Social media weren't built for marketing

If you're approaching social media as a way to market your organization, you're putting lipstick on a pig. That's the conclusion of Greg Verdino in a great post this morning.

If you ask me, starting with social media marketing can often amount to nothing more than putting lipstick on the pig (and yep, the pig in this case is your old school "anti-social" company.) I can't tell you how often marketers ask me for advice on how to use social media to reach new customers and sell more stuff, yet have never even considered how they can use the very same (or similar) tools to work better, smarter and cheaper themselves. Worse still are those companies that seem hell-bent on marketing through social media yet can't even access social media sites from within their firewalls.

Social media are great for marketing. But they're not great for marketing because they're marketing tools. They're great because they allow you to listen to and engage the people who are most important to you. And if you're really interested in doing that, your marketing and communications efforts will naturally improve.