, in addition to magnifying company creative through new social channels (pictures on Flickr).
- Social Media Market and Product Research: The use of social media tools to improve the knowledge base of a company, from surverys, user groups, reputation management, and competitor research.
To add to this, there is the social media of the public, which includes hobbies, personal connections, social networking, reviews, check-ins, social selling, interest groups, grassroots political activities, discussion, education, training, and anything else humans do.
The metrics for each of these areas of social media are easy to find. Take away the social media and use the metrics of the underlying discipline. That's always been the case, even in the days before we called it social media.
