Social Media Triage

During times of stress, when there is too much to do and too little time to do it, we find ways to sort the tasks into categories to better manage our time.

In medical terms, Triage.  Treat now, can wait till later, no hope so time is better spent elsewhere.

Running through my favorites list, and the email subscriptions I take, I realised I had done a similar thing with my social media options.

Some email subscriptions get opened every time, others sometimes depending on the headline

Some in the favorites list get looked at weekly, others once in a while, others I had not looked at for ages, so they just got deleted.

There is a hierarchy at work here based on my experience with these sites and my evolving interests, and weather we know it or not, we all do it.

The task therefore for the blogger, is to be on the first tier of the social media triage with as many readers as possible, and to do that, we need to be  engaging to a pretty specific group of readers. Those that fall into the second and third groups are far less relevant.

This is not a numbers game, it is a relevance game.

 

Marketing does not create brands.

How many times have you heard from marketers “my job is to create the brands”, (often followed by the “yours is to sell it” when they happen to be talking to sales people)

 Many marketers use it as the rationale for their existence. Pity it is nonsense.

Customer experience with a product creates a brand, not any amount of advertising, promotion, engaging games, and all the rest. At best, marketing creates the environment in which a customer will try, come back to, or stick with a product, but ultimately, it is the experience that creates the loyalty of an individual consumer, and that relationship multiplied many times, becomes the brand.

This simple insight has the potential to change the nature of your marketing significantly, and also enables some sensible measurement of the impact of marketing activity.

Manage, or sell change?

Much has been written about the management of change, and it usually focuses on the challenges, acknowledging just how difficult change really is.

When you turn it around, and consider what happens in successful change programs, there is very little management, and a lot of selling.
Leaders lead from the front, demonstrating the behaviors necessary, whilst managers push from behind. Demonstration is the oldest, and still the best form of selling, so when those whose work place, and the processes they operate are subject to being changed seeing those with the decision making  power demonstrating  the altered behavior makes the change easier.

You do not manage change, you sell it.

You sell it to your employees, shareholders, customers, suppliers, and anyone else who will stand still long enough to listen, and most importantly, believe.

Ethical sourcing. Cost or marketing investment?

Why are we so hung up about ethical sourcing of coffee??

What about the electronics industry, and shoes, rare earth minerals, and many others?

Who bears the responsibility for the conditions of workers in the supply chains of successful businesses.?

Apple is the biggest, most profitable company the planet has seen, but the depredations in the supply chain at Foxxcon are well known.

If the labour cost of an iPad is, as has been calculated, less than $15, adding a few dollars onto the price to lift wages would do little to damp the demand, or indeed, Apple could make a few dollars less, reducing its whopping billions in cash flow by a miniscule amount, but would it be a few dollars less?.

A significant number, albeit a small percentage, of coffee drinkers appear  willing to pay a bit extra for the “ethical” badge, surely the same would be the case with an iPad, fancy shoes girls cannot walk in, and many other product categories where differentiation is a key challenge. Benneton does, why not others?. 

 

Social life of the brand.

The oldest market research technique in the world is to ask a group “imagine brand X is walking through the door, tell me about him/her”. This enables respondents to describe the brand with human terms, words that reflect the human characteristics to which we all relate, and understand.

Why is it then that we do not think about our brands presence in social media as the Social Life of the brand?

Wander around the net, Twitter, Google+,  4 square, YouTube, Pinterest, and all the rest, and you find a few sensible, brand relevant  comments and posts amongst the inane updates and dross. It is understandable that brand owners want to appear human, so they often talk drivel on the social media, as this is what happens in life, but if the brand is worth anything, it will opt out of the rubbish and be relevant.

Think about it as a social gathering. When you meet someone who talks rubbish, you cannot wait to get away, by contrast meet someone who has something interesting to say, and you stick around.