Social media versus advertising in an economic downturn

This post by Josh Bernoff predicts that social media will be the choice of marketers during the economic downturn. He advocates cutting traditional advertising when budgets get tight, and moving your money to social media because it’s in a different part of the purchase process — consideration (versus awareness with traditional ads).

I agree that social media should be an increasingly important tool in a marketer’s toolbox. But social media’s use really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. Social media, search ads, and email marketing can be great and relatively inexpensive tools for your marketing, but there are many situations where there’s no substitute for awareness.

For example, I’ve been working with a client who is an innovator in a brand new product category. This client is a large established company, but the particular breed of technology they’re talking about is relatively new to the market. Manufacturers simply don’t know about it yet.

Would social media be a good choice for this company? Not at this stage. They’re still in their infancy — where potential customers don’t know anything about the solution…and the customers don’t even know they HAVE a problem! With social media, they’d end up preaching to the choir — a tiny group of people who already know about this new solution and think it’s great. But without a loud voice (read: advertising) to educate the market about the problem, this company would be missing the critical mass they desperately need. Social media can’t do that on a large scale nearly as effectively and reliably as advertising can.

Awareness is critical to many marketing campaigns. Social media can be very useful, but don’t make the mistake of throwing away your advertising campaigns for applications where social media isn’t warranted.