Mar 4, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Social Media
Most of my networks are small businesses, and pretty much everyone I talk to who is using social media in some way consider it as a part of their sales strategy, a tool to increase sales. Many would concede it is a marketing tool first, but why do it if sales do not come, and how do you measure success other than by sales?
The marketers amongst you will shudder.
What social media is good at is raising awareness, creating engagement and advocacy, what it is not good at is being a transactional process. Social media is not transactional at all, it does not create sales, rather it creates a conversation, the environment in which sales can be made, but the sales process itself is separate.
A subtle difference perhaps, but hugely important in any consideration of the return that comes from an investment in Social Media.
Mar 1, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Social Media
I recently sat through what should have been a very interesting presentation. The proposition fascinating, the data extensive, the qualifications of the presenter exemplarity. It is a pity, but a few minutes after it was over, none of the data was remembered.
All I can now recall is the scene setter the presenter used, the story he told which in his mind was just a warm up to the real stuff, the data that made the argument.
To me, the scene setter was the whole story, the data just a way to fill in a boring 25 minutes, and almost completely dispensable.
The lesson in this is that the social interaction we experience, or that are shared with us, are powerful conveyors of a message we recall, understand, and possibly act upon.
All the data in the world cannot do more than support the case, fill in the detail, and create quantitative foundations out of qualitative hypotheses. but it will always be the stories that stick in our memories.
Feb 27, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Social Media
Social media is a part of the marketing toolbox, an increasingly important one, so why does it so often get shuffled out to the side, assigned to the 20 year old intern, when it can have a profound impact on your customers and market?.
Marketing is all about demand generation, it is a very wide set of activities, behaviors, and attitudes that build an expectation of brand and pr0oduct performance. It covers everything from the usual promotional and advertising stuff people think about, to the little things, the cleanliness of the company logoed delivery truck, ( I always recall the shiny red Arnotts vans, to me they are a metaphor for the brand, sadly, there is not even a good photo on the web) to the way the receptionist answers the phone, and many other things. The “welcome quotient” of the brand.
We do all this stuff in the real world, but ignore much of it in the digital one, simply by ignoring the expectation that visitors want to feel as welcome digitally as they are personally.
Many websites are distinctly unwelcoming, muddled, untidy, hard to navigate and offering little encouragement to engage further. This post by Jay Baer lists 11 reasons people do not engage, and is a great list of the common problems I see, most of which are r4elatively easily addressed.
Feb 22, 2013 | Collaboration, Customers, Marketing, Social Media
David Ogilvy, fount of Intellectual Capital and the orginal “Madman”
Business is based on relationships, and generally the relationship comes before the business. As a result, you have to find a way to identify those with whom a commercially sustainable relationship is possible, then offer them sufficient value for them to buy from you.
Broadly there are four common ways to go about this:
Meet them in person
Meet them over the phone
Beat them over the head with advertising (primarily a consumer strategy rather than B2B)
Meet them via some sort of social media.
However, a fifth option is emerging rapidly:
Engage them via some sort of attractive e-content, that encourages them to come to you. If you can actually figure out how to achieve this outcome, the return on your investment in content will be huge.
So, the real question is what do you need to do to make the content compelling. Pretty simple, basic marketing stuff, perhaps so simple that most just gloss over it, offering insufficient thought, so here goes with a list:
- Define who your ideal customer is, and “e-talk” to them, in their language, looking at your offering from their perspective, not yours.
- Make sure the content interesting, informative, offers distinctive Intellectual Capital that conveys your proposition clearly.
- Be clear about the value they will derive from a relationship
- Ensure the post, blog, whatever it is, can be easily shared, and encourage that sharing
- Have a call to action, the Rule number 1 of direct marketing!
- Relentlessly monitor responses, and experiment with the message and they way it is packaged.
When you are doing all that, you are being smart at blogging, or social media, does not matter what you call it, you are using the power of the digital age to engage, and create the opportunity for a sale.
Feb 20, 2013 | Change, Communication, Social Media
Nearly 500 years ago, March 1517 to be exact, Social media was born, and rapidly demonstrated its power. On that warm spring day, Martin Luther “posted” his list of “95 Theses on the power and efficacy of Indulgences” on the local social media site, the church door, and inadvertently started a movement that would split the church. His individual action was just a single one, protesting at the aggressive marketing of Indulgences by church authorities, but to have the effect it did, required a whole bunch of other things to be aligned to take off. Similarly, the self immolation of shopkeeper Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia in 2011 focused the unrest in Tunisia , that led to the replacement of the Tunisian dictator.
Martin Luther was outraged that locals could buy “indulgences” sold by church clerics, which acted as paid confessions, removing the ritual of the confession and contrition, and wanted to stimulate a debate at the university on the topic. What happened is that a local printer who had one of these new fangled printing presses reproduced the 95 theses, and sold them, rapidly creating a movement that had all the hallmarks of a modern social media movement.
As Clay Shirky tells it, there are three conditions that lead to a social media led change:
Everyone knows the system is broken
Everyone knows that everyone knows the system is broken
Everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows the system is broken.
When you get to this third level, it all blows up apart, and that is exactly what happened in Germany in 1517, and again in 1989 when the wall fell, in Tunisia in 2011, and is still rolling through the Arab world.
The tools of social media have changed, but the nature of human activity and collaboration has not. In the 21st century we want the same things our forebears wanted, and are prepared to fight for them, it is just that the tools are a bit different.
Feb 16, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
I opined previously that it appeared to me that Facebook had cracked the challenge of monetising their site by applying semantic search to their billion users and their networks with the introduction of the “Graph Search” feature.
This post on the Social Media Examiner site goes into some detail about the way Graph search works, and when you think about it a bit, the value is huge to marketers, as it offers highly targeted search capabilities.
I am a tennis player, a member of a local club that has the almost unique distinctions of retaining its grass courts, being a century old, and having many truly great players as former members. Funding the maintanence of the grass is an ongoing challenge, one that threatens the future of the club as membership declines with the lessening popularity of tennis, and the changing demographics of the local area.
There are a series of semantic searches I, and my fellow club members (assuming they use facebook, which many do not), can now easily undertake. Using these connections, through the “friends” networks, we can identify potential visitors and members, and market to those “friends” networks the joy of the game on grass, (particularly on a hot day), the value of membership based on the availability of grass, the heritage of the club, and the social aspects of the great game. The searches would look something like this:
Friends: who like tennis,
who like tennis and live in the Sydney inner west,
who like playing tennis on grass,
who would like to try playing tennis on grass,
and so on.
As those searches are employed, ads by sellers of tennis equipment, marketers of sporting brands, tennis coaches, even lawn care equipment would benefit from the highly targeted, and empathetic environment.
Potentially a gold-mine for marketers, as the value of Graph search to those networked on facebook is substantial. Suddenly Facebook looks like it has the potential to pay a dividend to those donkeys who got sucked in by the IPO, and did not get out fast enough, unlike young Mr. Zuckerberg.
