Aug 3, 2010 | Branding, Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Social Media
Social network marketing is a fundamentally different beast to “traditional “marketing. When talking to marketers, they usually see social media as being in effect free, the challenge is to get the message spread, often by being outrageous, generating awareness for little money compared to traditional media.
To my mind, it is much more complicated than that. “Word of Mouse” on social media has to be earned, and that is really challenging, requiring intimate knowledge of the marketplace, customers, their behaviour, and what is likely to positively engage them. Traditional marketing makes it easy to gain a general level of awareness, you just have to pay for it, but like most things that are easy, the return is very low.
Aug 1, 2010 | Alliance management, Leadership, Management, Social Media, Strategy
Knowledge Management is all about collaboration, making the 3 + 3 equal > 6, but the challenge has always been how do you codify the knowledge for dissemination and re-use, implying the existence of both strategy, and a management mechanism for the knowledge.
By comparison, social networking is largely uncontrolled, and lacks a strategy beyond “to connect”, but it nevertheless has become a source of knowledge management.
Social networking brings to the table two factors not usually prominent in KM systems:
- Humanity, people connecting and interacting for the personal value, not monetary value, it reminds of the notion of “commons” where groups assemble because they can leverage off the social, intellectual and commercial base of the “common”
- Social networking offers the opportunity not just to form horizontal connections as happens in managed KM systems, but for the vertical, and oblique connections that offer the opportunity for insights and capabilities in an organic manner, rather like the organic metaphor for innovation.
It appears to me that an application for social networking techniques that will evolve quite rapidly will be as a new and powerful tool that will enable the rich and varied collaboration so crucial for the innovation process.
Jul 27, 2010 | Social Media, Uncategorized
I wonder why, when no army since Alexander has managed to retain control over what is now Afghanistan, that the US and it “Allies” including Australia think they can.
The leaks over the weekend on Wikileaks, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26warlogs.html?_r=1 puts a lot of “texture” in relation to the effort into the public domain, and I wonder why we are there.
I know the “nip terrorism in the bud” argument, and it has validity, but I cannot understand why we do not simply napalm every poppy field in the joint. When police aeroplanes in NSW can pick up a few “pot” plants g rowing in State forests, it would be simple to remove the Taliban’s source of money. If they are forced to conduct the war by throwing stones, it would cut down the death toll of soldiers sent to the place, and would have to make the process of bringing some sort of order such that average people could lead their lives in relative security easier.
Jul 25, 2010 | Change, Communication, Social Media
Most of us instinctively buy into the notion that the web has a “democratising” impact, it is a way for information to flow, to be disseminated, and this is absolutely true. However, what of the instinct of institutions, public and private to keep things secret? No matter how ubiquitous the web may be, it needs to be fed.
WikiLeaks is a site set up by an Aussie named Julian Assange specifically to serve as a medium for “whistleblowers” to leak sensitive documents their employers would rather keep quiet, whilst retaining their own anonymity. The site has been the source of several of the better known leaks, including the horrific footage of US gunships in Iraq gunning down a group last year, that included several children, and two Reuters reporters, and joking as they did it. Not a PR coup for the US effort in Iraq.
WikiLeaks has the potential to be pretty uncomfortable, imagine the internal, highly confidential documents that could lift the veil on the Gulf spill should they become public, but in the long run, the value of transparency of these documents to the community is far greater than the sectional interests that are generally served by keeping them secret.
Go you good thing!
Jul 22, 2010 | Branding, Communication, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
It will be fascinating to watch how Apple, the masters of digital marketing, handle the latest hiccup with the antenna problems on the iPhone4.
Apple has now stumbled twice in a short time, the first was the furore over the wages paid to employees at Foxconn, one of their major suppliers factories in China, leading to an unusually high suicide level, and now the dodgy antenna story, furiously being stirred by Apples grateful competitors.
The speed that such problems emerge and are all over the user communities has outstripped the response times of even the most sensitive and paranoid of businesses, and now it appears that Apple is going in to defiant mode by using Steve Jobs to front the problem and say, in effect, “all smart phones suffer from the same problem, we are no worse than the others.”
Apple has grown in an extraordinary way for the last decade, tapping in to the mindset of the early adopters to become apostles for their brand and products, and by being consistently first out there with a product that delivers a highly differentiated proposition. The Apple brand is now a very tall poppy indeed, and attracts attention, so they had better be careful that the legions of fans who have fed the myth do not turn around and bite it, because their hero shows themselves to be fallible, and therefore not worthy of being their hero, in fact, it becomes a source of satirical comment that speeds the process of brand erosion.
Such loyalty scorned can turn nasty very quickly.
Jul 1, 2010 | Customers, Marketing, Social Media
As a group, you may not like something. A style of music, a literary style, a type of product, a group of people, but when you see one of the group individually, and find you like it, or them, the rest of the genre becomes less confronting.
It is the same with brands, the closer you get to a part of the brand, the easier it is to find things about the whole that you like, and you can more easily justify involvement, and scoff at your previous dislike. Cognitive dissonance at work.
By definition you only get closer to a brand if it is delivering something to you, so it is a bit of a circular process, but the lesson for markets is that to build a brand, you need to get close.
The tools of “getting close” have changed, they used to be largely one way communication mechanisms, but now we have the power and tools of the web, so get close, engage, embrace, and succeed.
