Rumor Mill

HAPPY BOY FROM KENTUCKY wants to be my friend. But most of all, he wants to sell me something. Will I be interested in a load of organic top soil, or a dual-rotary reciprocating saw? Will I be interested in a box of male enhancement serum, or a date with a comely 27-year-old refugee from the Ukraine? Will I embrace the world with the click of a mouse? Will I, finally, be happy?

Welcome to the dawning of the age of social media marketing, when the felicitous camaraderie typical of the new, online networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, YouTube and dozens of others, merges with the crasser requirements of product advertising and brand promotion. The result is a curious combination of cheerful banter and hard-nosed sales, as if the carnival pitchman now buys a round of drinks for the crowd before he separates the fools from their money.

It was bound to happen. After all, the worldwide web and all of its channels are awash in the silent hum of virtual noise. And because they never sleep, they never stop presenting advertisers and their representatives with what seem to be delicious, inexpensive opportunities to reach audiences increasingly immune to the more traditional, and less interactive, lures of print, radio and television.

Still, the urgent question for anyone in the business of selling is this: Does social media marketing actually work?More pointedly, do advertising agencies and marketing communications firms even know what they’re doing before they advise their clients to spend dwindling budgets on a corner of this brave, new world?

JOHN SHERIDAN IS PLAYFULLY CIRCUMSPECT, IF NOT EXACTLY SCEPTICAL. He’s the St. John’s-based co-owner of something called SocialMedia404, a firm that claims to bridge the gap between traditional business functions and the explosive use of these new technologies. “It’s like teenage sex,” he grins. “Everybody says they’re doing it. But of the ones who are, not many are doing it well. As a result, businesses with tangible goods and services to sell often get burned. They don’t see the value in social media marketing when the predicted return on investment doesn’t materialize.”

Wilma Hartmann concurs. She’s director and principal of St. John’s-based Digital Daisy, a training and consulting company that purports to help industry harness online networking opportunities strategically. “Having limited knowledge sometimes gets you into dangerous territory,” she says. “You start running before you’ve learned how to walk. The key to anything in this particular world is deciding your objectives, otherwise it has the potential of taking a lot of time without generating many results.”

All of which sounds remarkably rational in this hyperbolic age. Could it be, then, that social media marketing is no more or less effective than any other kind of advertising? Could it be that success depends, as always, on the message, the fit, the content, and the skill of the executioner?

If so, Happy Boy from Kentucky, and all the other product-pushing bloggers, twits and Facebookers in this curious universe, are asking the wrong question of me and millions of others trolling the Internet for news, views and the occasional deal. It’s not “will I?”, but “why should I?”

SHE’S YOUNG, BRIGHT AND EMINENTLY PLUGGED IN. So, naturally, 20-something Jane Shkolnik, digital strategy director of Halifax-based branding agency Revolve, attributes any lack of commercial consortium between sellers and consumers in the social media world to fear, loathing and a broad failure to appreciate the emerging power of this platform. “At the end of the day,” she says, “people are always talking online. So, you have a choice as a marketer: You either engage in the conversation about your brand or you don’t. It’s like death and taxes.”

Her point is simple: For decades, the advertising industry has been dominated by the principle that giving up control of a brand is the first step on the road to business failure. You keep the brand pristine. You defend it. You push, push and push it. But with social media, where everybody is discussing and sharing everything all the time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, there’s no longer such a thing as a perfectly static brand. A big part of her job, now, is showing clients how to engage – how to become part of the conversation as a means to ultimately generate sales and revenue.