Updating 25 years of sales and marketing experience I started this blog after taking the Institute of Direct Marketing’s Interactive and Direct Marketing Diploma at Kings College London in 2009.
On finishing the course I found London was awash with Social Media Marketing conferences, training courses, and speakers. The talk was about how using Free Social Networking tools such as Facebook, Blogging, and Twitter, and networking round eCademy and LinkedIn, your Marketing was now FREE. Thanks to Social Media Marketing, businesses could include themselves in a new goldrush for a fraction of the outdated website, pay per click and SEO marketing budgets.
Social Media has a huge impact the practitioners argue. Blogging helped the US President Barack Obama get elected. Twitter told the world about the Iranian election frauds. Companies cited as making millions from Twitter revolved around Starbucks and Dell Computers, and they use the same free tools as a one-person business can.
What is good for politicians and major companies is good for you and will make you rich runs the argument. And a number of people certainly are making Social Media Marketing work for them. So why not everyone? An irrestitable dream in a recession hit London for sure.
All seemed very different to everything I have just learned at University. And it didn’t take long for businesses to start asking hard questions.
Why do I have 2,000 followers and NO enquires? Why has a year’s blogwriting produced zero returns? Why is Facebook bringing my site lots of traffic but no more sales? Why is this month’s social media driven quotes not converting to sales? Why do I have to spend every minute of the day and night following, blogging and tweeting to unknown global audiences when I’m a local printer in Kensington? Are we chasing rainbows?
Social Connection’s purpose is to understand what really does work in Social Media Marketing for London’s businesses. This will be done by quarterly scientific grade surveys, and learning from response metrics used by our clients and others. We’ll use analytics to measure and identify ROIs, understand the business generating tactics that work, and and the market situations they work best in.
After that Social Connection will cover converging the best Social Media approaches within integrated marketing campaigns, and refine again.
There are pots of gold to be found with Social Media. The purpose of Social Connection is to make sure we know precisely the right rainbows to follow for our customers, and share the learnings, as all good Social Media practitioners should.
Chris Clark
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Chris Clark is MD of Clark Marketing, a digital marketing company focussing on keeping clients’ shops full, getting the Hillingdon Mayor to see one of our success stories for herself, turning £5-figure e-commerce site sales to £6 figure, and more. Chris has just completed his diploma in interactive and direct marketing for the IDM at Kings College, London, and was the oldest one on the course!
