It was interesting to read Will McInnes' latest post Social Media Market Hots Up – these guys are better placed than most to ponder on how the market has changed over the last few years.
For me it reminds me of web development 15 or so years ago. Clients were largely unsophisticated in their buying of digital. There was no such thing as a web strategy, very few digital marketing professionals and a big rush to get a website with no understanding of why, what it was for, or how it would help the business. Fast forward and they are much clearer in their briefing, sophisticated in their understanding and therefore their expectation are quite rightly greater.
In social media land clients seem to be falling into one of three camps:
- Those who are ignoring it all in the hope it just goes away.
- Those who believe they should be 'doing' social media but who don't
want to know that it's anything other than a Facebook
page (the rest of it is too messy, tricky, hard to put in a box) - Those who understand that social media is fundamentally changing what
customers expect from and have taken steps to ensure that
this feeds into all areas of their business (either because they are a young flexible company or because someone at
board level actually gets it).
Right now I'd say that most are in camp 2 but give it a couple of years and, like web development, they will have moved up that curve and that will be a good thing for everyone.
In the meantime, this great post from Mike Arauz kind of sums up where I'm at.
And let's not forget that this approach is still very much out there….