In comparison to typical marketing and communication campaigns, social media is much cheaper. Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research recently met with other experts in the field to discuss how effective social media would be if we are indeed heading into a recession.
We concluded that Social Media, which tends to have lower costs than other forms of marketing (commodity tools) can be very cost effective for those wanting to get customers to spread and share messages. On the other hand, marketers need to be careful, because doing it wrong will result in more work, and in some situations, brand backlash.
The many “cost” is the time of a person who will be your community evangelist (This is actually a professional term in this field, cool huh?). They need to be involved in using these tools to effectively communicate and coordinate within your online and offline communities. In the world of the church this could easily be a team of volunteers who have a passion for taking the church online and connecting to people.
Bottom line, social media is not only the way that your people prefer to interact with you online, but the tools to do so are cheaper then what you probably are currently running.
