SDMA Events

Last week’s networking and education event at the Seattle Direct Marketing Association featured a presentation on how to use social media to achieve direct marketing goals.

The presentation, by representatives from the Parnassus Group of Seattle, provided immediately useful “Dos and Don’ts” of social-media, and a bit on the mechanics of how it works. The main focus of the event was on using Facebook as a direct marketing vehicle for Internet-based campaigns.

The Parnassus Group especially favors Facebook for the promotion of events. The vast communication network makes it easy to get your message to go viral, and to provide timely results. The audience of Facebook wants to know what is about to be “now,” and any hint of a bonafide news scoop makes for good social currency that is bound to be passed along.

The primary reason these social-media marketers believe this medium offers recession-proof marketing is that direct marketers can catch their audience in the decision making mode while they are doing research on the Internet, and while looking at what their social networks are saying about products, services and people. These are buyers. Not lookers. And they believe their friends.

The lesson seems to be that if you get real endorsements, directly from real people, your marketing budget only has to work half as hard. This is because you don’t have to spend half your time looking for people interested in buying and half your budget convincing the audience that they should believe you before they even begin to grow receptive to your marketing message.

So, how do direct marketers go about saving half of their budgets?

There are a few mortal no-nos, and a few quickie-cuts to better direct marketing results:

DO

Explore the groups
Find groups related to your business, and be friends with the administrators of these groups
Blog about Facebook groups- users will find you out in the “real world” this way too
Buy social ads
Design applications- You’ll have to explore the site to understand this if it’s not making sense right now, but the exposure here is huge
Contribute & participate

DO NOT

Be fake. Poser sales guys are sniffed out & exposed immediately
Spam
Come out with a hard-sell up front
Tag people to marketing content
Poke people you don’t know, especially when you’re here for business, even if they poked you first
Ignore your detractors- give them some honest conversation instead

Considering there are 66 million users currently registered with Facebook, and you can conduct a direct marketing campaign for little more than the cost of strapping an intern to the computer, there are probably not many marketers who can afford to ignore this space.

The Parnassus group says it takes about 10 hours to launch a direct marketing campaign in a social media space (caveat, be familiar with the workings of Facebook first, then start counting these hours), at a cost of about $75-$200 per hour. And, companies can be hired to create the applications for you in a price range of $5-100k.

For more information on the Parnassus Group of Seattle, and the Seattle Direct Marketing Association’s social media marketing event visit: http://parnassusgroup.com/, and view the slides from the presentation.

To find out about the Seattle Direct Marketing Association’s upcoming networking event visit: http://www.sdma.org/events.php