Social Media Marketing

Some marketers are counting on social media to generate missionaries for their products and services, but finding passionate customers may be a challenge.

Social media sites with names like Facebook and My Space are called advertising’s latest miracle messengers. They are different, we’re told, from all the rest, as all the rest once were.

The excitment over these sites confirm that advertising is perhaps the most flexible business on the planet, which is one reason it is so much fun and attracts so many crazies. We have glided easily from one major medium to another, from newspapers and magazines to radio, billboards, kiosks, direct mail, television, email, websites, DVRs and racing cars, not necessarily in that order. We embraced them as quickly as we learned how to write, record and put pictures on them.

Social media is different, we’re told, because it will interact with us and turn customers into passionate missionaries for our products and services, right there on our computer screens. We hope it does.

Loyal customers worked for mom-and-pop operations even without the Internet, but that was when customers had names instead of numbers. Some customers still spread the word for their favorite motorcycles, cars and ball teams.

But can social media find many enough missionaries who will sing the praises of business-gobbling retailers loud enough to drown out the critics who don’t like their labor, neighborhood, environmental and small business practices?

Utility, insurance, oil and financial giants will have to search hard for customers who love them enough to lobby their neighbors on the finer qualities of multi-millionaire CEOs who walk away with additional millions while customers struggle with rising prices.

Lots of luck. Meantime, we’ll still see companies thanking themselves profusely in TV commercials, proving that at least their ad agencies love them.