One of the things that irks me these days is the tendency for people to pronounce things dead. The idea being that some radical change is occurring  or has occurred rendering something obsolete. This old something must now in fact be pronounced dead. This pronouncement is given even though this old something has been so powerful in the past. In fact compared to this new thing the old thing has a demonstrated track record of high performance.

I’m sure there is a reason to think major changes are ahead that might permanently change things, but pronouncing things dead? Especially those things that have been mainstays for such a long time. Isn’t that taking things a bit too far.

So, here is a list of marketing tactics, techniques, ideas and thoughts that have recently been pronounced dead:

Jeff Gomez pronounces that “Print is Dead”

Marc Miller and Jason Sinkovitz pronounce that “Selling is Dead”

Michele Eggers asks “Is Marketing ROI Dead?”

Rick Aristotle Munarriz asks or states (can’t tell) “Death of Affiliate Marketing?”

And these are just a few examples. Over the years I’ve also heard the following:

• 60 second elevator speech is dead
• Personal Computer is dead
• Microsoft is dead
• Resume writing is dead
• Cover letter writing is dead

And recently I’ve heard a few people already pronounce that social media is dead.

And the biggest one of them all is when German philosopher Nietzsche announced that God is dead. Last time I checked he was the one that was dead.

photo credit: Shahram Sharif

When it comes so social media, one word defines your level of success. That one word is “engagement”. It’s easy to go to the various social networking sites and set up a profile. All it takes is a few minutes out of your day, and as long as you have a decent picture you can pretty much have a great presence right away. It’s the same when it comes to blogging, micro-blogging or any of the photo and video sharing sites on the web.

The real work comes after you have the profiles open. Despite what many say, they will not necessarily come just because you built it. You will need to start putting in a lot of work into your little corner of the Internet. And when I say work, I don’t mean adding widgets to your blog and uploading a bunch of pictures either. I mean, actually going out into the social network and starting to engage your target market.

This is the part where you need to roll up your sleeves and start thinking of the ways in which you can start the dialog. Companies across the net are doing it with different levels of success. The bottom line is making your engagement strategy compelling. It must be creative and the user must feel like they are getting something out of the interaction.

Take a look at these two examples of customer engagement:

• eBillMe (YouTube) – a shopping confession video contest
• Colgate (Gather.Com) – sharing your smile

Both of these engagements are very creative and well put together social media engagements.