Natalie Myers

Is Social Media Destined to Meld into All Marketing?

February 11th, 2009

Karen O’Brien, Partner, Interactive Services, Crimson Consulting, said something really interesting about trends she’s been seeing with her Fortune 1,000 clients. I share it with you.

We were chatting about social media (a specialty of Karen’s), and she said she is seeing every business unit within companies, as well as every group with a geographical, segment, or product focus within companies, start to consider social media and implement it into their marketing efforts

“I think it’s like when Web marketing first started,” she said. “In the beginning, it was kind of experimental and you had someone at the corporate level say, ‘I’m going to be the Web marketing person.’ But then Web marketing became so pervasive that no one person is going to own it.”

She thinks this is what’s happening to social media. Pretty soon no one marketer will be able to call his or her self the “social media person” for the company.

“I think it’s going to become an inherent part of all marketing,” she said.

Natalie Myers

About Natalie Myers

Natalie Myers writes for MarketingSherpa’s Great Minds and Content Biz newsletters. She covers a broad array of topics for Great Minds, regularly interviewing thought leaders and experienced marketers about innovative or highly successful marketing strategies. For Content Biz she focuses specifically on online subscriptions models, including anything you pay for to read, listen to, watch, rent (as in Software as a Service models), etc.

She writes blog posts about topics relating to her beats, including useful information from interviews that doesn’t make it into an article.

Natalie's Posts | Send a Letter to the Editor

Categories: Marketing, Social Networking Evangelism Community Tags: ,



  1. free social networking and buzz marketing webinar
    February 11th, 2009 at 15:02 | #1

    i tend to agree. it needs to be more than one person or a select few involved in a company’s social networking effort. the more faces of your company out there, the better.

    big jason

  2. JoJami Tyler
    February 13th, 2009 at 09:00 | #2

    We are using it, and it has been a great resource for services and it keeps us so connected to what others are doing.

  3. Steve Gershik
    February 19th, 2009 at 23:38 | #3

    Seems like social media has three great things going for it now: it’s fun, cheap, and new. The part I struggle with is exactly how to quantify the business value of social media (with getting into the qualitative argument a la David Meerman Scott) in ways that have the CFO nodding his head.

    Not against social media, I’m just trying to come up with an economic payoff model that works.

  4. Natalie Myers
    Natalie Myers
    March 4th, 2009 at 11:48 | #4

    Hi Steve,
    SO many people are in the same boat in trying to figure out how to quantify the business value of social media. It’s a challenge I’ve written a lot about. No one I’ve spoken to has been able to give me a concrete answer about metrics that would make a CFO nod his head. I believe it will take some time but companies will eventually be able to identify a positive ROI from engaging with customers and prospective customers through social media channels. Thanks for your comment.

  5. Dale Underwood
    March 6th, 2009 at 22:59 | #5

    Social Media ROI is easy if you realize that social media by itself is only the “bait”. You still need a hook to catch the fish and weigh (measure) it on the dock (website). Most websites I see these days couldn’t catch a cold.

    Not all marketers are “in the boat” trying to figure this out, many already have and are flourishing even in this economy.

We no longer accept comments on the MarketingSherpa blog, but we'd love to hear what you've learned about customer-first marketing. Send us a Letter to the Editor to share your story.