Way back in the 20th century, “buzz” was the je ne sais quoi of the marketing world. Every company wanted it, but few presumed to know how to get it. Back then, corporations generally lobbed their products into the marketplace, bombarded consumers with repetitive messages and sat back and prayed that buzz would magically appear.
That, of course, changed as companies learned how to harness the Internet. And, as social media like MySpace and Facebook emerged, marketing became less of a monologue and more of a multiparty conversation. It suddenly wasn’t enough for companies and their spokespersons to speak down to consumers from the mountaintop. The new challenge was how to get consumers to say good things about a product to one another.
The rise of social media has been part and parcel of the devolution of authoritative information and the flowering of a million cacophonous voices. It not only changed the way companies looked at consumers but how consumers looked at each other.
By 2005, surveys showed that when it came to the marketplace, Americans were beginning to trust their peers more than well-known authorities and experts. The following year, according to the Trust Barometer Survey conducted by Edelman, an international public relations firm, saw the emergence of “a person like me” as a credible spokesman for companies and products.
By 2010, nearly four in five corporations were planning to move money they once spent on television advertising to some sort of social media campaign. For example, Pepsi chose to forgo a high- profile TV spot at halftime of the Super Bowl for a social-media- driven charity campaign that will award the nonprofit organizations that muster the most votes through virtual social networks.
Could there be any better proof that social media is the future of marketing?
But hold on, now comes Edelman’s 2010 Trust…