Social Media Needs To Learn Traditional Media

Social Media Marketing Isn’t Everything

Social media marketing has a huge disadvantage right now. We don’t know, or want to know, the values and methods of traditional media marketing. We think we’re the real deal. We can show real interaction and real metrics. Those traditional PR types have been goosing customers for a 100 years, but we’ve got the secret sauce. As long as people listen and act authentically.

I am somewhat guilty of the above thinking. I’ve worked in traditional marketing, in fact before I worked in high finance, I was a marketing specialist where traditional media was our primary focus and social networking was for college kids. And as I’ve returned to marketing, I tried to forget my past in marketing and everything I knew about traditional outreach; read: broadcasting.

But clients aren’t there yet. And even if I consider it a part of my job to bring them along into the lovely pastures of social media, I’ve also got to be able to work with them when they want to include traditional media. If I simply stomped my feet and said NO NO NO like a petulant child, I wouldn’t have many clients.

So How Do Social and Traditional Media Work Together?

Much better than I thought a few months ago actually. Recently, one of my clients got a big press mention in a certain newspaper of record. All the blog mentions and tweets meant nothing compared to being picked up in the way we were. But the method is important. The only reason we got the press mention that we did was because we had a consistently awesome social media strategy; an engaged and influential Twitter account, a righteous open-sourced and easily shareable blog and of course, great content.

This is how you can use social media to work with traditional media. But social media marketer need, and many already do know, that traditional media still has an outsize influence compared to tweets and page views. The audience is different, the tone is different. And yes, its OK to pop the champagne when a mainstream media outlet picks up your stories.

Should Social Media Marketers Do Traditional Marketing?

I could suspend the answer to this next question in lots of flowery language that somehow hides my real feelings. But to cut straight to the point, Yes, social strategists need to get familiar with the rules, protocols and metrics inherent in traditional marketing practices.

We aren’t used to promoting ourselves to gatekeepers, or influencers. Our philosophy is much more open than that. Take your project, put it out there, get the conversation going, and the press and attention and sales will flow from that. That is our ethos.

But that can still be our ethos and operating philosophy even if we dip our toes into traditional marketing’s waters. We need to develop contacts similar to traditional PR firms. We need to know how to get in touch, pitch and talk with traditional media players.

And here is the real value; everyone’s jobs are made easier by a strong social presence. We don’t have to continually pitch stories. We can ask journalists and bloggers and other tastemakers to follow us, to friend us, to receive our email updates. Then, we can go back to our real jobs of providing great content, of telling interesting, compelling stories and let the traditional media contacts get in touch with us when they see something they like.

If you build that system, and if you push wonderful content, they’ll be coming back to you more and more.

Image Source: Rabble Radio on Flickr

Tagged as: Community Building, Social Media for Business, Traditional PR vs. Social Media