Review of article on Social media: oversold and overrated

The article by Mark Ritson on social media being over sold and overrated in the October-December issues of professional marketing by Australian Marketing Institute, is talking about how many companies overestimate the use of Social media tools in marketing to communicate their products to customers. He says that there are revolutionary new ways for companies to communicate and build relationships with customers around brands and products, with the help of Social media there is also the overlooking fact that meaning companies have just jumped on the ban wagon and sent to much time and money on this new form advertising to the old print, TV, radio ways of communicate their product offerings.

He gives the example of Westpac bank that that started a Twitter account, to serve to answer customer’s questions in real time; they have team of six employees to do so. The problem is that while 6,400 customers following on twitter might seem large it is only 1 in every 160 of their customer base, about 0.6% and does it really justify the employee’s time and company money spent on such a small percentage of their customers.

Another example is that of Pepsi in USA who instead of going with their traditional advertising of 150 million dollars spent on Super Blow TV advertisements they used 50% of their branding budget on a social media. They created a Pepsi Refresh Project on Facebook were customers would upload causes to be voted on by all other members and winners would receive   funding by Pepsi. Coke-Cola is Pepsi biggest rival and after reviewing the sales data for that year Pepsi could see that they had lost 5% market share to Coke and their sales have dropped, even that there were four million likes on Facebook it look like Coke using TV, print and radio advertising had more of impact on customer buyer decisions.

Now these article is not saying that social media is bad way to promote and build relationship with customers about products and your brand. It is saying that you wouldn’t just believe all the hype of other companies that have had successful campaigns with using these tool, but maybe you should look at your over ways of communicating product offers, such as TV, radio, print , as well as social media and see which is the best way to communicate your message.   

So marketing managers should beware of the pitfalls of using social media and that more traditional methods of advertising are still very effective, and not just jump on the bandwagon with the successful social media campaigns by other companies, as their objects an goal could be very different form your own. They should judge all the methods of communicating a message to their customer and work campaign that can be used across all modes of advertising not just one, to better communicate to their audience and achieve their goals and objects.