Social Media Marketing is about Emotion not Automation

Doug Karr at the Marketing Tech Blog has a post this morning called You Know Your a Smippy When…

Before we get started into the Smippy world. I’ve known Doug for quite awhile and would count him as THE one that helped me get into social media specifically blogging. I pretty much take everything Doug says as fact and trust his judgment without fault. He is def. one of my SM mentors.

Part of his post is a rebuttal against my Twitter Auto DM Petition.

Now… I am not going to take offense to the Smippy comment. I actually think it is pretty hilarious. The beauty of social media is that you can freely express your opinions and other people have the right to disagree.

There is one thing I am NOT against and that is social media marketing. My company’s future is built off the concept that you can use social media for brand exposure, as well as, increased sales. Though I think there is a fine line with taking a marketing medium and bastardizing it by setting up direct responses without any regards to the person on the other end.

I’m going to cite an article by Seth Godin called  The Rapid Growth (and destruction) and Growth of Marketing.

Social media, it turns out, isn’t about aggregating audiences so you can yell at them about the junk you want to sell. Social media, in fact, is a basic human need, revealed digitally online. We want to be connected, to make a difference, to matter, to be missed. We want to belong, and yes, we want to be led.

The business owners and marketers that were focused in mass marketing in the past try to systematize processes, “How can we take this tool and automate it to get the most BANG for the BUCK?” When you use Twitter Auto DMs you are not respecting the fact that I chose to follow you. I don’t want to know about your new e-book. I will find it on my own if you were that compelling to follow in the first place.

Any product that automates social media tools is slowly sucking the personality out of your brand (personal or corporate). You cannot try and automate a tool that is rooted in permission based marketing.

If you aren’t taking the time to personally thank people for following you…

Aren’t you just collecting another mailing list?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Chris Brogan: Custom and Unique — Repeat Repeat Repeat
• Discontinuous change in social media marketing and marketing for 2009
• The 50 Best Business Blogs of 2008
• What the hell is wrong with being marketed to?