A recession (yes, that might now sound optimistic) invariably throws up or accelerates new forms of marketing focus. Social media is one of these focuses and is a wondrous catch-all for everything from social networking sites to forums, blogs and video. Social media is symbolized by the tendency to think that because it appears cheap it has to be both easy and effective. The first trick is to really understand how best to measure all of this stuff. Old world measures assume a really linear model: spend $ X influence Y. However, this is not going to work here because of three fundamental issues.
Major league baseball just announced plans to think about and maybe test instant replay. Wouldn't it be great to be able to use instant replay in our marketing? Can you imagine before we actually have to make a decision we can look at the end result, time and time again before we press the decision button? It would be so much easier to give absolutes in our decisions if we could see the future in a perfect way. Life unfortunately is not instant replay-able and nor can marketing be. Our need to be perfect often gets in the way of "best practices." What I mean by this is in our pursuit of the highest immediate performance we underestimate the power of learning from experiments and something as simple as chance. We often look to do the same thing, time and time again and expect different results - hoping to get learning without experimentation. We should experiment and tell our colleagues we are experimenting. This will change the way we all review the learnings from the work.