Is all the tweeting, facebooking, and blogging worth it?

I was unable to find an article on my NPR or MSN RSS feed so I had to venture out in search of an appropriate article. I stumbled across the below article titled Social Marketing: Is all that tweeting, facebooking, and blogging worth it? written by Dianne Buckner with CBC News in Canada. While this is a very brief article she managed to address some very important and relevant issues related to internet social marketing.

For the article Dianne interviewed Jonathan Huth, a partner of the marketing firm named Conversion. Huth stated that the purpose of his business is to “convert clicks into customers” for his clients. While he understands that many businesses are not in the financial situation to hire a company like his, he warns against the many free marketing resources available on the internet. In his opinion, they tend to be extremely time consuming and if you are just going through the motions it is pretty much a waste of time and ineffective. Naturally, Huth is in the business of promoting his own skills and assets that he can bring to the table for clients.

Dianne interviewed several owners of small businesses who were doing their own social marketing and were very successful at it. Of those interviewed was Martin Perelmuter, director of a marketing and communications firm. He stated that his company was “experimenting” with online social marketing. He told a funny story about a client of his in the mid 1990’s that when instructed to go online to obtain more information on a subject he refused stating “he wasn’t comfortable using the web to get important information”. How funny is that? Now the first place we turn to find important information is the internet. Like anything new, it takes time for people to jump on the band wagon but social marketing is here to stay.

http://www.cbc.ca/money/smallbusiness/story/2010/09/29/f-vp-buckner-social-marketing.html?ref=rss