Last month The Wall Street Journal highlighted Pepsi’s 5% marketshare loss in a number of articles.  For the first time Pepsi went down to number three after Coca-Cola and Diet Coke.  What Pepsi called the “Pepsi Refresh Project” is getting most of the blame. Despite the social media experiment’s empirical success of generating 3.5M Facebook “likes”, 60,000 Twitter followers and other impressive metrics, it apparently failed to do the most important thing: sell Pepsi.  

This is an important battle in the old vs. new media war.  It certainly demonstrates on a large consumer scale that diverting entire TV and print budgets towards social media is a mistake.  It proves that “traditional” media still has a very important stake in consumer purchasing influence.

So what is the allure of social media marketing?   1) It is easy to buy ad space, 2) artwork cost/entry point is lower, 3) cost per eyeball is lower by an order of magnitude (deceivingly so), and 4) it is infinitely trackable and real-time.  Social media and online marketing in general does well when users are in a purchasing cycle, but traditional media still has a stronger impact in building brand awareness. 

The lesson for printers and other stake holders in traditional media, is to address 1-4 above and to generally remove the customer facing speed-bumps from their workflow.  What’s one sure way to do that?  Ecommerce.