Social network marketing is a fundamentally different beast to “traditional “marketing. When talking to marketers, they usually see social media as being in effect free, the challenge is to get the message spread, often by being outrageous, generating awareness for little money compared to traditional media.

To my mind, it is much more complicated than that.  “Word of Mouse” on social media has to be earned, and that is really challenging, requiring intimate knowledge of the marketplace, customers, their behaviour, and what is likely to positively engage them. Traditional marketing makes it easy to gain a general level of awareness, you just have to pay for it, but like most things that are easy, the return is very low.