Social marketing….not optional?

So here is where I tread into some dangerous territory since I know that some of THP’s clients and new business prospects are readers of this blog.

After engaging full force for the last several months into the that squishy place where traditional public relations and social marketing converge, I am more convinced than ever that the use of these platforms to communicate directly to friends and the broader public is here to stay at least for the foreseeable future.

As we have introduced these new platforms and tools to clients and new business prospects we have presented these opportunities as additions to what we normally do, priced somewhat separately from our regular services.   This gives the clients options, one of them of course is to say no.

While social marketing is not for every company or client, I’m coming around to the line of thinking that we should be presenting it as less of an option and more of regular offering just like media relations, community relations, message development.  This is not because we want to make more money, but because we’d be doing the client a disservice not to include it as a regular offering.

Our experience so far is that it is getting harder to separate social marketing out of the mix.  The traditional tools need to feed the new platforms and vice versa.  It is hard to build a Facebook Fan base without using the more traditional tools and you can’t reach the 180 million people on Facebook without having a Fan Page.  Twitter is slightly different but it helps to let people know you’re there.

The Bottom Line is social marketing is becoming less optional.

The question is do we make it less of an option for the lion’s share of our clients and include it (and its associated costs) in all of our proposals?

Would love to hear your thoughts.