Social Media & PPC or What XC & Track Teach Us About Digital Marketing
via flickr user welmo
My favorite memories of college were cross country and track practice. While XC and track both increase your fitness by running, the approaches were quite different.
Cross country was more freeform. You’d go out on long runs and just run. You could run hills, through creeks, deal with trails. You adjusted on the fly and the key is going long and hard. Try running five miles at an average pace of eight minute miles. Interval training on varied terrain for 1 or 1.5k happened every week, and much of the work happened on the trails.
via flickr user nocklebeast
In contrast, track workouts were interval based on a track. 100, 200, 400, 800 and 1000 meter repeats. Run, time, record. Try and hit consistent splits with every interval.
Over time, your times get better. This was true in both XC and track.
However, times in XC had more variance. Why? Courses were different. Some had more hills, turns, tree roots, rain, streams, hay bales than others. These factors affect your time.
Track times tended to be more consistent because a track is a more controlled racing environment. It’s 400m, outdoors. The surface may be cinder, rubber, or gravel. The turns’ tightness may vary, but it’s basically some form of oval.
Now what does this have to do with Social Media and PPC?
Social Media and PPC both help you reach your online marketing goals in different ways.
Think of social media as XC. The landscape varies. Twitter, Facebook, blogs are all different. The interaction paradigms vary in part because of the content that is share and in part because of the people you can connect with. You can show up, listen and share information with people you connect with. It’s a long term marketing strategy.
Think of PPC as track. You have the search engines. You buy your ads and keywords and you can calculate your PPC ROI and adjust over time. You try to hit your click through rates and lead gen goals.
With both XC and track you get fit. Fitness from XC and track complement each other - you run better times for running both.
Think that’s true for Social Media and PPC as well?
Tags: ppc, search marketing, social media, track, xc
May 5th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
A related thought: both track and XC have seasons. In general, XC is in the fall, and track is in the spring. At least in Minnesota, when I was running, this meant that the last XC meets of the season were often in sub-40 weather, which needless to say makes breathing interesting. Similarly, track meets were more likely to encounter spring rains, although these matter less with a hard track.
With regards to social media, I think this means that your training has to adapt to more than just the default terrain and how controlled it is: there are also less predictable season changes. What if the “temperature” drops and people’s usage patterns for Twitter change significantly with regards to company interaction? What if Google “rains” and modifies their algorithms in such a way to eliminate your investment in search engine optimization?
This is a different kind of adaptability than what you describe comparing XC and track, in that you don’t know the conditions going in, or at least with very little lead time. About all you can count on is that the risk of rain or cold is increased at certain times of year.