Is Social Media as Industrial Marketing a Field of Dreams?

I have watched Social Media for a few years trying to determine if it was an appropriate venue to invest some of the advertising budget. In trying to unravel the “How To”, “Is there enough time in the day?”, “What is it really going to cost?”, “When do we make the leap?” and the most important one “Will anyone care?” I was sometimes paralyzed by those thoughts.



Criterion historically has sold through distribution and advertised in the traditional ways. This unintentionally built a level of insulation between our customers and us. It could take a few years to really get a message of innovation out in the market place. Our sales force would have to be trained. They would have to train the distribution sales force who would go and show the customers. We would have to print literature, design ads, issue press releases and display at tradeshows all of this taking a fair amount of time. Feedback from the market if it ever arrived at all would take time to come back through all of the channels that were built into the system.



I realized that if we participated in this personal forum called Social Media we would be opening the opportunity to deal directly with the individuals who use our products. We could instantly (something I have started calling the speed of Tweet) present new products or improvements to existing products to our customers but more importantly we can get instantaneous feedback from the most valuable people to our company the customer.



I must confess that I am still learning the “How To”, there is enough time in the day, its cost is part of the cost of doing business, we obviously have made the leap and as for “Will anyone care?” the answer is Yes! Those very important customers are starting to find their way out of the cornfield surrounding our Social Media field after only a few weeks.



As a company we still need to participate in the traditional marketing approaches but in the not to distant future I believe that Social Media will be part of the traditional marketing methods because it brings you right to the customer and the customer right to you.



Thank you to the customers who have already allowed us to play on the filed with them. We look forward to hearing and working with more of you as we grow together.




My final confession is I hope my competition does not react as fast as the customers have.