Aug 25, 2012 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Social media is a jungle, full of vegetation that limits the view, poisionous flowers that look beautiful at first glance, small areas of bright sunlight that somehow finds its way through the foliage, nasty surprises of many types, and gems that can change your life.
Those who know the jungle can pick the nasties from the goodies with little more than a glance, when the reluctant wanderer can barely see any difference, and they seem to be able to find their way effortlessly through the undergrowth whilst we flounder.
That is the nature of our environment, get used to it.
There are many blogs out there that offer information, insight, and advice, use them. Jay Baer’s convince and convert, Mike Stelzner’s Social Media Examiner, and Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation, Jeff Bullas, being four of the best. All offer advice, insight and opinion via a range of means, and will throw a bit of light into the dark corners.
A client asked me recently why he should bother spending the time and money (it is not cheap, it just costs differently to the stuff on the P&L) on social media, and my answer was simple: “that is where your customers are!”
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.
Jun 29, 2012 | Communication, Social Media
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.
