Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Social Media Marketing And Permission Marketing : The Return of Disruption

Social Media marketing is on the edge to become a major relationship medium for brands. The way it has been designed enable brands and customers to discuss, and interact in a very unique way, something which is not comparable to any other known medium.

Nevertheless, a French study shows out that French customers perceive social media marketing to be intrusive, and hence, are reluctant to its raise.

Permission Marketing
Seth Godin book “Permission Marketing” has changed deeply the way companies interact with companies, promoting one to one CRM techniques, and mainly pull marketing campaigns, asking for the customers’ permission to deliver promotional messages.

The concept is simple: due to the multiplication of media and brands, customers are overloaded with commercial messages which they are not asking for. Hence, in order to get the attention of customers and to optimize advertising budgets, you should set up a contract with the customer, to provide him an accurate and targeted messages, which will be delivered at the frequency and through the media he wants.

Social Media As A Permission Marketing Threat
Hence, when companies are discussing via social media, there is somekind of disruption that could appear. Of course, a customer could decide whether or not to follow a brand on Twitter or to become a fan of it on Facebook, but still, with community management springing up, brands are listening more and more to what is going on in social media.

I've attended a ecommerce diner where one of the invitee asked if social media users wouldn't feel oppressed by being watched by brands. If they talk about brands on social media, that doesn't necessarily mean he wants to discuss or even get in contact with it.

Community Management To Be defined
Is social media a threat for permission marketing? I believe that social media marketing experiences the same problems that occurred with emailing not so long ago. As the medium is relatively cheap and new, people are not really mastering the medium, and hence, are more in a disruptive mode. Moreover, there is a lack of tools to run this kind of techniques.

However, there are some ways to create bonds with customers thanks to social media marketing without being disruptive. When a customer adds a brand on its Facebook, it is a strong sign that he wants to establish some kind of relationship with the brand.

I believe this feeling of disruption results mainly of the large amount of messages spreaded on social media, which create a lot of noise.

That was the very same thing with emailing in the early age. The media was so cheap and easy to use spamming became an easy job. But permission marketing has been designed, which helped a lot to establish an ethical code to optimize the customer relationship. That would probably be the same with community management.

What do you think about it?