However, it’s got pretty much squat to do with effective social media marketing.

Perhaps there are some charlatans somewhere in agencies telling big, foolish companies that the key to social media is viral campaigns and that they have the magic dust to make it work.

But back in the real world, everyday businesses and individuals are sing social media in far more mundane (but rather more predictably effective) ways to engage with their customers, build relationships, and eventually to sell more of their stuff.

In this world, viral tweets are an irrelevance, thankfully.

Ian

People then look at the single success and copy arbitrary aspects of it, ignoring the many, many attempts that had those aspects but failed miserably.

This is because it’s difficuly to set out to build something that, primarily, is ‘lucky’.

Those campaigns that were successful are as you say relatively small in number compared to everything that’s out there. And emulating social campaigns is often doomed to failure, the social web isn’t very tolerant for copycat marketing.

I’m not sure the evidence that Twitter didn’t help him to sell a book is a good one, generally speaking when the results you are looking for are short term the way the tools are used are not so effective. Too sales focused. Building a loyal following or tribe as Seth Godin might put it is not done overnight. For that following to read the book and share their thoughts with others might take longer still but many a book has been successful through word of mouth and social just accelerates that process (just not necessarily at the time the author wishes; this doesn’t mean he should abandon his flock)

Also we shouldn’t look at social marketing as just being viral success.

Relationship marketing through social channels, effective CRM through a social outreach program, conversations and insights, all fall under the social marketing umbrella and all produce measurable results.

Not every organisation is wasting marketing dollars with the dream of viral success or there would be a large pile of unemployed marketing managers out there.

We’re all getting used to the rapid evolution of social, the ways to manage it and nurture it across the organisation, and varying dependant on the culture and size of the business.

Saying that social marketing doesn’t work is too large a statement but warning against the dream of viral success and encouraging marketing teams to measure I can agree with whole heartedly.

The numbers don’t always go down; if you’re measuring the right numbers. And whilst it’s true that we can now measure a lot, maybe we can sometimes be distracted by all this data and not see the wood for the trees.

As someone recently said at a conference I attended ‘Analytics can’t save us from stupidity’