So on the second day of smx social I’ve asked Rand Fishkin to explain to me in two short and simple sentences how to convince my boss to spend money on Social Media Marketing and not on traditional channels in a good old fashioned marketing mix.
Rand Fiskin @ SMX Social NY2007
Now he didn’t do it in two short sentences 
but was kind enough to give me his thought on how to sell the concept. For him the most important upside of social media marketing wasn’t necessary the backlinks generated or even the huge amount of visibility you could generate this way. Although these are obviously very nice “side-effects”.
The most important thing to keep in mind for him was that you could never ever reach the people you can reach through social media marketing through the traditional channels of mass marketing like TV, print or radio. Just as Seth Godin stresses in his books like purple cow you need to be remarkable – bookmarkable.
The traditional marketing does and will more and more fail to reach the Innovators and Early Adopters – but social media marketing through bookmarkable, viral – or simply said brilliant content tailored to the very specific needs of your target audience.
Now thats useful additional food for thought – only again needs to be seen how to maneuver around the question of “what is the ROI, whats the expected new sign-ups if we spend x amount of money on this stuff”.
But at least I got a better idea now and if I tell my boss how successful Brent and Rand are in using this kind of an approch he might be more likely to sign the budget off.
