Best Practices•
on November 7th, 2008•
Peter Drucker said 40 years ago that a business need do only two fundamental things; market and innovate. With the advent of Social Media and it’s growing consumer adoption, the ability to “Market” has arrived. Over the years, business have only been able to “market” with a small “m”. So what’s the difference?
The practice of “marketing” for the past 60 years has been very one-way. A business saw marketing as either supporting sales directly as a function of sales or as creating awareness to drive sales leads. Even worse, sales was (and often still is) either pitted against marketing or valued higher than marketing, since marketing is often (wrongly) seen as a spend item and sales results can be measured faster and more quantitatively. True marketing is a managed investment, since the the ROI in marketing is longer term. That said, marketing had limited channels to broadcast it’s message (TV, radio, mail, print, Web 1.0) and the feedback channels to measure and obtain “input” for ROI analysis and revisions to strategy were even worse – focus groups (with inherent bias), phone surveys (high rate of false data), unsolicited snail mail or trade shows. In too many organizations it’s also sales vs. marketing so the two don’t trade data, creating a gap in understanding front line needs. So what does Social Media change?
The fundamental change in Social Media is that there is now a zero cost to the “market” a business is engaged with to communicate to the business. Conversely the marketer now has increased and often more targeted, ways of reaching their market. In the broader sense of a business, “marketing” a company is not just customer acquisition and retention anymore. A business should use “marketing” to attract new employees, retain employees, find investors, reduce retention costs, gain product insights and develop better integration with sales. In other words, for the first time ever, Social Media combined with traditional marketing channels enables a business to Market itself as the Whole Business – a holistic approach. And metrics can be put in place in each area of the business (Finance, Sales, Marketing, Administration and Operations) to understand the ROI. SMB’s will gain a huge advantage in this regard in the coming years.
If a business can Market itself as a whole entity, at lower transactional cost, then it can grow. By staying narrowly focused on it’s marketing activities, opportunities to new segments and true, real-time customer feedback are missed. This is a huge shift in thinking, best practices need to be re-invented, cultural shifts need to happen and the C-suite needs to adapt. It’s not easy and it represents risk. But it is also inevitable as Social Media adoption and usage by consumers who buy products and services will force this change. Once businesses start to see how they can Market themselves in so many ways, and measure it, a whole new approach to Marketing will evolve. This is just one way Social Media is changing business practices. What do you think?
(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Partner)
Best Practices•
on August 18th, 2008•
Is it worth using Fake Persona’s or Celebrities in Social Media campaigns? Recently, Social Media marketer Beth Harte wrote an interesting post on this topic and so we build upon that a little. There are a few examples of attempts at using Fake Persona’s in Social Media (most notably LonelyGirl) and some mild attempts at celebrities appearing in Social Media campaigns or trying to create a celebrity through a Social Media campaign. They’ve all backfired, causing a PR nightmare for the company. One wonders if they’d done their research would they have even attempted it?
Our experience with companies entering into the Social Media fray is that they feel a need to be there from a marketing angle and are often pushed by an agency to “be there” but only for a campaign. This is short-lived and misses the point of Social Media entirely – which is a very one-to-one medium based around relationships over the longer term. While a campaign can be executed, and very successfully, the company must be prepared to have some level of commitment to sustain a presence that the campaign can fall back on afterwards.
Using a Fake Persona without making it obvious as a “gimmick” will backfire simply because you can’t sustain a fake person. Consumers own the Social Media channel and they own it passionately. Ridicule and anger will surface quickly and the resulting brand damage may be almost irreparable. Using celebrities can work as a campaign, but exiting the celebrity takes careful planning for it to be effective.
if you’re agency advises starting out with a Fake Persona to learn about Social Media, run. The risk of exposure is far too high for any possible short-term success, aside from the ethical issue. Key success points in Social Media are from building trust and a rapport with your audience through active and ongoing engagement. This means honesty and openness.
Best Practices•
on July 15th, 2008•
As businesses struggle to understand and then leverage Social Media, we posit that there are 3 Core Principals to building an effective Social Media strategy. These Core Principles provide the subsequent framework to manage Social Media. Currently, most businesses tend to see Social Media only as a one-way marketing tool in the sense of direct customer acquisition. But Social Media is a two-way channel; enabling not just acquisition, but retention and insight. Additionally, Social Media applications can play a key role across an organization in terms of productivity and innovation. Here’s our 3 Core Principles for Social Media in Business.
Brand & Reputation:
A good brand builds a strong reputation and building a strong, positive reputation is intertwined with your brand. Both take a long time to develop and both are developed by the market, not by the company. Implementing good Social Media and Traditional Media monitoring tools can help you gain increased insight into your brand value and reputation.
Innovation & Intelligence
Using Social Media can provide insights that lead to innovation. Without innovations, businesses stagnate and can suffer market depreciation (Peter Drucker noted that the two main functions of a business are innovation and marketing.) Using Social Media for intelligence gathering on consumer sentiment and trends and competitive information can also fuel innovation by providing insights to product usage, uptake and competitive strategies. This will help a business formulate better corporate strategies – and innovate.
Productivity & Process
Leveraging collaborative tools like Wiki’s, shared bookmarking, Web conferencing across work groups and chat groups can improve productivity and ensure a team is on task, on track and identify emerging issues. With productivity comes process. Despite the Web often being thought of as a place of chaos, processes can be achieved in knowledge work, subsequently feeding into productivity.
Working from these 3 Core Principles for Social Media in Business can provide the framework that helps you align marketing, investor relations, communications, finance, production and administrative functions to go beyond just “one-way marketing” via Social Media. Can these be improved upon?
Note: This is an excerpt from the upcoming eBook The Conversant Corporation due for release in August 2008
Best Practices•
on July 4th, 2008•
For decades we’ve had the Corporate Spokesperson; groomed, media trained and prepped to deliver a single message repeated at least 3 times in an interview. Or just the “face” we always saw. This worked for Traditional Media, but with the growth of Social Media and the blurring lines between professional and social media for what consumers read, this is changing radically. The “Corporate Spokesperson” may be evolving to be the “Corporate Conversationalist” who has brand status similar to that of the corporation itself. read more