Lowering the bar on mass (social) media?

"Reach over 350 million active users on Facebook. Learn how to connect your business with real customers through Facebook Ads" - so goes the Facebook online pitch.

From a marketing viewpoint, when you look at the large public social sites such as Facebook, Youtube, Twitter - are you just looking at traditional mass media advertising applied to a new channel?

The real challenge in listening to your customers

The great challenge for contemporary marketing is summed up very nicely in Rethinking Marketing (Harvard Business Review, Jan 2010):

'Never before have companies had such powerful technologies for interacting directly with customers, collecting and mining information about them and tailoring their offerings accordingly.

And never before have customers expected to interact so deeply with companies, and each other, to shape the products and services they use.'

A glimpse of the social organisation

"The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed." (William Gibson)

And so it is with organisations and brands as they experiment with social media how best to operate in the (increasingly) connected era.

Grounding your brand conversation: online community hubs

With the explosion in and variations of social media participation (eg Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) you can forgive marketers for occasionally feeling just a little bewildered. It can seem like drinking from a firehose! Yet getting involved yourself (open a Twitter account, start a blog, start a group on Facebook or LinkedIn) is critical for any marketer just to understand this new medium...  And that is only half the challenge, what about your day-gig?  What is the brand going to get out of this?

Want to retain customers? Asking them questions is a good start

Just find out what your customers want&do that. Sorted.
It has been known for some time now that the 'physics' of customer loyalty has an uncertainty principle - the act of measurement changes the event you are trying to measure.

The good news in relationship marketing is that the changes our measurement efforts cause in our customers... are generally positive.

Google sidewiki: encyclopedia, conversation or graffiti?


WTF micro-blogging on mictro-blogging?

ROFL: micro-blogging on micro-blogging?

Why guess when you can know?*

estimation

Social media strategy: not the Marketing Department alone

Forrester have published a pretty good taxonomy, based on the business objectives you have, for branded online communities. Communities can be set up for you to;

  1. Listen to your customers
  2. Talk to your customers
  3. Energise your advocates
  4. Support your customers (or let them support each other)

The Business of Believing

"The market for something to believe in is unlimited..." (Hugh McLeod)

And guess what, that new fangled thing - the internet and its social media offspring - just lowered the threshold on entry to that market!

Storytelling

12 Principles for changing behaviour - social marketing & social media marketing

Smoking area ceiling mural

Smoking area ceiling mural

funny-no-smoking-sign

RSS Subscribe