Comment

At the Interact conference in Berlin a couple of weeks ago, Forrester VP and research director Jaap Favier delivered the news that proponents of social media have been waiting for. "Ads don't drive sales," he said, "customers do. Ads drive consideration, but what drives sales is customers."

In other words, big traditional media can get you noticed, but after your product has made it onto a purchaser's shortlist, it's what people are saying about it in chat rooms, on blogs, on review sites...

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... and in social networks that will determine whether they buy it.

This is the social media marketing model in a nutshell, and neatly explains why smart PR companies have got so excited about the space. Speaking at an event organised by M&A consultancy Results International last week, Chime Communications CEO Christopher Satterthwaite defined PR as "communication through third-party endorsement", a skill that fits perfectly into the social media world.

This reinforces something I've been thinking about for a while. As NMA columnist Michael Bayler suggested last year, marketing is splitting in two. There's the traditional world, where agencies create messages for brands, then buy media to place them in front of consumers. This is becoming harder and more expensive as audiences fragment and interactive technologies provide them with ever-more sophisticated tools to ignore advertising altogether. The other world is that of social media, where audience resistance to interruptive advertising means media can't be bought, only earned.

This raises two important questions. The first is what the relationship between the two sides of the divide will be. Favier's comments seem to emphasise the importance of the social media side, but that may have more to do with the need to persuade companies to take this aspect of interactive marketing more seriously. Certainly we're only beginning to understand how social marketing might work. But I've spoken to a few digital agency people who have recognised that social media methods can be slow, that the viral nature of such communications makes it hard to make a big noise about what you're doing. That's the heavy lifting that traditional media still do well, even if their power is fading.

The second unknown is the extent to which what we currently think of as advertising can survive. The world of interruptive advertising is changing as brands have to offer value to the audience. The end result, as Paul Graham, managing partner of ad agency RKCR's digital offering Saint, said to me, is that the most creative advertising approaches could be all but invisible. Meanwhile, advertising in social media is increasingly coming to resemble PR.

These were the ideas I wanted to address when I put together the programme for the Online Marketing & Media show this year, as well as finding some concrete examples of people using social media tools and techniques, rather than just talking about them. In the process, I've started to wonder about Bayler's marketing schism. All the talk about integration focuses on making online and offline work together, and who should lead that process for clients. But who's going to bridge the gap between traditional and social marketing?

Online Marketing & Media 08 will be held at the Business Design Centre in London on 24-25 June. Full details at onlinemarketingshow.co.uk


Michael Nutley is editor-in-chief of NMA