Shiv Singh is not only the Vice President but also the Social Media Lead for agency Razorfish. A widely respected and influential marketer he has introduced social media strategies and social influence marketing to clients including Panasonic, Microsoft and Ford. Having just released the latest title Social Media Marketing For Dummies Shiv was available to answer a few questions on the subject:

You’ve harnessed the power of social media for some big name clients. Was there ever a challenge in convincing them that social media could successfully market their product?

That was more of a challenge a year or two ago. Few clients question the value of social media or of using it to get closer to their customers. What’s interesting though is that many clients still consider it valuable as a channel with which to form deeper relationships with their customers. They still question the value in using social media as direct marketing and for the most part I tend to agree. You can’t push your product through social media. You need to begin by building trust and taking care of your existing customers.

Even online marketers are sceptical of social media and its use in online marketing, arguing it to be too transient to remain effective, what is your response to this?

I’d argue quite the opposite. It is easy to forget that whatever we write on a social platform or share with our friends in an online conversation is potentially searchable and archived by Google, Bing and others for the rest of time. The fact that there’s a historical record of our conversations brings certain permanence to social media. A permanence that is both exciting and challenging. We live in a time where customers create and break brands. To assume that it is a transient phenomena is to assume that customers don’t want to talk to each other.

As is evident with the high-speed nature of the Internet do you think social media will evolve as a marketing tool or be substituted for the next emerging technology?

Most definitely, social media is in its early days. Marketers are just beginning to understand how to harness the phenomena and the social media platforms too. What’s more, many marketers have barely scratched the surface in terms of strategies to engage in the various forms of influencers to help them achieve their marketing objectives. That’s something I spend a lot of time explaining how to do in my book. One thing is for certain; it will certainly never be substituted for the next emerging technology. Rather it will be integrated into every subsequent one!

Social Media Marketing For Dummies helps you to learn the art of social media marketing to build your business to its full potential and includes contributions by Michael Becker, Jeannette Kocsis and Ryan Williams.

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Available to buy now
Social Media Marketing For Dummies
Shiv Singh
John Wiley & Sons
Oct 2009