Why is Social Media so important...

Social Media is demonstrating a shift away from One Way Communication to a Dialogue Between Consumer and Brand.

The traditional marketing approach is designed to interupt your day, in fact the average person is exposed to 3000 advertising messages each and every day. Traditional outbound/interuption marketing and advertising include...

• Email Blasts
• Telesales
• Printed Ads
• Direct Mail
• TV
• Radio

A kind of "throw enough at them" approach and hope some of them are in the market to buy, but many are not, alot of waste. Only 14% of people trust advertisements but 78% of people trust the recommendations of other consumers...they trust other consumers as opposed to a brand telling them what to think, believe, or buy.

In fact, after so many years, more and more customers are blocking traditional marketing psychologically and modern technology is helping them....ie, spam filters, caller ID, Sky+ fast forward through adverts, and so on.

However, couple this with the general trend of the consumer towards the web....the web is replacing magazines and telephone directories...Google is now used to search for local companies, not just national or global and sites like Gumtree and local business sites mean people turn to the web rather than local press or directories. 90% of business users use the internet to read the news - BBC.co.uk and Sky.com are extremely popular sites with text, video, podcasting mediums......17% of business owners use the internet for more than 5hrs a day.

The web helps you to understand why traditional and interuption marketing is being replaced by permission and pull marketing - letting people find you when researching the market (you pull people in towards you)...

• SEO/SEM - websites placed infront of people searching.
• Blogging - share knowledge and info.
• Social Media - Facebook, etc.
• RSS Feeds - fro news to itunes and so on.
• Free Trials/Tools
• Viral Videos - YouTube is extremely popular.

Modern marketing needs to embrace new media in order to create a communication model based on dialogue....it needs to be transparent, inclusive, authentic, interesting, issue solving, and concumer driven.

Social Media Marketing is based on the principles of permission based marketing. The reality is that concumers now expect more than a static website, the internet is being used differently, users expect to search for information in different ways, they expect to contribute to the internet and view/watch/read/listen to a rounded multi-media experience.

A brand communicating and creating dialgue with its customers can powerfully turn a customer base into a customer community, embracing permission baed marketing and the very basic principles of "word of mouth" marketing.