If nothing else, you’ve provided an excellent segue to a deeper dive on the utility of social media. As a caveat, we are in agreement that Social Media should be integrated into the broader marketing mix, and based on that agreement and our close proximity to one another, I’d love to buy you lunch to discuss. For our purposes here, today, perspective…

Counterpoints:

1) Quantitative vs. Qualitative Messaging and Positioning and Velocity

The statistics you provided assume one to one reach only, and do not account for latent (as opposed to direct) word-of-mouth conversations
that happen after or during engagement. What about the consumers turned brand evangelists? More precisely, how many social media users go on (word-of-mouth) to communicate a brand experience, a sale, a promotion, conversation, or direct one to one customer service experience to those that may not be active on or even have social media accounts? Are these people accounted for in the statistics/metrics? No.

The US population as of this writing is estimated at 306,120,792. US social media users are estimated at roughly 50 million (plus). This equates to 1/6 ratio of social media users to the general population.

More and more, consumers are empowered to control with whom they engage: Satellite radio; tivo/dvr; hyper-restrictions on telemarketing; tighter controls on direct mail (ie recent changes to NCOA protocols and inflated postage costs); digital technology designed to filter email; are consumer tools to counter the effectiveness of traditional advertising and marketing. Usability lab data demonstrates that over the last ten years, humans have been conditioned to avoid online banner ads.

Couple this with the fact that since the dawn of human history, humans are more likely to be motivated and subsequently act based on the advice, counsel, suggestion, purchase patterns and preferences of their friends, family and peers, and the fact that you are empowered to personally communicate directly with literally hundreds if not thousand of people at the speed of light, a paradigm shift emerges…

As a marketer, If I reach 1 member of a 6 person family/community with my message and brand experience, directly, coupled with the recipient’s opportunity to query me about said message, product, service, cause within ten minutes of engagement, the velocity with which I have garnered visibility, awareness, credibility, thought leadership, and conversion is unprecedented.

On the numbers, a personal anecdote (and here I readily admit I am but one data point): I buy shoes from Zappos.com, and have done so since Tony Hsieh, Zappos’ CEO, engaged me one to one on Twitter. I was deeply impressed with this experience because Tony directly answered to the pro’s and con’s of his service model, and gave me unbiased advice on the best way to procure size 13 footwear in shoe styles that I had a very hard time finding.

My grandmother suffers from disk bulge in her back and a degenerative disorder inhibiting her overall mobility. The same grandmother does not own a computer and has not been online since she sold the family business. Since her diagnosis, she has experienced some major lifestyle changes, and with every lifestyle change comes new purchases, including shoes.

So what did I do? I sent an email to Zappo’s customer service with photo attachments of my grandmother’s shoe preferences and the mechanical specs that her doctor suggested. Within hours, Zappos had solutions-comfortable shoes that my grandmother would actually wear becaue they looked like the shoes she used to wear. Zappos now drop ships shoes to my grandmother as I have created an account for her.

My Grandmother then told my Great Aunt, her former golfing group, my Mother, and my Sister, who then told my Dad about Zappos, and over the course of two weeks, each member of my grandmother’s community and my family had me either ordering their shoes from Zappos, or got online to create an account of their own. No one save me in this community of aforementioned people, uses social media.

What do you think the residual ROI/ROMI is on that “campaign”? Barring a hiccup or two moving forward, I’d say Tony enjoys an exponentially great return on his investment of ten minutes with me on Twitter, for the life of his business or the lives of these customers. And more to your point, no less than ten people not using social media are now being served by company that invests a large majority of their marketing budget on social media marketing.

It is next to impossible to duplicate these results with traditional marketing and advertising.

2) Behavioral Targeting, SEO/SEM

Social Media sites/apps are preference engines, first, and digital repositories of human motivation, second. At any time on any given day, an individual (regardless of their role or function) can immerse themselves in the social media stream and get an unfettered understanding of other individuals motivations, opinions, preferences.

Last November, I was in the market for make-up. Mom is the executive director of a non-profit in Houston and with the gig, she has a lot of speaking engagements. Mom’s skin is not the best, and knowing this, knowing that she is insecure about public appearances, I though organic make-up was a good gifting idea for Christmas. I knew nothing about make-up. So I did a search on Twitter and facebook and google to find brand advocates evangelists and their blogs for their preferred organic cosmetics. I then engaged individuals that were raving fans of organic cosmetics, listened, and asked a lot of questions. Once I had enough information to talk intelligently about organic make-up, I ran a query on the boutique make-up company that I heard good things about on LinkedIn. Within seconds, I had direct access to the cosmetic company’s representative; After a message on LinkedIn, phone number enclosed, I had a telephone conversation with the rep and learned what retailers in my area carried their products. That was a $400 sale.

I would never appear on a target list for a cosmetic company, and I certainly do not fit their demographic/psychographic. And though I am an advanced social media user, not much of my searching required social media accounts to obtain the information I was looking for.

Mom now exclusively uses this organic cosmetic company’s products; and though Mom is not a social media user, nor does anyone she works with engage online in social media exchange, at least four women at her non-profit are now brand loyalists of the organic cosmetics based on my Mom’s advocacy.

Before closing, in the next couple, given the opportunity, I’ll comment more congruently with your post when discussing the proficiency of direct mail/broadcast/outdoor–>social media, cross-media campaigns.

Again, thanks Luis for the opportunity to engage and share my perspective.

Towards creative fidelity,
Jason