The recipe of marketing success with social media

Although Mack Collier has an interview with Sandy Carter of IBM concerning “The Recipe for Marketing Success with Social Media“, we dare to state there is probably no recipe for marketing success with social media.

Social media success is unpredictable

How much effort you do.
How much energy you put into.
There is no relation between input and outcome.
In social media anything can be picked up or seemingly everything can be ignored.
Social media success is unpredictable. It is not science.

How to get measurable success with social media?

In order to be able to measure you need to measure the input and the output.
For a start the measurability of social media is not feasible for the moment.
Due to the complexity of social media the input is unclear as there are so many sources than can trigger a social media event. The input can be different from the sources you are registering or the sources that you control.

Next you need to be able to link the input to the outcome.
It is probably impossible to prove the origin or the catalysat of the outcome.

No recipe of marketing success with social media

If we can’t measure, humans are not able to build a model or a heuristic that defines the recipe.
There is no secret formula.
It probably comes down to many experiments and good luck with the content and timing.

Of course you can try to use a catalysat like email campaigns or promote your content by bookmarking (or getting bookmarked by someone) on Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Propeller or similar in order to boost the process reaction to get picked up, but as too many factors play a role: no exact outcome can be predicted.

Above the unpredictability and unmeasurability of social media, it is certainly not suited for every type of business, solution or service. Thus maybe you don’t even need to look into social media.

What’s your experience and level of success with social media?