By “Social Steve” Goldner, Contributing {grow} Columnist

It’s time to bring social media marketing to an end.

I do not make this statement lightly.  In fact it is pretty humbling.  How do you think I, SocialSteve, feel about telling you about the end of social?  Damn … not sure if my name can live on and switching it to DigitalSteve … just doesn’t have the same ring.

Seriously, I want to tell you why we need to stop concentrating on a social media strategy as the end game.  Far too many people approach social media as a separate entity.  Another organization in the company.  Even separate from marketing.  And this is the problem that needs to be solved.

eMarketer stated that “Integrating Social Media into Business Process a Challenge” — “When it comes to integrating social media into the overall business, companies must evolve and change structurally, culturally and on a personal employee level to succeed.”  And what this means is that we should stop talking about social media as its own country club.

It is time for the real leaders to emerge and set the course.  These leaders need to have a holistic marketing methodology (strategy, plan and promotion, operations, and tracking) that MUST include all digital elements:

• Demand generation (CRM)
• Digital asset development and management (could be a service)
• Email
• Display and PPC (pay per click)
• SEO (organic)
• Paid SEO
• Social outreach (go where the conversation is, not just your Facebook and Twitter)
• Social engagement (listen and converse on your assets and off)
• And don’t forget all things must be brought to mobile as well

A mandate for a holistic view

Let me highlight why the holistic approach is a MUST.

I’ll step away from social to make an unbiased point.  Let’s take “display.”  What is the value of display?  Some may be cynical about its value, but consider this scenario.  Let’s say Connie Consumer visits Brand X’s site to view smartphones and packages.  What if you could store the user action and information, and then later provide a display ad for Brand X when Connie visits another site?  Through this integrated approach, the value of the display ad goes up exponentially because it is contextually relevant to Connie’s activities and reinforces her original interest in Brand X.  If you just went about displaying your ad in a silo, you could never accomplish the same results.

But this siloed approach is primarily what is happening with social media.  So long as it is stand-alone and lacking contextual and promotional relevance, it will continue to have little success for you.  What I am really suggesting is that we evolve our social media marketing approach to be a “mentality” as opposed to a “practice.”

As long as we think about social media as platforms as opposed to a channel that reinforces a brand position, creating greater awareness, increasing views on brand content, increasing sharing of brand content, winning earned media, unleashing referrals, and word of mouth marketing, we will never reap the true potential of an integrated marketing strategy.  And my experience shows me an abundance of siloed exercises developing marketing and social media strategies.

A path forward

Here are my suggestions on breaking in a new social media mindset:

1. Make sure you have an integrated media plan – one that includes print, radio, TV, complete digital (yes social is in there)
2. State specific quantitative marketing growth goals (i.e. awareness; brand recognition and reputation; views of all assets; brand sharing of content, referrals, and overall word of mouth; earned media)
3. Baseline goal parameters and continually measure
4. Make adjustments as required based on metrics

So while I will still evangelize social media (because my name is SocialSteve after all!), I am suggesting that YOU stop talking about social media in your company.  Make sure you stand out as a marketing leader and address the objectives of growth in customer awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty, and advocacy.  Use the full digital marketing palette available to you.  If you really do this and produce a complete marketing strategy and plan, I am sure social will be in there.  But you don’t have to speak about social media explicitly.  It can be our little secret.  OK with you?

Steve Goldner is the Senior Director at MediaWhiz where he leads the social media practice. Steve has been a marketing executive for the past 20+ years and engaged in social media for the last 4 years. You can follow him on Twitter @SocialSteve and visit his own blog at http://socialsteve.wordpress.com .

I had a very interesting question come across my desk from {grow} community member John Bethune:

In the minds of most people, journalism and marketing were once diametrically opposed. Has that changed in the social media era?

A great question!  And, in fact, I think the social web has brought these disciplines together in a number of surprising ways.

The ideal of journalism is a quest for truth. Marketing is the quest for a product’s “truth.” By that I mean the best marketers are on a journey to know how their company’s goods and services exist in the hearts and minds of their customers. Then, their job is to express that consumer truth to the best of their ability.  So in this way, the disciplines are unexpectedly similar, although the end product is quite different!

But the social web has created an important shift for both disciplines.  What does it even mean to be a journalist today? Through blogging and technology like smartphone video cameras, journalism has been democratized.  Anybody can report, anybody can publish.  Jeff Jarvis of City University of New York recently defined a reporter today as simply somebody who can say, “I was there and you weren’t.”

The democratization of marketing

To a great extent, marketing has been democratized, too. Remember last year when Gap changed their logo and there was such an outcry? I felt empathy for the company because they are probably good marketers who followed a traditional protocol — work with graphic designers, test it, get feedback, and roll.  That system has worked for decades and changing a logo is not an easy or flippant decision for a consumer product company to make. I’m sure they had done their homework … or at least they thought so.

But a few vocal people thought the new logo was stupid (perhaps people who were not even customers!). Through Twitter and Facebook, they created an anti-logo movement. and suddenly it became an embarrassing meme. I can imagine the Gap marketers waking up to this one morning and thinking “Wait … what?”

So something as important as an adjustment to your brand image may not even be in the hands of marketers any more. The Gap’s marketing strategy had essentially been crowd-sourced!  Like journalism it seems, marketing has also been democratized.

Content as power

The production of content has also been an output of the marketing process, usually in the form of advertisements. But now content is at the very centerpiece of many strategies as companies fight to attract attention on the crowded social web.  The journalism schools are full of new applicants. Why? Because content is big business now and the new media channels have an insatiable need for it.  Companies need story-tellers as much as marketing graduates.

I have recently been working with the president of one of my B2B customers on a blog and a series of how-to videos to demonstrate their new robotic technologies. I’ll bet five years ago he never would have dreamed he would be in the publishing business!

So this idea of content and storytelling is another way that journalism and marketing have been brought together.  For both fields, content that moves virally through the social web represents success and power.

Truth as a strategy

I think expectations of “truth” and transparency is another way the social web have brought journalism and marketing together.  For a brand to have integrity and to be successful, it can’t be spinning the truth around any more. There are a million watch dogs out there now and any one of them can sniff out a fake.

A few weeks ago, I was working with some marketers for a hotel chain and we were discussing negative hotel reviews. “We don’t mind them,” they told me. “It makes us more real.”

Interesting. Truth as a marketing strategy.

My hunch is that a few years ago, that is not necessarily what their reaction would have been.  In marketing, truth is the new black.

Maybe journalism and marketing are getting closer than we thought?  What do you think?

Note: John Bethune’s full interview with me can be found here: “Content is Power: A Q&A with Mark W. Schaefer.”

I saw some beautiful ads on TV promoting tourism for the U.S. Gulf Coast.  But after the heart strings were sufficiently plucked, who is identified as the sponsor?  BP — the company that caused the mess in the first place!  This really pissed me off.

Luckily I was in Memphis at the time and had the chance to have PR Expert Amy Howell calm me down, as you will see in this short video discussion.

Did BP do the right thing with these ads?  What were the alternatives?  Am I right to be venting over this?

I think you’ll enjoy the conversation and hope you’ll add your views on the subject in the comment section! Thanks!

P.S.  You know what else pisses me off?  If you “Google” BP tourism ads, all you get is BP PR fluffy stuff.  They have their SEO machine working overtime, don’t they?

P.P.S.  Grrrrr.

September 11, 2001.  That was a day many of us experienced a single emotion for the first time — horror.  Not the movie kind. True, real-life, gut-wrenching, nauseating horror.  I will never forget it.

And as I watched the tenth anniversary news coverage, I had this weird thought.

I’m so glad we didn’t have Twitter back then.

“Nine eleven” was a day of complete chaos.  Planes were falling out of the sky. We didn’t know what was happening or why. And maybe most profound, we didn’t know what was going to happen next.  Agents of terror had seemingly used the nation’s infrastructure at will to kill thousands of innocent people on our own soil.

What would be the next target? The water supply? A nuclear power plant? The air that we breathe? You’ll recall that within the week there was an anthrax letter attack on the nation’s capital too. Did we need to lock ourselves up in our homes? Prepare for a nuclear or biological attack?

Can you imagine having Twitter on top of that confustion? What would Twitter be like in the midst of terror and chaos? Although there might be ways that Twitter connections can help in an emergency and maybe even save lives, certainly, when applied to the scale of the 2001 attack, it would also magnify the terror.

When every confused eye witness with a cell phone becomes a reporter and the most ridiculous innuendo can become a viral “fact” today, I shudder to think how much more emotional and psychological damage could have been done had we been following a Twitter stream that day.  How would terrorists use social media to spread misinformation to make the situation even more dangerous?  It would have been another layer of chaos on top of chaos, horror on top of horror.

Instead, we had to rely on “traditional” media.  And for all its faults, there was probably some psychological and emotional advantage in waiting for official statements from emergency services and the government.

Think back to that terrible moment.  Would social media accounts of that day have made the situation any better? Or like me, do you think it would have just added to your fear and confusion? Any lessons or thoughts on this?

Photo:  AP Photo/Suzanne Plunkett

Facebook is like a box of chocolates.  You never know what you’re going to get.  And sometimes, it’s not even sweet.

While most social media advisers are bullish on Facebook as a marketing channel — and certainly there are some amazing success stories — in my classes I teach a more holistic view of the opportunities and the PERILS of what you might get into.

I use the screen shot above as a way to illustrate the dark side of exposing your brand on the social web. Let’s take a look at what’s going on here.

The first wall comment is from a guy who is using a cute little girl as his avatar. I’m guessing this is simply a proud papa, but without careful observation, or taken out of context, you might make the conclusion that this is a perversion or that this cherubic girl is thanking Budweiser for participating in an alcohol-related promotion in Kansas City.

Curiously, the next avatar is also from a Bieber-like child who is clearly below the drinking age. This little boy is thanking Budweiser for supporting LGBT issues. This stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual and Transsexual. While Anheuser-Busch may very well support this demographic, it certainly is not reflected in its advertising or core brand promise. Bud is known as the King of Beers, not the Queen of Beers.

In any event, a casual observer would be thinking, why are these two little kids posting on Budweiser’s Facebook page?

Finally, Joe Doyle thinks this photo is so funny he posted it TWICE. Remember the Southwest airline attendant who got fed up with his job and abandoned his flight?  Yup that’s him. Joe goes on to suggest a Facebook site encouraging Bud to feature the wayward flight attendant in an advertisement.

From a traditional marketing standpoint, this is a mess.  Everything you do, and everything you don’t do, communicates about your brand.  What is being communicated by these community comments and how does this reflect on the most powerful beer brand in the world?

While social media represents a true opportunity for connection, listening and service, a wacky page like this seems to overwhelm those positive opportunities, doesn’t it? 

I had the privilege of working with Anheuser-Busch senior execs for four years and I know the extreme pressure on brand managers.  After viewing this page, if I were Bud’s marketing director, I might be thinking “WTF … Who talked me into being on Facebook?”

I’m not necessarily suggesting that they shouldn’t be on Facebook, but I’m making a point that in an era when many ”gurus” think every marketing problem can be solved with a Facebook page, you better be prepared for all possible consequences.

Marketing on Facebook is hard work … as we see by this example. Considering that a brand like Budweiser is probably going to consistently attract “diverse” and unusual comments like these, how do you weigh the benefit versus expense of a high-maintenance page like this? 

Is this a case where a brand has to be there or be conspicuously absent?  Is Facebook like your industry trade show – you just have to go or people will notice if you’re not?

Or, does Facebook represent an opportunity to legitimately inform, engage, and communicate in exciting new ways in a case like this, or is this a daily nightmare for an important brand?

Let’s get down to basics.  Is a Facebook page going to help Budweiser sell more beer?  How does it fit into an integrated strategy?  What do you think?

This is a video of me sleeping. Holy crap what a lousy picture.

Nevertheless, you are going to love this video. Jay Baer and I usually see eye-to-eye but when we were on a panel at the recent Social Slam event we discovered we had radically opposing views of the future of how social media is integrated into a company. We decided this was such an interesting topic that it would make an interesting debate … so here it is in video form.

It’s a short video but it covers a lot of ground!

Will social media marketing be absorbed into the every day workplace or will it stand alone as a distinct career? Or both?

What is the future of social media consulting?

What is the most economical way for companies to deal with the frenzied pace of change in social media?

What do we make of Chris Brogan’s prediction that social media consultants will be irrelevant in two years?

I think you’re going to love this video, and of course it’s OK to disagree.

With Jay.

No seriously … I enjoy dissent and hope you know that by now. How else will we learn and grow?  This is a GREAT discussion.  Let me know what you think!

Last Friday, the 159-year-old New York Times, arguably the nation’s most important newspaper, announced it would be charging a subscription for the online version of its product.

In an email to current subscribers, the newspaper announced a hybrid plan that would still allow non-subscribers to read breaking news:

• On NYTimes.com, any one can view 20 articles each month at no charge. After 20 articles, you will have to subscribe.
• On smartphone and tablet apps, the Top News section will remain free of charge.
• The Times is offering three digital subscription packages:  $15 every four weeks for access to the Web site and a mobile phone app (or $195 for a full year); $20 for Web access and an iPad app ($260 a year); or $35 for an all-access plan ($455 a year).
• New York Times home delivery subscribers will receive free access to NYTimes.com
• Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit.

My response is, “Hurray!”  We need to keep journalism vital in our country and to do that it has to be funded.  When my subscription offer hits my inbox this week, I will be the first to subscribe.

The risks in this plan are significant.  The company might jeopardize its huge online reach and drive away advertisers, which now represent more than a quarter of the newspaper’s revenues.

Plus, it has already failed at this attempt once before. The Times had experimented with a pay model from 2005 to 2007.  That program brought in 227,000 subscribers at $49.95 a year, generating about $10 million in revenue.

But after they commissioned a study to examine how TimesSelect was working, company executives became convinced that restricting access to the site was constricting its potential for more readers and more advertising.  When that program ended, traffic to the site almost doubled. It now stands at more than 30 million unique domestic visitors a month.

With the decline of their traditional reader base, this new subscription model is the most urgent development since the advent of the Internet itself.

What’s your take on this?  Are people going to pay for content or are they permanently conditioned to find their news and information for free?

Note: This morning Mashable reported on Twitter-based scams individuals are setting up to get around the 20-article limit. Is this enterprising or is this stealing?

Last week I attended an explosive panel discussion at SXSW. With the mild-mannered title of “Debating Brands’ Role as Publisher” sparks flew as Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and Lora Kolodny, a contributor to the New York Times and Money, sparred with the aggressive moderation of Tom Ashbrook , the host of NPR’s On Point, egging them on.

While there was actually five on the panel, the explosions between Pulizzi, Kolodny and Ashbrook made the highlight reels.

Pulizzi earnestly defended the growing corporate commitment to content as a viable marketing device — even filling the vacuum left by the declining traditional media. He said consumers don’t have three seconds for a brand but will have 30 minutes for a story. Kolodny lamented the trend and sneered at the idea of companies providing anything in an altruistic manner. Ashbrook stopped Pulizzi in his tracks when he asked him if companies would tell a story about killing babies with Bisphenol A

At various times both sides garnered applause but in the end the viewpoints remained far apart.

It didn’t have to be that way.  I think marketing professionals simply need to state the obvious: We’re not journalists, and we can’t try to be.  Similarly, Lora could probably admit that the plentiful corporate coffers are funding some useful and entertaining content.

As individuals and as a nation, we need fiercely independent journalists, It is essential to democracy.  And that role can never be served by public corporations and content marketing efforts. I think that is all marketing professionals have to say to take the emotion out of the conversation. There is no reason these disciplines can’t happily co-exist by simply acknowledging the limits and opportunities on both sides.

What do you think?  Are there threats presented when corporations try to fill the gap left by the decline of traditional media?

“Mass culture is dead. Every one of us is creating our own version of culture.”

This quote from futurist Faith Popcorn sums up a lot of things I have been experiencing lately.

Whether it’s YouTube-inspired dance moves, crowd-sourced literature, or my own personalized information stream, the Internet is inexorably un-tethering  culture from the places on earth and moments in time.

Culture used to be narrowly defined by country — perhaps even a region within a country — that had its own way of dress, food, art and lifestyle. But what happens to this concept when all art, music, and literature is globally-dispersed, user-generated, open-source, multi-platform and available on demand?

Well, for one, I sense that I am creating my own individual “culture!”

Not long ago, pop culture in America was largely defined by TV networks, local newspapers, ad executives, Hollywood and record companies. Now, I make my own newspaper. I watch programming from all over the world whenever I want to, and largely commercial-free. There is nobody in the world who  watches my “TV network” or listens to my “radio station” or reads “my newspaper.” I am surrounding myself with the World Culture of Mark. And through my own publishing, I’m influencing the culture of others.

Even something as physical and seemingly regionally-specific as dance is evolving digitally and globally.  Chris Anderson recently gave a compelling TED speech on how the rise of web video is driving this phenomenon.  In one example, he showed how dance moves now spread through the world, are enhanced and improved, and then sent back the other way again.  A global culture of dance is evolving through what Anderson calls Crowd Accelerated Innovation.

Personally, I like it!   I get a rush out of connecting to the world on my terms and my time. I love experiencing these amazing new cultural mash-ups.  But over time, will these rich historical cultures be diluted or even forgotten? Will we have museums to the regional cultures and customs the Internet diluted — or destroyed?

So much to think about and this is a subject EVERYBODY can have an opinion about!  Here are a few questions for you. Pick one that interests you and tell me what you think about it in the comment section!

• Will the Internet eventually create a definable World Culture?  Is having a global cultural icon like Michael Jackson a sign of this?
• Will the rich customs and culture of a place like France or Japan be made less relevant to the next generations by a digitizing, globalizing world?
• What are the implications of an Internet culture that seems to favor the English language?
• Are you creating your own user-defined web culture?

It’s Election Day here in the United States and we appear to be on the brink of a significant social change.  Fueled by outrage over the financial meltdown, economic stimulus attempts, government bailouts, and the election of Barack Obama, The Tea Party Movement is upending incumbents in the name of fiscal conservatism.

Many are pointing to the role of social media channels in spreading this movement.  Did social media create the Tea Paryt Movement, and if so, does this prove that the social web CAN enable dramatic social change?

Today, just two years after a sweeping Democratic victory, the tea-party movement is poised to redraw the landscape again. Nurtured by online networking, it helped disparate activists across the nation link up and already push aside high-profile incumbent leaders in multiple states this year.

A thorough history of the Tea Party Movement in The Wall Street Journal is peppered with references to the use of social media in building a national movement.  Let’s start with a brief summary of how social media played a role in these sweeping changes:

Blogs

The genesis of the Tea Party Movement may have been a blog by Stacy Mott, a stay-at-home mother fed up with the government’s economic policies.  Enraged by the government bail-outs, she started a blog for conservative women called “Smart Girl Politics” and launched a social networking site at the same time.  This and other conservative blogs were catalysts for live rallies. The content caught the attention of influential blogger and political commentator Michelle Malkin who started to write about the rallies.  After a dramatic online television rant calling for a modern-day Tea Party movement by CNBC Commentator Rick Santelli, the Smart Girl blog went viral.  Hundreds of other blogs popped up, creating a grassroots cry for change.

Social networking

Facebook pages started springing up locally and then nationally, uniting disparate activities. The movement initially had no budget, so Facebook served as the central directory for the party’s activities.  Within a year there 2,000 Tea Party-related Facebook pages. Eventually one of the founders created a website and social networking site called The Tea Party Patriots.

Twitter

Many believe the first seeds of the movement were planted on a list of top conservatives on Twitter, dubbed #tcot” for short. This list spawned other lists and within weeks #tcot  grew from 25 names to 1,500. Twitter was used to unite disparate voices and organize conference calls, town hall meetings and rallies.

Wikis

As the movement grew, organizers established wikis to provide protest advice and organizing techniques.

Fueled by these social platforms, general disenchantment coalesced into a cause, and in just a few months the movement enjoyed a stunning victory when Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts won Senator Ted Kennedy’s long-time Democratic Senate seat.

The social media revolution?

Undoubtedly social networking unified an idea among disparate interest groups with no organization and no budget.  Does this amazing success discredit the much-discussed Malcom Gladwell article claiming that the weak links and lack of hierarchy could not promote such dramatic social change?

Yes and no. If you look carefully at the brief history of the Tea Party Movement, it may actually SUPPORT Gladwell’s contention.

The WSJ article shows the initial loose organizations created on social networks were eventually dismantled by in-fighting, controversy and hurt feelings. Once the euphoria of the initial change began to wear off, the social networks could not sustain the change and even the early pioneers united by blogs and Facebook became bitter and divided. Relationships among the loosely-based coalition deteriorated so quickly members began suing each other.

The real catalyst came from coverage by the traditional media. News programs on the Fox Network and articles in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal fueled interest in rallies. Live conference calls to organize the initiative seemed to be the linchpin between chaos and unity. Town Hall meetings and live rallies kept the momentum alive.  Embarrassing content, like a racist photo-shopped images of the president, quickly went viral on the social web and actually created more divisiveness among the members.

The other important point was that Gladwell was addressing revolutionary change that requires risk to personal safety.  Voting for the Tea Party Movement in the privacy of a voting booth carries the same risk as clicking a “like” button on Facebook so this is not exactly a test case for his theory.

In any event, there is no doubt that the Tea Party Movement could not have coalesced with this speed and forcefulness without social media. What are your thoughts on this Social Media Political Revolution?