Don’t Forget About Offline

All of the internet marketing big shots have been down in Austin for South by Southwest Interactive this week to talk about things like social media,  online communities, blogs, Twitter and Facebook.  And that’s cool, I love social media.

But it got me thinking…

Maybe it’s because the most popular topic on Twitter is Twitter and blogs tend to talk about other blogs more than anything else – but it seems like everyone is forgetting about the old-fashioned and less cutting edge part of word of mouth marketing: offline.

For all of your online word of mouth building efforts to truly work, it almost always has to go offline.  That’s why I find it so interesting that everyone is jumping into the social media game head first.  For every 100 social media marketing experts, how many offline, word of mouth experts is there.  I can think of a few, but not many.

A few questions and things to think about:

• If you’re focused on building relationships online, what are you doing to engage consumers offline?
• If you have an agency to manage your online community, do you have one to manage the offline?
• Do your online conversations include a call for offline action?
• 71% of “word of mouth” conversations happen face to face (source: Fizz, TalkTrack/Keller Fay Group 2006)