It took thousands of years before people who had no useful skills realized they could earn money by wearing nice clothes and designing deceptive brochures.
-The Joy of Work by Scott Adams

If the corporate world ran as Scott Adams described it to me (and I’m still convinced it does), the Marketing Department would have to be the most social group in every company.  A place where ‘people’ people engage in study groups discussing how their company’s products can make your life fulfilled.  This is where social got is legs, where the idea of a conversation with the customer was invented.  This is where the consumer is king and their voices are heard.  At least, that’s what the marketing textbooks say.

So why do I get the impression that few people, myself very much included, really understand what Social Media Marketing is all about?  Thankfully Ajit Jaokar has an article that has started me on the journey of understanding by framing some of the things I know I don’t understand.  I will admit, it took me a couple reads to absorb what Ajit is saying here, but it was worth the effort to get my head around it and to see things from his perspective.  Here are some of my takeaways

• Social Media Marketing is not the same thing as Social Media Advertising.  The latter is placing ads for the social community while the former is starting a conversation with that community and seeing where it is going.  SMM can and will have a SMA element, but SMM is far more ambitious and advanced.
• You can’t translate traditional ideas like CPM into Social Media Marketing, they just don’t apply.  You need to find new metrics to judge when you are succeeding and when you are missing your targets.
• The idea that someone could sit on the sidelines and monitor all the little feeds of information in a social graph for a brand, even potentially alter the conversation’s direction, is wicked cool.  I wonder how close some of the huge brands like Coke or Nike or Apple are getting to doing just this kind of work.
• A brand can serve the conversation by giving it focus.  Three ideas for this are listed as ‘Information’, ‘entertainment’, and ’cause’.  I’ve seen all three of these methods used in social advertising and never realized it at the time.
• You could do some amazing things with the right data and a rapid response cycle.  Just imagining the short side potential of keeping advertising tied to Social Media’s latest feedback would be enormously effective.  Every ad would hit the right message, every campaign would be topical and fresh.  I’m sure there would be times when this would backfire, but the upside is enormous.