Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media
Has Social Media Changed Marketing Principles or Has Social Media Given us Technology that is Forcing Us to Do Things Differently?
The principles of marketing will never change. Social media marketing – Facebook marketing and Twitter marketing, for example – is still ultimately about persuading people to buy your stuff. That’s what marketing has at its heart no matter how it is expressed: the desire to persuade people to give you money.
The principles by which that desire is expressed are, and have always been, about influence. The mechanics of that influence have changed out of necessity, usually to keep pace with new technology and social environments. Like social media. Facebook marketing and Twitter marketing are the latest in a long line of influencing techniques, stretching all the way back to a man on a travelling sales wagon pitching the virtues of his particular brand of hair cream.
The core tactic of all marketing is to get people to understand why your brand is good for them – why their life, in other words, is better with your brand in it than without it. Facebook marketing, Twitter marketing and other forms of social media engagement do exactly that – they just use other people to do it for you.
People are fed up of traditional marketing. They no longer like being told by brands how to live their lives. Instead they want people to tell them how they live their lives, and they want to take their own inspirations for style and consumption from those people. It’s an extension of celebrity culture, inevitable after the tidal wave of pop-celebrity culture generated by reality TV has made the general public feel that it, too, can be a style council. Modern social media marketing makes everyday people into the brand evangelists that famous models used to be.
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