As we PR people feel our way along in social media, the marketers are declaring the End of Times for everything else. Anecdotal evidence shows that big companies are pulling big money out of traditional advertising and funneling it into social media, and that bears examination. But as I’ve said, I’m not ready to write obits for ma
ss marketing/advertising in favor of “marketing to a segment of one” right this very minute.
I first heard that phrase (Marketing to a segment of one) from the lips of Steve Cone, legendary marketer and then-CMO with KeyCorp. He was the architect of dropping the “Corp” and/or “Bank” from the company name in favor of the symbol you see at right.
That made Key one of just three companies in the US bearing an eponymous symbol for its name. Shell and Apple are the other two.
Key made a strategy of getting people to see the Key logo and associate it with “bank,” as in, “I need to stop by the Key on the way home.” The idea, Cone claimed, was to stop thinking of mass marketing — with all of its efficiency and logical, numbers-driven strategy, and think of “marketing to segments, eventually to a segment of one.” So then came emerging affluents, wealth management, small business, middle market, large corporate — all of those categories based on grouping customers in some logical way, then changing strategy to target them.
This requires information about customers and prospects. When it comes to social media, that information is scattered to the four winds, unless you’re on Facebook. Twitter’s foray into geo-location, Foursquare, and many other social media firms are trying to gather as much data about YOU as possible to facilitate what is a pretty old marketing model.
Just as at the onset of the Web Age you had hundreds of companies popping up to “help” companies enter the Internet realm, now at the onset of the Social Media age you have companies popping up to “help” companies enter this realm. The part that twists my noodle is when companies purport to know how to measure social media come up with yowlers — like the Vitrue Facebook fan value imbroglio, the Altimeter study on correlations between social media activity and stock appreciation, and now Vitrue’s assertion that frequency of mention in social media is somehow a reflection of its social media reputation.
Vitrue offers a chance to compare brands in a handy Flash gobo that produces a cool pie chart. Just for fun, I compared Ford (which Vitrue pronounces its winner) with a couple of random words — sure enough, pop “the” in there, and you find upteen thousands (OK, 134,000) ‘somethings’ and the aforementioned cool pie chart. Ooh, and there’s a bar chart too! So kewl. W00t!
I could go on for 1,500 words, but won’t. It’s another cow pie pretending to be a metric. Resist this assault on rational thinking.
