Many of the largest CPG companies that are making major investments in social media – and that goes WAY beyond blogs, facebook and second life.

P&G has made a major investment in a Social Media Lab to develop the discipline for deployment across all brands. PepsiCo and Unilever both held big social media training days for all of their brand managers in late December. We are working directly with many other huge marketers on these challenges – and the output is rarely manifested in something as simple as a facebook page or a blog.

Like all things worth doing, moving from broadcast based mass marketing to relationship based passion marketing will be hard, time consuming and costly, but there will be significant rewards to those who execute best.

Turns out there is no free lunch, but there is a huge opportunity.

Tom O’Brien
MotiveQuest LLC

Since my assertion was about brands – by which I meant major consumer brands that spend a great deal on marketing and media – I’d certainly love to hear counterexamples of brands that took a cheap and quick approach to social media that wound up having a lasting positive impact.

My point is that “becomming social” represents a major transformation for most established marketing organizations, and such things are almost never cheap and quick, even if they seem at first like they might be.

OTOH, if such cheap, quick ways did exist and were repeatable, I imagine analyst firms that mastered them would do pretty well.

/Andrew

There’s no reason becoming social should be a “slow and costly process.” Unfortunately in this context, the cheap, quick ways don’t support Gartner’s revenue model.