Spectrums of Social Media for Marketing

This is just a little something that I started thinking about yesterday while preparing for a webinar with John Stone from CrossTech Partners coming up tomorrow. It just hit me while discussing how the various social media tools apply to businesses seeking relationships with customers (either b2b or b2c). I wanted to put this out as a starting point to a thought.

I believe that as marketers seek to use social media and social networking software to do business with people on the web that there is a spectrum to their engagement efforts.

On the far left, banner ads. Next would be building a small group somewhere, like on Facebook. To the right of that might be blogs and other created media. Content marketing is what I’d call that region, where you build interesting and compelling media as a way to encourage engagement and interaction. To the right of content marketing, at the far end of the spectrum, is relationship marketing.

Relationship marketing is where I’d put things like community managers and active engagement, listening, and robust interexchange between customers and businesses. Not just with the marketing department, but with people in all different parts of the organization.

They range in difficulty to properly execute from left to right, too. I think the costs in money and resources probably scale in that direction, too. It’s cheaper to buy a banner ad than to hire a community manager.

The results go in that direction, as do the risks.

Banner ads — small groups — content marketing — relationship marketing.

What do you think?

Photo credit, kevin dooley