Social Marketing Has Come of Age - Again?

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May 9, 2008 by James
Filed under: Internet Marketing, Strategic Content 

‘The pen is mightier than the sword.’ What a great line. Written no doubt by a pacifist I’m guessing, because I’m all for the power of the word (after all, in the beginning there was only the word…) but facing someone in battle armed only with a ballpoint pen… I’d run a mile - unless of course I was Bruce Willis or Stallone, then I’d win no matter what *grin*

But what has that go to do with the price of fish? Not a great deal other than the fact this annoyingly cute saying is in fact correct. Granted in physical combat it’s a no-win, but in today’s wired world where we communicate at the speed of thought, the sword is no match for the word.

And once you accept the power of the word - spoken or written, you begin to understand the true scope of its applicability to our very nature. The nature to which I refer to is that of our social qualities, the act of gathering together and exchanging stories, values, ideas and sharing perspectives and opinions.

The town square and village pub were slowly replaced online by the bulletin boards of the 1980’s and then again with the power of the Web and email. Today the next evolution has occurred with websites like MySpace, Facebook and other social networking venues. And if you think that these websites are just for kids talking about how cute someone is - you’d be wrong…very wrong.

Today many of these social networking ‘watering holes’ get more daily page views (traffic) than Google. Yes you read that right - MORE THAN GOOGLE. This watershed moment happened in the summer of 2007 and it’s been rising steadily since. This shift in “influence” has happened very quickly. The biggest surprise in the traffic game has been YouTube. This site now gets more daily traffic than Google by a very healthy margin and a visitor spends on average at least 15 minutes experiencing the content.

The other sites like MySpace and Facebook are currently matching Google (however this is changing monthly and may well be higher by the time this goes to print.) You can see for yourself if you’d like by visiting www.alexa.com and typing in the names of the sites you’d like to compare.

Is this rapid rise of social marketing a surprise? Not to me. It’s human nature all over again. And if you stop and think about what this means to you, well it can be good or bad depending on how this new ‘force’ is applied. Today with Web2.0 and Social Marketing gaining momentum like never before, I’d have to agree that the pen is truly mightier than the sword - yet again.

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