online marketing
Social Media Marketing—Reaching for Historical Perspective
by Mac Heller-Ogden
As evident in the Google Insight graph below, over the last four years, social media marketing seems to have sprung from nowhere to become one of the hottest new marketing niches.
The social media community has been quick and thorough in responding to the ever-increasing interest surrounding social media marketing by launching a few thousand blogs on the subject, publishing several hundred books about it and presenting countless tips and strategies and lists upon lists of best practices.
Yes, there’s a whole lot of chatter in the blogosphere on the topic but in many ways there’s nothing new about social media marketing. In fact, if you strip away the technology, social media marketing is nearly identical to the direct marketing approaches of the pre-broadcast era in that its focus is on the individual rather than a generic demographic. Given this similarity, I can’t help but find myself wondering what history can teach us.
How is social media marketing like the direct marketing approaches of yesteryear?
One hundred years ago, if a salesman knocked at your door, or if you were passing by a salesman on the street, you’d judge him on three basic factors—expertise, trustworthiness and dynamism.† Does he know what he’s talking about? Is he engaging and interesting? Can he be trusted?
Today, when you interact with someone on twitter or facebook, they’re judging you on the exact same set of qualifications. Does she talk intelligently? Are her comments fun, polite, constructive? Is the information she’s providing reliable?
With my somewhat limited knowledge of history, I’ve only been able to draw a few high-level insights from this line of thinking but I’m hoping that there might be a few history geeks out there who can chime in with their perspectives.
Can you think of other ways in which history might be able to teach us a thing or two about social media? Please share your comments below!
† As Richard M. Perloff outlines in his book, “The Dynamics of Persuasion,” there are actually several additional factors that we consider when judging someone including goodwill, sociability, extroversion and composure. I’ve selected to focus on expertise, trustworthiness and dynamism because of a talk I listened to by Jason Randal in which he identifies these three qualities as being the most critical.
