My thanks to Dr. Craig Shoemaker and the students of St. Ambrose University. He invited me to lead a discussion with his marketing class on how social media (SM) is influencing public relations and marketing.
What began initially as a survey into the latest sea change in online activity, very quickly became an engrossing investigation on how the paradigm is changing across society. It was quite interesting to dip into the role of both consumers (as participants in SM) and purveyors (as communicators and marketers). And I think this blurring of boundaries is what describes the environment of social media. For a business to be a successful player in this field – it is as important to listen as it is to speak. Success is social media is conversation and dialog – and not just your message.
Social media is a bigger player than the mailing in your email or even the nascent versions of online community (i.e. discussion forums and bulletin boards) is the peer-to-peer layers along with the relevance of influencers.
Featured Presentation of the Day. Yeah!
My takeaway from the discussion was that almost all forms of mass communication is based on some version of revenue support (possible exception of government sponsored communication!) and so it was interesting to see how business and broadcast models are influencing each other. This is largely driven by the considerably more participatory nature of the audience. Business is going to focus on social media because it knows that is where the audience is gathering. The challenge is business needs to recognize the channel is different and so has to adjust their communications and marketing mechanisms to be successful in the SM environment.
An interesting sidenote: SlideShare.net selected the presentation as a Featured Presentation for their home page for today!
Do check out the presentation and post comments – would welcome your feedback and input!
March 29, 2010 at 10:22 am
[...] at Craig Shoemaker’s strategic marketing class at St. Ambrose University where I had also presented recently. John Deere's Agriculture Landing [...]