Jul 23, 2012 | Communication, Social Media
The “social” part of social media is a metaphor for a conversation you would have over the back fence, or in a shop, on the street, and so on, it is just electronic.
It makes sense therefore to treat the e-conversation the same way you would treat a personal one, listen, ask questions, be polite and attentive, engage.
From one of the gurus, here is a list of 19 ways, all of which are just the common sense rules of behavior we apply without a lot of thought when we engage in a conversation across the back fence, that should be applied to blogs, and all other forms of social media.
Many businesses appear to miss the point, seeming to think that they can control SM as they do their internal communications, and failing to recognise the totally voluntary nature of social media. It is this voluntary participation that gives SM its power to endorse and inform. Just like over the back fence, we recognise that there is little self interest in an endorsement, and it comes from somebody with whom we have engaged voluntarily, so it carries great power.
Jul 17, 2012 | Category, Communication, Marketing, Sales, Strategy
Huge amounts of marketing dollars are spent to convince customers to come back. They try the product, leave, or just shop around, so we spend to get them back.
If marketing really was a war, as the analogies often go, it would be the same as expending resources to take a hill, then abandoning it to the enemy, only to have some general say take that hill, so the grunts go through the hell again.
How much easier to have kept it once taken.
Jul 16, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Sales, Small business, Social Media
A vast array of marketing & sales activity is aimed at persuading, far less are aimed at engaging. This may appear to be a largely semantic difference, but consider the difference when you see someone undertaking an activity they are paid to do, compared to somebody undertaking the same activity because they love to do it.
Yet it is engagement that leads to persuasion, not the other way around, so why bother trying to persuade, which is usually a recitation of the features of your product or service, concentrate on engagement and have the product sell itself.
Jul 12, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Social Media
Her we go again, another paradigm shift (cliché warning) in media.
The basis of the advertising business has always been cost per impression. Doesn’t matter about the medium, that is how the costs have been calculated, however, there is a pretty clear recognition that beyond low cost commodity items, cost is not the way we make decisions, they are made on the basis of perceived value. Therefore there seems to be a disjoint between what we recognise as the foundation of selling, and the manner in which we make most purchase decisions.
The emergence of social media is all about the opportunity to build connections and relationships, with people, brands, locations, groups, you name it, all there, so why would a banner ad work in that environment?.
Sooner or later, Social Media platforms will realise that their future is in finding ways to monetarise the opportunity for a relationship provided by access to the interactions of their users.
Facebook, the great IPO failure of the year, is in a prime position, being the place everyone goes, so the current stock price may be cheap if they figure out how to sell the value of the opportunity to engage in a conversation, rather than the charge for the opportunity to interrupt it.
Jul 5, 2012 | Lean, Management, Marketing, Social Media
It has always been so.
The father of the modern manufacturing revolution, W. Edwards Deeming probably said it first in a management setting, that led to lean, the TPS, 6 sigma, and a host of management articles, cliches, and learned papers, but it has been said before, in many ways. It is also a core component of the Balanced Scorecard.
Measuring advertising has always presented a challenge, throw an ad schedule on the box, and hope it works, has been the dominant method for many years.
Now we have the net , and a whole new set of measurement possibilities across websites and social media platforms. Like anything, simplicity is the gold standard, finding a few measures that get to the heart of the performance is a real challenge for management, as differing measures for differing platforms, differing markets, and platform/market/interest dynamics are always required, there is no pro forma to be used here.
Avinash Kaushik‘s great blog Occum’s Razor concentrates on measurement of digital performance, this entry on the measurement of social media, which should engage the minds of all marketers.
