Apr 15, 2013 | Management, Small business, Social Media
Over the weekend just gone, I was a part of a strategy group setting out to build the marketing plan for an occasional client. There were several guest speakers, one an articulate and persuasive purveyor of what I regarded to be social media snake oil, and so a vigorous debate ensued.
His contention was that every business, particularly SME’s needed to be active on every major SM platform, and that a part of every employees job was to represent the interests of their employer on the various platforms.
Superficially that argument has some attraction, as an advocate of SM for SME’s, it is hard to argue against a proposition that SM is more available than traditional media, and that employees should be engaged and committed, or they ceased to be useful employees.
However, there are three very real arguments against the proposition, all of which I used.
- Not all social media platforms are equal, and they play vastly different roles, attracting users for different reasons, and in different situations. Individually, each platform is just a small piece of the SM pie, but if you try and consume the whole pie, all you get is indigestion. Much better to understand the pie, and go to where the goodies are hidden.
- Then I thought about the senior maintenance engineer who had worked in the business for many years. An enormously competent and committed bloke, and great in a group at the pub, but the owner of a left field sense of what is funny, sometimes even acceptable, and what is not. Encouraging him to be anywhere near the 140 characters of Twitter sends shivers down the spine, but I desperately want him to continue running maintenance
- The clincher, SM is not free, it consumes lots of the most valuable resource an SME has, time. The invoices may be lower than with traditional and paid media, but the commitment of time to do a good job is significant, and most often will attract consulting fees of some sort as SME’s fill the capability gap, which then offers the opportunity to be paying for snake oil, unless you are good at identifying the snakes.
The real management task is to have a very clear business purpose, supported by a few strategies that have evolved from understanding the business, its value proposition, customers, competitors, and operating environment, and making the choices that drive the priorities and resource allocation decisions. Social Media is a part of the mix, an important part, but you need to be putting round pegs in round holes of the right size, and not getting confused about which is what.
Apr 12, 2013 | Branding, Marketing
Like is too easy, no emotional investment has been made, to do anything useful, you need to move to want. As noted in a previous post, social media wombats, those clicking a “like” button on your site in the hope that you will “like” them back, are breeding at exponential rates.
Nobody ever engaged with a proposition, or bought anything, because they “like” it. People become engaged with an idea, a brand, make a purchase decision, because they want to.
Nobody ever got marries because the “like” their potential partner, they do it for much deeper reasons, they “want” to.
Apr 11, 2013 | Collaboration, Customers, Sales
“Relationships” is just a word used to describe the web of give and take that binds people together over time.
A transaction can take place without a relationship of any sort. However, a series of transactions that require choices to be made will slowly build into some sort of relationship, with a brand, a store, a salesperson.
Successful selling in the long term relies on relationships, the transaction is just a score keeping mechanism.
So, next time you sell something to a customer you have not seen before, it would pay you to find out something about them. Ask some polite, human questions, positively reinforce the intelligence of their purchase decision, find out what else you may be able to do for them, and give yourself the opportunity to turn a transaction into the beginning of a relationship.
Apr 10, 2013 | Change, Communication, Social Media
In the economy of C21, we are far less interested in physical stuff that we are in intangibles.
A measure that will emerge both as one of internal corporate performance, and the performance of markets is the velocity of ideas.
How quickly do the ideas being considered in the executive suite filter to the shop floor, and in what form are they perceived?
How quickly is an initiative taken up by others externally upon which depends the success of the initiative?
This morning I was at a meeting of small businesses, 700 of them, gathering to voice our dismay at the total disenfranchising of small businesses in our political process. Together we employ millions of Australians, are the biggest generator of economic activity, and we create, innovate, and drive the health of the economy, but are ignored.
Hopefully no longer.
By the end of the meeting, the “#toobigtoignore” handle on twitter had generated substantial traction, and the hits on the website www.toobigtoignore.org.au were starting. The velocity of the spread of the ideas expressed will be a key measure for the success of the initiative, and by watching the velocity of the ideas, and the depth of engagement of those reached, will be not just measures of success, but leading indicators of that success.
Ignore the notion of idea velocity at your peril.
Apr 9, 2013 | Branding, Marketing
It seems that there are a lot of hashtags appearing on ads in traditional media, and I wonder at their value.
Some conversations are simply not worth having, and so inviting one by using a twitter hashtag is absorbing some of your hard earned brand credibility, for no return.
Building a brand is still a difficult, long term, brick by brick effort, and wasting some of that effort by following the lastest fad pushed by a 20 year old with a beanie seems futile.
Even in the “old days” when you could block the few broadcast channels with advertising, it was still consumer by consumer, it is just that we could not see the process, as advertising, particularly mass adverting is a one way, non accountable activity. However, consumer by consumer, user by user, you still had to touch them in some way to motivate a modification to their behavior over time. If successful, your consumer built a relationship with your brand, if not, well, the failure on an individual consumer level was largely invisible. Apart from a very few individual cases, such as market research, a complaint, return, or conversation at point of purchase, the possibility of individual contact was very limited.
No longer. Now, we have the potential to see the whole process unfold from initial display of interest, to purchase, and post purchase behavior, if we are smart enough, and game enough, to put in the tracking mechanisms. These mechanisms make marketing investments accountable! Imagine, the end of the waffle!
Just putting a hashtag on the end of an ad, and hoping for the beginning of a worthwhile relationship is likely to be completely unsuccessful, and probably counter-productive, consumers are way too smart, and advertising savvy to be herded like the sheep of old.
