Marketers have had a lot of fun using social media but it’s been difficult to quantify the results of many activities past. Depending on who you talk to the profit generated by social media is either hidden because the consumer doesn’t generally make a purchase through the platform itself, or because the effects are often strongest concerning brand loyalty or brand recognition but not necessarily translated into purchases right away. Today is the busiest shopping day of the year in those United States of America (Black Friday) and a big social media experiment of sorts is going on. Traditional media has been swept aside in favor of tweets and friends, and today of all days social media and retailers may have an affair to remember.

Several major retailers made significant Black Friday/Cyber Monday investments on a number of platforms including most notably Twitter and Facebook, in anticipation of a frenzy of activity today. Before today’s shopping mayhem began Sears, with more than 150,000  Facebook fans, held a sweepstakes on their website offering items at Black Friday prices early to selected customers they had engaged through their page while Toys R Us is letting its fans vote to determine which merchandise should go on sale Cyber Monday, the first business day after the holiday weekend and traditionally a busy online shopping day. For those interested in Cyber Monday deals I highly recommend www.goeyeball.com (check earlier post for more details)  where you can make your own time and money saving customized bargain hunter bot, AKA your eyeball, that scours the best prices online for selected items.

Social media as a marketing tool works great when you truly have something worth marketing. Regular prices don’t work people into a frenzy like they used to (did they ever?) and the value of social media as a contact point should never be doubted by retailers. I think what we’re seeing today though is a real coming out party for the new media, showing the utility of it in directly influencing consumer patterns over a smaller temporal scale but with incredibly high density or volume. It shows that social media when used strategically (like all marketing should) has profound utility. Just having a fan page or a twitter account isn’t going to drive people to your store (meaning larger temporal and low density or volume) but some of the imaginative uses of social media we’ve looked at in this post, and there are several others we have overlooked,  are examples of social media at work in the business cycle.  Large companies are finding ways to use it that directly can be quantified, hopefully silencing a lot of critics and naysayers in the process.