Peter Drucker said 40 years ago that a business need do only two fundamental things; market and innovate. With the advent of Social Media and it’s growing consumer adoption, the ability to “Market” has arrived. Over the years, business have only been able to “market” with a small “m”. So what’s the difference?

The practice of “marketing” for the past 60 years has been very one-way. A business saw marketing as either supporting sales directly as a function of sales or as creating awareness to drive sales leads. Even worse, sales was (and often still is) either pitted against marketing or valued higher than marketing, since marketing is often (wrongly) seen as a spend item and sales results can be measured faster and more quantitatively. True marketing is a managed investment, since the the ROI in marketing is longer term. That said, marketing had limited channels to broadcast it’s message (TV, radio, mail, print, Web 1.0) and the feedback channels to measure and obtain “input” for ROI analysis and revisions to strategy were even worse - focus groups (with inherent bias), phone surveys (high rate of false data), unsolicited snail mail or trade shows. In too many organizations it’s also sales vs. marketing so the two don’t trade data, creating a gap in understanding front line needs. So what does Social Media change?

The fundamental change in Social Media is that there is now a zero cost to the “market” a business is engaged with to communicate to the business. Conversely the marketer now has increased and often more targeted, ways of reaching their market. In the broader sense of a business, “marketing” a company is not just customer acquisition and retention anymore. A business should use “marketing” to attract new employees, retain employees, find investors, reduce retention costs, gain product insights and develop better integration with sales. In other words, for the first time ever, Social Media combined with traditional marketing channels enables a business to Market itself as the Whole Business - a holistic approach. And metrics can be put in place in each area of the business (Finance, Sales, Marketing, Administration and Operations) to understand the ROI. SMB’s will gain a huge advantage in this regard in the coming years.

If a business can Market itself as a whole entity, at lower transactional cost, then it can grow. By staying narrowly focused on it’s marketing activities, opportunities to new segments and true, real-time customer feedback are missed. This is a huge shift in thinking, best practices need to be re-invented, cultural shifts need to happen and the C-suite needs to adapt. It’s not easy and it represents risk. But it is also inevitable as Social Media adoption and usage by consumers who buy products and services will force this change. Once businesses start to see how they can Market themselves in so many ways, and measure it, a whole new approach to Marketing will evolve. This is just one way Social Media is changing business practices. What do you think?

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Partner)