Make Marketing History

The views of a marketing deviant.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Tools Of The Trade.

The arrival of every new social media tool, be it Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed or whatever, is inevitably followed by conversations about the best way to use it for marketing purposes. Ideas are floated, advice is offered and someone creates a best practice guide.

And there's nothing wrong with that. Except that it's putting the cart before the horse. It's fine, indeed imperative, to know what the new tools do. But before you use any of them, you have to be certain of the context in which you're marketing and the goals which you're seeking to achieve.

Only then should you look at the tools available so as to decide which of them, if any, are best suited to meeting those goals. Tactics follow strategy - not the other way round.

3 Comments:

Blogger Robert said...

Maybe it would be better if the marketers invented their own social media tools rather than continuously try to piggy back someone elses hard work ... especially because these tactics often results in putting more people off than the number it attracts.

7:38 PM, January 22, 2009  
Blogger john dodds said...

Maybe. Or maybe they should learn to use the existing ones in the way that users already do rather than impose their methodology on them. Which would of course also be a problem with their own tools.

2:05 PM, January 26, 2009  
Blogger Robert said...

It isn't a case of knowing how to use the tools as the masses do ... it's a case of knowing what is important in the masses eyes - which is almost never what they spend millions of dollars trying to do.

7:37 AM, January 27, 2009  

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