Despite having both a personal and professional interest in all things internet, I’m still not convinced about the benefits for Irish businesses in investing considerable time and money into building activity through social networking sites. (this is the polite, professional version of this blog )

So I was interested to read an article in the Irish Times today about putting businesses on the social media map. It seems to me that the interviewee, Mark Swaine has worked with clients paying someone to keep the social networks up-to-date and he’s come to the same conclusion as myself – it’s probably not worth it.

I think it is worth creating a presence on the sites as its low cost (though equally minimal impact) however investing significant resources into bland content updates, tweeting what you eat etc strikes me as ridiculous.

Remember Banner Advertising Anyone?

Remember the early days of the Internet; business models based on revenue from banner advertising – based on the assumption banner ads would lead to sales – no? I can honestly say after a decade in the business I have never EVER met a marketing professional that ran a campaign purely through banner ads that generated cost-effective sales. I can hear the screams now – it works in conjunction with other media – banner ads are great for branding etc etc The thing is that most of our clients are B2B and/or SMEs and most of them expect hard revenues from direct marketing campaigns – I appreciate those in the FMCG market and other sectors need to build brands but for many other businesses if it’s not directly increasing revenues in its own right, it’s not worth doing. And funnily enough I’ve never met anyone who said they’ve run a campaign that paid through the social networks – have you?

Tags: banner advertising, banner adverts, irish times, online marketing ireland, onlne marketing, social media, social networking, twitter

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