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Just to warn you – this article is  just kind of a rant, but follows a question that I’ve been wanting to pose to both business/organizational leadership and the Internet as a whole. Organizational leaders or business owners may find value by reading on to see where I think both marketing and outreach are headed after spending the last many months deep in research.

Simply put: I’ve been frustrated lately at the lack of solid evidence that supports all of the claims of social media and new marketing techniques. This is definitely not to imply that I don’t believe in the potential of these methods and completely stand behind any of the methods that are coming available today. Instead, I just want to illustrate the fact that nobody is an expert because we’re changing too fast.

Hardly any research exists yet because things are moving faster than we can assemble data and analyze. I feel the term “thought leader” is a more appropriate term today than the word “expert,” as I feel anyone that studies the marketing arts today is learning just that – an art of communication. There is no set model or method anymore. For something to go viral, it HAS to be against the mold, has to be creative. It has to be new. It has to be exciting.

I heard a saying this weekend at a conference: “gain knowledge faster than the world is changing.” Successfully pulling this off is getting to be more and more difficult. Daily on my twitter stream are thousands of articles that attempt to make sense of the social media revolution. Speaking in academic terms, many of them still range in the area of just “hypothesis” since there’s been no real lab yet for experimentation – we’re all seeing it unfold.

Every case I do see, however, is exploding with results. Every nonprofit I see that utilizes social media as part of their overall marketing efforts are experiencing great results. This hits me directly with my scout group I volunteer with and provide pro bono marketing work for – our social media efforts can pretty much be attributed to providing a huge spike in membership interest, involvement, and activity. For businesses and companies (especially local), I am seeing an increased interest in community development and connection between audience and company – an invaluable asset. Imagine finally having a method to connect with your people on a daily basis! It’s so very exciting and promising.

But it’s just that at the moment: theory. Traditional marketing techniques have not changed drastically over the last few decades, allowing for deep analysis in the limited number of applications. Naturally, much research has been conducted and the data analyzed to provide “best practices” and metrics to ensure return on investment. With the huge transformation of the Internet with the evolution to interactive applications such as social media, we’re seeing things we haven’t seen before in technology. We all see the potential, yet nobody knows where the wave will take us. This rapid change has not permitted us to research in depth the founding principles and best practices, but instead has caused us to literally run to catch up and not miss the opportunity to reach our audiences.

In essence, we’ve been trying so hard to keep up that we haven’t had any opportunity to look at it from a bigger picture.

To be successful, we must continuously study and be on the top of emerging technologies, methods, ideas, and techniques. We need to know the ins and outs of any new idea so that we can apply them creatively to today’s challenges and audiences. For local businesses and organizations, this is especially exciting since new tools open the doors to countless combinations of applied methods to create marketing and outreach efforts that have never been possible before.

This sense of continued learning a value that I’ve established in Millennial Associates when I started it, taking heart that saying I mentioned earlier to “gain knowledge faster than the world is changing.” We want our clients to have the best, as well as every option available. For us, being “thought leaders” and daily students of our methods is very important.

I am excited to see the development in the academic literature on how the Internet and particularly social media has affected societal communication models and styles, as well as behavior of participants of social media. To put that into business terms, continued research in this area will start to tell us how our society values interactive communication, new media, and social networks. This in turn will allow us to find out how we can best reach our target audiences and reach out to them. While the tested literature and data is weak right now, we’re going to find some common denominators that will allow marketing departments, business owners, and just plain ol’ anyone to have the framework to create an effective message.

We’re not at the stage yet where we’re able to review hundreds of effective case studies. There just hasn’t been enough time that’s passed. But when that time comes, that’s exactly what they’ll be – case studies. We’ll be able to see what worked for a certain organization or company, but we will have to remember one important observation about social media – that the dynamic nature allows for an almost unlimited combination of applications of tools today, something which we value greatly (creativity). There’s no one-way method to market anymore. And that’s the exciting part (and even hopefully academics will study the multiple methods as well!)

I’m just being impatient. We’re seeing all of these exciting, promising social media applications and new marketing campaigns that are mixing with traditional marketing methods to create communication channels that haven’t before been opened. I guess what I’m feeling is that I want to read about the long-term success right now before the long-term success has even happened.

We know that these trends are just continuing and all statistical forecasts show increased use of social media and the Internet. We’re on the cusp of this change and don’t know where it will take us. However, we know it will be somewhere exciting where interaction with companies is commonplace and the word “advertising” could imply feelings of fun and interactivity.

Until then we just have to keep studying and testing. The best part about this field is the creative nature – because there aren’t many boundaries formed in the world of new marketing, we will most likely see incredible campaigns developed. In five years, we’ll see a different approach, a more hybrid model that combines these exciting social media and other new media methods with those of traditional marketing to have captivating marketing efforts that have people talking.

Categories: Best Practices, Ideas and Breakthroughs, Local/Small Business, Millennial Associates, Resources, Social Media and Web 2.0, Successful Messaging, Web Strategies

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