Next year, marketers must evolve with social media and ditch the old games.

Blake Bowyer
Media Program Analyst

While the sun sets on 2009, year-end lists and predictions are coming at us in droves. We’ve even discussed a few of our own on the INSIGHT blog. They’re practically irresistible – fun, brazen shots in the dark with big upsides and risks their authors will hardly be held accountable for. The same can be said for social media, for which the prognosticating generally states that social media will grow up, online marketers will figure out how to better use it, and “2010 is the year of social media ROI.”

While all of those predictions are fine and well – and hopefully true – here’s why I think 2010 will be so important for social media marketing: we can’t blow this.

Social media is undoubtedly revolutionizing marketing, just as technologies that came before it. A media revolution only comes around once in a generation at most and this era might be the biggest opportunity marketers have since, well, the printing press. And, as much possibility and power and delusions of branding grandeur we hope to realize from them, social media could slip through our fingertips in 2010 if we fall off the wagon and ease back into our old roles.

While luminaries like the Ad Contrarian will profess that TV (and often other mass media) isn’t dead (warning: foul language) – and they aren’t, by any means – social media, and new media in general, gave beleaguered hucksters and carnival barkers a fresh face. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter allowed everyone to trade in tweed suits and storyboards for flatteringly small avatars of profile pictures and impenetrable 140-character messages so brief they’re hardly vulnerable to criticism. And that’s the temptation: to use these sparkling new mediums to bathe ourselves in the cleansing ideals of “engagement” and “dialogue” and pretend like we’re doing customers a favor … when, in fact, we have the tendency to talk at them like we usually do.

Permission marketing is fantastic in theory, but a spade is a spade and marketers market. It’s not just the old school of marketing theory, that’s THE SCHOOL of marketing theory. The only one we currently have. For every manifesto on social media marketing and customer experience management that gathers buzz around the internet, there remain throngs of marketers and agencies using new tools for old devices. Don’t get me wrong, we should use social media for marketing – ads, promotions, etc. – but the potential is so much greater.

With TV and radio, marketers can only do so much. Both are – literally – machines used as distribution platforms for content to attract eyeballs for advertising dollars. But interaction is minimal (if absent), the ability to solve problems is limited, and possibility of converting customers into the marketers is unrealistic – unless you want to count the gents who did last year’s Doritos commercial for the Super bowl. (I don’t.) We truly can use social media marketing to create communities and foster trustful relationships between monolithic brands and the people that pay their bills. It’s beautiful.

And it doesn’t have to be disingenuous. Every day I watch customers interact on Facebook with firms as big as Coca-Cola and as small as Boise Fry Company. And they’re DELIGHTED to share experiences with those companies and, as a result, with all of their friends, fellow fans, and miscellaneous eyeballs that cross those pages.

While the predictions of social media maturity are exciting and necessary, I hope it doesn’t mean marketers figure out how to treat social media like their predecessors and wring the trust – and fun – out of another opportunity. Social media gives us a chance to think differently about the way we talk to and interact with customers, for the benefit of everyone. We’ve lost customers before with other media, and now we have to fight increasingly hard for even a moment of their time. Social media can change all that or we can wait for the next revolution if you want. Personally, I’m stoked about this one. Don’t let it slip away in 2010.