This blog post by David Alston at Radian6 has been enthusiastically retweeted. Once you read on, you find a highly useful cataloging of the advantages of social media. 

What I dissent from is the insistence that either you are completely onboard with social media or you are a mouth-breather who is willfully cheating his clients. 

You would have me reject “old school marketing” and all its ways. 

As I understand the term, marketing means knowing your audience, studying your competition, framing a meaningful positioning, creating an attractive brand, and then using a mix of tactics to generate awareness, spur consideration, prompt purchase, and engender loyalty.    

I don’t want to give any of the above up.

You seem to hate old school promotion—which is the act of crafting a message and sending it out into the world via ads, direct mail, web sites, and other traditional media.  (Yes, web sites are now traditional media.) It is how Doyle Dane Bernbach brought the VW to America. It is how Chiat Day introduced the Macintosh. It is how Fallon made so much money for Rolling Stone that Jann Wenner described it as the equivalent of someone dumping a wheelbarrow of cash in his office.

I am not going to give this up either, even though I don’t do it nearly as well as the gifted people I mentioned above.

Please understand: I love social media.

I have suggested it to clients and I have recommended that they get radian6 to measure it. I think social media is great in itself and I  think it is raising the bar for traditional media—forcing our ads to be more charming, less tinny,  more respectful. 

But social media does not trump old media in every instance for every client. If this makes me a knuckle-dragger, so be it. If it helps my clients succeed, my knuckles can take it.