How Social Media can save you a bundle on paid media.

A social media spend should come before an ad spend. The thing about real paid advertising is that it’s expensive to create and place. Screw up with a real campaign with real dollars and you are in a real bind with a serious confidence crisis on your hands. Social media is a cheap way to float messages as a test to see if people will find them interesting. If I spend a few grand running a campaign to float something to blogs and it gets picked up and discussed positively then I’ve got a pretty good idea that when it comes down to spending real money telling my story on a larger paid media scale there is a good chance my money will be well spent. Social Media is a great tool for doing quantitative research (The gathering and analyzing of measurable data) before you go and bet your farm.

The image above is for a new type of economy seat - it won’t be in service completely till 2010 but from the positive touches it’s getting as the story spreads around the blogosphere I’d expect that any advertising that talks about it will be well received. People like it. Who cares about focus groups when you have Digg and a bucketfuls of blogs.