YNOT – Digital social media, the hot trend of the moment, has been an enormous boon to marketing folks. In addition to adding new dimensions to marketing plans, sites like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Orkut, Digg and others not only make targeting a wider range of potential customers easier and faster, but they also can help stretch budgets by decreasing cost per acquisition.

However, for every positive aspect of social media marketing, a negative lurks just out of sight, ready to trip the unaware over a surprise that can result in anything from minor embarrassment to career suicide.

Here are some of the pros and cons to keep in mind.

Costs

• Pro: Compared to traditional channels like television, print, radio and billboards, hard costs associated with online social media are almost nonexistent.
• Con: Hidden soft costs can mount up as marketing agents spend the time necessary to develop strong relationships. Soft costs can manifest in productivity decreases and employee burnout.

Feedback

• Pro: Rapid and often detailed responses can help marketers make incremental shifts in their approaches long before a project jumps the rails.
• Con: Making too many changes too quickly based on sometimes-contradictory consumer feedback can give potential customers the impression your company has no clue what it’s doing. Make sure you keep the endgame in sight.

Relationships

• Pro: Social media allow for relationship building, thus providing deeper, one-on-one engagement with consumers and giving customers a stake in product success.
• Con: Customer dissatisfaction can take on the dimensions of a personal betrayal, and dissatisfied customers can turn the very same social media tools against the object of their ire, negatively impacting a brand’s reputation very quickly.

Outreach

• Pro: Because each customer and employee has his or her own network — along which each node has its own network, ad infinitum — every point of contact with your message represents a media outlet with limitless tentacles.
• Con: Turning over any portion of brand reputation to outsiders can be scary, because customer- and employee-advocates can take brands where their owners may not want them to go.

Longevity

• Pro: Done right, the benefits of social marketing done can last for years, without additional expenditure.
• Con: Developing an extensive, loyal social network requires time, consistency and patience. Rewards may not be seen for months after a plan is put into play.

Level playing field

• Pro: Social media is egalitarian in that big companies have no real advantage over smaller ones. Instead of money determining who wins, in most cases, sincerity, customer service and product quality trump bucks in social media marketing.
• Con: Success with social media can encourage small companies to overreach their actual abilities, and those kinds of reputation bruises can be difficult to overcome. Don’t overextend.

Low barrier to entry

• Pro: Most tools are free and usually require a shallow learning curve.
• Con: Tools can change quickly, and tool popularity fluctuates constantly. Simply keeping up with the latest “hot thing” can become a full-time job.

Most marketers seem to either love or hate social media; there’s no middle ground. Frankly, if what you’re doing doesn’t include social media marketing but it’s working well anyway, you might want to avoid jumping on the bandwagon just because “everyone else is doing it.” Not participating probably won’t hurt your business … but getting social media wrong could do irreparable harm.
Weigh the pros and cons, and make the decision that best suits your specific needs.