David Masover Process Selling Blog

Does Social Media Marketing Work?

In my blog post last week I wrote about questions. I’d like to continue that theme, but from a slightly different angle.

In the last year or so, I have seen a similar question come up again and again in the Question and Answer forum on LinkedIn: Do social media venues such as LinkedIn / Twitter/ Facebook, etc. work as vehicles for generating business.

The majority of the answers provided in the forum, like those in most debates, fell onto one side or the other – yes it does, or no it doesn’t. With respect to this specific question, I had a revelation while watching a Disney movie with my kids over the holidays. The revelation was that the factor that makes social media work or not for a business is the same thing that makes the Disney machine work: Great content.

The idea came to me since we had just come back from a Disney on Ice show that introduced the kids to Ariel of The Little Mermaid (and to Disney Popcorn – profit center number 2 for Disney). We went home and later rented the movie (number 3). In the middle of the movie the kids asked when we could go back to Disneyland (number 4).

Disney is a great example of an effective integrated marketing company. Exposure to one kind of product leads naturally to interest in another.

Social media is best thought of the same way. It is infrastructure. Asking if Social Media works is like asking if plumbing works to deliver fresh water. This is really two questions. The first question is “does the plumbing work”. The second question is “will the water that comes through the plumbing be fresh”. Very simply put, the water will be fresh if it is fresh, the pipes are clean, and the pipes do their job and deliver it.

If you have content that resonates with your audience, and you can connect to that audience through the infrastructure of social media, then social media may help you reach your business goals. If you content is not interesting to the audience, then no infrastructure – social media or otherwise – will help.

As sales and marketing professionals, it behooves us to stop evaluating the potential effectiveness of tools and communication vehicles with binary questions based on someone else’s opinions. If we know our business, and know our audience, then we can use the tools that present themselves to us to reach them. From there, we need to connect via great content. If we fail to do so, then social media will work to help your prospects leave your content just as fast as they came.

So does Social Media work? Sure it does. Will it work for you? Depends what you put into the pipes, who you ask to turn them on and how you do it.

Author: David Masover

David Masover has over twenty years of business-to-business sales experience, including more than eight years in sales management, training, and consulting. He has consulted and negotiated in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Masover is co-founder of Branders.com, the world's largest online seller of promotional products, and is currently engaged in private sales consulting in Budapest, Hungary.