Author Archives: Sarah Hohne
Sarah Hohne | Critical Mass Chicago
“As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
These days, it seems like everything new and groundbreaking has a little bit of something old mixed in — whether it’s the 3-D cinema remakes, the endless sampling in today’s pop music or the new cult shows that evoke a ‘retrovision’ understanding of our past (who else is waiting for the Season Premiere of Mad Men?). It’s somehow comforting to look at old things through a new lens. We’re better at adapting and embracing what is new when we are familiar with a piece of it – be it the storyline itself, the underlying theme or the once elusive but now predictable outcome.
I couldn’t help but feel this same sense of looking at an old challenge through a new lens (or, one could say, a new challenge with an old lens) while working with a client trying to ‘crack the nut’ of social media – determining its true worth or opportunity to a marketer before making proposals to the C-suite. The questions were more plentiful than the answers: What is the real value? What are we getting? How much can we sell? What’s our ROI? And the one great question these all laddered up to… The question our executive Scott Shamberg admitted being asked more times than he could count at a recent industry event… “My executive team doesn’t understand it. How can I convince them?”
After a series of déjà vu moments, I realized that it felt a lot like our pre-bubble, pre-burst, Web 1.0 years. When the Internet itself was still ‘emerging’ as a viable model (and before the e-commerce enlightenment), the burning question was how to quantify the value of a Web site and participation on the Web. Everyone knew it was there, that they needed it, and that it was huge – but no one really knew what to make of it. The questions were endless about how much to spend, how to measure it, and what tomorrow would hold. Many were eager to jump on the “bandwagon” but unsure how to make the business case to do so. Sound familiar?
The subsequent bubble notwithstanding – there are some lessons we can learn from that time. Even though social media represents a different ‘animal’ with a different proposition (enter influence!), it has become an emerging media opportunity that is as hard to grasp but as important to long-term brand management as websites were when they hit the scene. At the end of the day, you can’t afford to NOT be where your customers are talking about you and looking for you. With that principle in mind, it’s just a question of how to position the opportunity and help your company decide to either proactively shape where this goes, or to jump on later and potentially forfeit the opportunity to drive.
How your company chooses to adopt and use social media is really subject to the needs of the organization and the philosophy of your leadership. Some executives embrace the next new thing with the spirit of a competitor and will see the application immediately – others will view it as unnecessary, or maybe even a nuisance to a well-controlled marketing environment. No matter what the case, you can pull from lessons of the past to help frame up this ‘next new thing’ in familiar ways to sell in what promises to be a long-term houseguest in the world of media communications.
