Archive for the ‘Brand’ Category
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 |
SOBCON08 - definitely a good event on all fronts - hotel, venue, food, people and content. There are plenty of great re-caps online about what took place at SOBCon from a content perspective, lessons learned, visuals and a even musical spins, but not a whole lot on the sponsors of the event which definitely help make the event a success. Several key sponsors participated throughout the Jim Beam, Utterz, Buzz Logic and Network Solutions, which I’ve labeled “platinum sponsors” based on my ability to remember mainly. There were a couple of bronze and tin sponsors thrown in, but since no of the other stuck in my head, I’m focusing on the platinum sponsors.
With a focused group of bloggers north of 100, each of the sponsors below innately improve the impression of their brand with the group and create awareness for their offerings and brand.
Jim Beam
They brought the brand manager and his pitch seemed completely honest, if just a little bit unstructured. Even a little humorous with his public declaration of “what is blogger casual”? I didn’t know either, so my laughter was for a different reason. Brand guy spent 3-5 minutes doing a recap of their nascent social media strategy while acknowledging this was all a new thing for them and they came to learn. Thanks to his rambling confession of lack of knowledge, every Sicilian Kiss I order going forward will be with Jim Beam.
What is a Sicilian Kiss? A Sicilian Kiss is a drink which is 1/2 Whiskey, 1/2 Amaretto and a splash of orange juice chilled (shaken over ice) and served as a shot.
Utterz
The bald guy was there - he pimped a Bessie or two, did some demos and did the video ad thing which Jen won. The selection process Sim engineered was very egalitarian and represented the voice of the people. The process also offered another opportunity to meet folks and share ideas.
Overall the Utterz participation was a cool thing all around. I just seem to like this company just a little more after their sponsorship and am wondering when I will just make the call and shave my head. What was your tipping point Sim?
Buzz Logic
A company I had previously not heard of which apparently does influence visibility, ok I have see folks post on them like Jeremiah, but didn’t spend any time figuring out what they did. Know that I know, there are just a bunch of uses for this for businesses and bloggers alike. Uses from companies range I suspect from competitive intelligence, brand influencing and as strategic planning tool for social media. It could also be used potentially for demand shaping. Buzz Logic invested throughout the event starting on boat night. Great music and a reasonable liquor thanks to their willingness to throw down some hard earned VC cash.
Buzz Logic not only was nice enough to sponsor, but they sent two hotties as the demo team, Valerie and the other one. Both provided real-time product demos on topics of interest for each person they engaged - personalized demos WORK! Good stuff for everyone which got the opportunity to work with both of them over the conference.
Network Solutions
Active participants throughout the event. Provided web site analysis for the participants which I personally didn’t benefit much from, but I may not of asked the right questions or something which impacted the value. They even had a guy who was now going to blog after his attendance based his newly found understanding of blogging. Dude, let us know the the URL when you’re “online”, as I would like to see what you do. Your name would be cool tool.
A Humanized Brand
After re-reading my post so far, I’ve noticed a common theme - humanization. By deciding to engage people and not crowds with their sponsorship each company developed relationships with users/buyers/influencers/evangelists. While I may not remember all the components of everyone’s solution, stories or names - I do remember the effort. By sponsoring this event these folks have done more than an Ad, blog post or “coordinated” social media campaign could.
At the end of the day, that’s what SOBCon was about - meeting people, learning thier stories and trying to improve. There was very little personality driven discussion or focus it was more about process - trust me as the short guy with that cool chick Emily.
PLEASE NOTE: I authorized the use of the term hottie prior to posting with both Valerie and the other one, Sandra Ponce de Leon.
Posted in Brand, Marketing, Social Media, tools | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 |
Our stories as marketers continues to be a theme of late, whether it’s understanding how YOUR history and biases impact your stories and now from Seth, how your EXECUTION is central to the story/brand experience. Below is an excerpt which asserts lack of a story can impact consistency of the brand:
But what if you haven’t figured out a story yet?
Then the work is random. Then the story is confused or bland or indifferent and it doesn’t spread.
On the other hand, if you decide what the story is, you can do work that matches the story. Your decisions will match the story. The story will become true because you’re living it.
Does Starbucks tell a different story from McDonald’s? Of course they do. But look how the work they do matches those stories… from the benefits they offer employees to the decisions they make about packaging or locations.
The pithy piece from Seth opines about what comes first, the story or the work. Not sure that this is the best way to manage the story or the execution, since they are more or less ONE thing - the Brand. These are two interactive and evolving components which can’t be untethered. Customers, employees and transactional interactions move the story and change the story over time, evidence the $1 coffee from Starbucks or the 3 hour re-training event which was intended to boost the barista-ness of the the customer experience.
This example from Starbucks is a great use case for how to align execution to the story and the market. So if the story is linked to execution/the work, then speaking to the market is only part of the story to be told.
As brand managers/creators, marketers need to continuously deliver messaging not just for the market, but for the larger organization in partnership with human resources and the leadership. What are the types of activities and processes required to consistently deliver on a brand story/uphold the integrity of a brand? The realities is it varies. This will vary from industry to industry and market segment to market segment, but 3 key areas for consideration regardless of industry:
- Establish a Unified Tribal Understanding
- Open Channels for Feedback
- Consistently Reward and Publicize Contribution
Tribal Understanding
You can’t tell the same story, unless you KNOW what the story is, so what have YOU done as a marketer to make this happen?
This is the concept of making sure the whole organization understands what a product is supposed to do and what the value drivers are for the consumer. In technology for example, the larger organization needs to understand the solutions being delivered, the relative importance of the solution for the consumer and overall strategic direction of the company.
With this baseline folks can understand and how this relates to what customers/the market need for a given technology provider. Without common tribal understanding, you get inconsistent execution which can greatly change the market version of the story/the stories your customers tell.
Tip: The easiest way to figure out if you need to develop a plan for this is fairly simple, walk around the business. Walk around and ask say 10 folks across the organization from a functional perspective and seniority perspective and see if they tell the same story about your product or your brand. If you get 6 different answers, you probably need to do something.
Channels for Feedback
As consumers habits change and market requirements evolve, it is important that every organizational story teller cannot only understand the brand story, but also that they can contribute to the evolution of the story. Whether it’s collections, professional services or customer service, all of these stakeholders interact with the market daily and should have easy access to provide input from the business. This can be as simple as email or a suggestion box on the intranet and is imperative to keep a pulse on the market and to understand how your product is perceived on the front lines.
Tip: See if you have a clear path from communication to the marketing team, product management and leadership of YOUR organization, if not perhaps you should roll out a formal plan, remind folks of how to contribute and develop a formal plan to manage input for improvement.
Reward and Publicize Contribution
This seems a little obvious, but telling the story for the market, requires awareness for the larger organization of how a single person can leverage their tribal knowledge and exceed the promises of the brand. While the type of recognition will vary by company size and budget, marketers need to equally tell the story internally and leveraging an open channel for feedback and ensuring the full understanding of the story makes it simple. Don’t underestimate a Starbucks gift card and an “all employee” email.
Tip: Recognition isn’t about burying an accomplishment on the intranet for a specific functional group - it needs to be shared. Don’t fall for the corporate newsletter trap here - you can mention it in the newsletter, but take the time to highlight individual successes outside of the normal communications channels for the whole organization.
While this clearly is not the alpha and omega of brand based story creation and modication, it’s a good place to start. Do YOU have any ideas on how to improve the stories told in the village? Leave a comment and let us know.
Posted in Brand, Leadership, Marketing | 1 Comment »
Thursday, March 27th, 2008 |
Most marketers apply their personal biases to initiatives. These biases are created through experiences - personal and professional. Whether a bias is earned from lessons learned or a personal “style” element - it often manifests in the types of channels used, the tactics used and which of the 4 P’s is central to the brand. With that as a baseline, I found this interesting pitch entitled - “Writing Customer Stories”. I wanted to know more about customer stories. The pitch is below that has no real content to drive the talk track, although it has one. I clearly had a personal talk track on it prior to listening and good thing, click through first WITHOUT AUDIO. Think about the story you have - then listen LISTEN to the audio. (I know this post has a bad email forward feel)
So do you think this person’s bias is radio? It’s was so much cooler in my head. I think I might could even pitch those slides and potentially it would even work, without a single edit, but I’m confident my story/pitch would deviate in key themes and messages based on my preferential biases and after listening - I KNOW THAT. Oh the stories we conjure as marketers.
Posted in Brand, Marketing | 2 Comments »
Sunday, March 9th, 2008 |
What is social media? A better question is what isn’t. It’s not big, it’s not broad and it’s not for sale for the most part. That’s a HUGE problem for traditional marketers. To keep it simple - you know social media when you see it. The Social Media Club provides this definition/framework:
Social (from Merriam Webster)
“1 : involving allies or confederates
2 a : marked by or passed in pleasant companionship with one’s friends or associates social life b: SOCIABLE c: of, relating to, or designed for sociability
3 : of or relating to human society , the interaction of the individual and the group, or the welfare of human beings as members of society < social institutions>“
Media (from Merriam Webster)
” 1 : a medium of cultivation, conveyance, or expression;”
Wikipedia defines Social Media as “the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs.”
By this definition social media is essentially a set of infomediary channels. These conversational channels are equally available to individuals and corporations which makes “controlling the message” or positioning the brand a little more dynamic. The dynamic and egalitarian realities are requiring organizations to add corporate bloggers, community managers and SEO folks to the payrolls to shape the discussion. This latest corporate internet frenzy does have a little bit of the “we got to be there” feel of the early internet which spawned the explosion of webmaster roles in IT which transitioned to more creative roles in marketing many organizations. Technology has a way of developing new disciplines and requiring new skills and investment in people - social media is no different. Social media may actually be organizational development writ large - a new model for organizations, Social Management.
With the new roles on the org chart comes a new worker, a connected conversationalist, where work and life are a balanced set of commingled actions which are agnostic to both place and time. I’m not saying everyone is going beduin, but personal is becoming professional and where and when work happens is different. Markets are becoming social, professionals are becoming personal and brands, at social media’s most atomic level, are their tags.
Social media is changing relationships within a business and how everyone at a company contributes to the success in the marketplace and how customers are re-defining old brands and showcasing new brands. The change will be bigger than it appears on the surface.
Yes - looks are deceiving and that’s a fairly sweeping statement, but the new roles in organizations and the proliferation of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter ARE the leading indicators of change, it also loosely ties into my recent theme on corporate gardening, which I see as a good thing. (The other challenge is there is not a whole bunch of empirical data, so you take what you have and create a plausible relationship and hiring practices for social media roles is a fairly compelling data set.) Social media is on the edge of mainstream for corporations the graphic from Indeed below shows the historical growth of social media roles in the marketplace:
The initial focus of change in many companies is within the marketing group, but support and development jobs are also carrying the social media tag. For now, social media is changing marketing more so than any functional group. When will it be a requirement to show your social portfolio as part of the interview process? How long until there are generally accepted new media launch toolkits and methodologies in the marketplace which start showing up on monster profiles and ads?
Understanding/Overstating/Underestimating the Impact
Social media is not so much about direct influence of revenue, but more of a market optimizer - which DOES impact revenue. Current revenue streams AND future opportunities. Essentially social media aids in making markets more efficient with pervasive communication, connectivity and real-time transaction capabilities. It’s a fundamental change in market mechanics.
Think about it - People buy from people right? Social media is about people. Not huge logic jump that times they are a changin. The change in the mechanics can be seen in the rise of social media platforms as preferred places for interaction and research for many consumers/individuals/employees. The emergence of the social customer isn’t just the re-tooling of word of mouth marketing, it is a change in influential scale - a single customer’s opinion can now influence 1000’s of prospects, not just a handful at the barbershop.
Social media is essentially just starting to prime the market pump - removing the air from traditional “brand out” messaging and requiring more substance for “brand flow”. It will clearly take some more time to have all the “plumbing” in place and air out of the line, but we can see that folks removing the air from the buying process, such as Cushman’s Toyota Yaris experiment. Don’t like the pump metaphor - another way to look at it is as a market lubricant which reduces transactional friction caused by the legacy market mechanics.
A Frictionless Market
Markets traditionally are made less efficient due to brokers, intermediaries, traditional marketing, limited access, price variability and the inherent transactional costs of the exchanging goods of value. The fundamental mechanics of communication, value creation and brand management has been diffused into a community of infomediaries - customers, former customers, competitor customers, employees and former employees. For good or ill access to people, information and influence impacts loyalty, awareness and product placement. There is a downside - the risk of commoditization exists with the reduction of transactional friction in the market. Easier to compare, easier to shop - essentially accelerated discovery and understanding.
The Back End Brand
Discovery and access is changing the messaging imperative from who can shout the loudest to the biggest poplution to be considerably narrower engagement - a conversation. Reviews, diggs and micro-content will essentially piece together a brand mosaic which is the brand identity. Today marketers spend time, energy and money on developing mass awareness and cultivating a sense of value before the commercial transaction. Social media is allowing the customer to do this now in parallel.
Essentially the front end brand investment seen today, will need to shift product focus on service and the ability to influence the conversation in a segment. Brand management has moved from perpetuating a mass market myth to influencing post transactional conversations and community lore. Ultimately social media transitions the definition of brand and value to the service chain.
If this is the case - should customer care/support be part of marketing? Or should support be a standalone product with a product manager? Is this the new portfolio manager? This is going to be an exciting time and good market change. So as a marketer, manager or contributors what can you learn and unlearn to leverage this change in the mechanics of the market? I don’t know what the future holds, but I thank Jeremiah and for getting me thinking about it based on the Tweet below:
@oracletechnet says community managers (before social media) used to be called ‘editors’. I’d say they were called Support or Account team
Not sure I made a point, but sometimes you just have to press publish and move on…..
Posted in Brand, Marketing, Social Media | 2 Comments »
Saturday, March 8th, 2008 |
If brand management is increasingly about customer input, feedback and how they share their experiences, does that mean more investment in “after the transaction” is required to differentiate?
Posted in Brand, Geeky, Marketing, Nugget | 2 Comments »
Sunday, January 20th, 2008 |
So I got to thinking about a link from Chris Brogan via Twitter. The link had a very interesting post on communal data and trust. Which got me to thinking about ownership, the right to assign and what owning an identity meant and what attributes are portable. Is identity essentially a concept/social construct, where a “user” is an identity instance or sliver effectively shared within the constructs of the service and within a service’s capabilities. As a user, we overtly agree to acceptably use the service with certain constraints. Can trust be a function of shared identity transactions?
Identity management seems more like a strategy than a portable data set. Is your virtual identity a branded repository or a repository of brands? Does user registration represent the transaction which established a shared transactional identity?
What a terrifically conceptual afternoon today has been thanks to Twitter.
Posted in Brand, Geeky, Marketing, Social Media | 3 Comments »
Saturday, January 12th, 2008 |
I know we are all enamored with widgets, social networks and alike, but it can become just a bunch of WORK! So I spent the weekend overhauling my tools, blog and networks to make it just a little easier. So to save YOU time, I’ve put together some insights I received from the let’s say - at least the last 7 days of work.
Tools
The right tools for the right job, not just relevant to carpenters, appears to be good for bloggers as well. I’ve been watching folks use tools on twitter, like twitterific, I’ve been playing with my bookmarking sites and just seeing how it might best be coordinated. My previous content management strategy very much had a herding cats feel to it. Here are some of the tools which I’ve centered on based on input from other folks:
- Shareaholic - a single firefox plug-in which manages all of my go forward social networks. No more crazy toolbars or additional buttons - a single drop down! Needless to say, Firefox is a must have tool.
- Feedburner - Yes, I know everyone knows about Feedburner, but did you know the Pro tools are FREE now? Each tab now has new cool stuff you can use, not just for optimizing your feed, but also your site. There are a whole bunch a goodies in there for you - Feedburner, not just for RSS - a single interface to Optimize, Publicize and Monetize (I’m not monetizing, but I guess I could go for the $.04/mo I might get) and Troubleshootize.
- FeedFlare - I know, it’s part of feedburner, but it’s so cool because it replaced my previous WordPress plug-in for bookmarking and I think my site is faster, just because of this.
Your Friends and Your Networks - Your TIME
Managing networks, bookmarks and actively participating is a bunch of work. So I QUIT! Sorta anyhow - I’ve centered on only a handful Facebook, del.icio.us, Digg and StumbleUpon (I only kept stumble since it’s a lightweight commitment). Last but not least - Twitter, I’m not sure why I like this so much, it is just fun - I think because it is iPhone friendly and not that much of a commitment - getting the theme here? Social Media-Life Balance
Intelligent Design
Since I’m fundamentally a lazy cat, I really needed to step back and think about how I wanted my online experience to evolve. So I found myself just getting way into the constructs of understanding relationships, what smart folks do online, (this requires a bunch of reading) and what I really want to do with my spare time and why. So I mapped out goals, systems, tools and traffic patterns to understand where I should focus on delivering reasonably meaningful content to the marketplace and I realized I had an accidental architecture. I had bits of mediocre content flying all over this Arpanet.
So what did I do? I decided to literally diagram where I am, where my readers are spatially on the web compared to where I am and weighted “objects” on benefit, effort and a totally subjective cool factor. Yes, I think everything can be put into model. Once I did that I figured out my haphazard hairball or spaghetti online existence just wasn’t what I wanted. So where did I start? My blog and worked out from the brand nucleus.
- Usability: Your stuff has to easily navigated to be read! That’s right, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about what goes where and why is something is on my blog until now. Guess what - there’s less clutter and in just the short time I’ve been re-designed, I’ve had more subscribers than any other single day! Clean is good.
- Consistency: This is as much about content, as it is about the frequency, so I automated a few things with behind the scenes posting automation/replication. I still need to clean things up a little, but Twitterfeed and the Wordpress plug-in Postalicious will be making my life just a little easier and establishing a reliable flow of content, I would like to read. I think I still have a little recursive content, but I’ll have that fixed by Wednesday.
- Necessity - Only use things that add value. If a widget doesn’t derive benefits which you can PROVE in your analytics, then its got to go. You know what there’s an interesting side benefit- less widgets = faster site.
This is what I have for now, I’ll keep thinking about it and if you have ideas or recommendations let me and my readers know.
Technorati Tags: twitterific, Feedburner, iPhone
Posted in Brand, Geeky, Social Media, tools | 1 Comment »
Saturday, January 5th, 2008 |
So I’m one of those odd ducks that actually looks forward those moments when I run into one of those “I don’t/didn’t know moments” - these are opportunities, not moments to dodge. I’ve doing a bunch of random research the past couple of weeks and had only modest time to do anything with the holiday’s thrown in, but I’ve already have some interesting things I have actually already realized or learned in the past couple of days, but mainly I thought I would talk about the Wal-Mart blog.
Check Out Blog is an amazingly well written blog with an interesting set of characters. ( Go Rand! Sustainability is good, I’ve been compact fluorescent for years and not recycling is essentially a crime in Ann Arbor, so I got real good at it.) Man I wish it wasn’t a Wal-Mart blog, because I got a little jaded and told myself “try to give it a chance”. So I decided to dig into the authors because the authors look so happy - not unlike the Wal-Mart greeter. I’m confident that there was some be a Wal-Mart blogger contest which was only extended to buyers and merchandisers after reading their profiles, but the lady who checked me out late night in Alpharetta probably shouldn’t be a blogger.
As I continued to dig through profiles, I quickly learned, there has to be a ghostwriter somewhere in the mix, but that is not a bad thing - take Alex Cook’s profile with the following statement:
In layman’s terms, I work with a group of professional buyers that are responsible for buying all the pc’s (and cool stuff that plugs into the PC’s) for the Wal-Mart stores in the U.S.
So as a technologist, I couldn’t think of keyboards and mice as cool things that plug into a computer, so I browsed walmart.com and indeed found “cool” things to plug into my PC, like the mouse below.
I agree, resting my hand on a picture of my family on holiday could be considered cool, providing I was put in a time machine and was able to plug it into my rad as hell 486 Hewlett Packard while scorching my way online at 14.4 with my new mouse resting on a mouse pad with a picture of my college dog Chumley. But the best bio is Tif’s.
Tifanie Van Laar
Author For Gaming
About Tifanie Van Laar
I am the video game software buyer for Wal-Mart, but before starting this role, I did not own a single video game or video game platform. Since that time, I have joined the legions of game players across the globe and proudly sit in the corner clicking away on my NDS while my boxer dogs, Makeda & Rohan, watch with disdain because I’m not paying attention to them. I have been a buyer with Wal-Mart for more than 8 years and have bought a vast array of items from movies to paint. I greatly enjoy my role with the company that harvested me out of the University of Arkansas of which I am a very proud alumni….Woo Pig Sooie, Go Hogs!
Not only does she have an inner gamer, she likes football and was apparently harvested, like corn - ahh fall is such a fun time in Arkansas. All that is required for an all-in demographic win is a NASCAR reference, which oddly doesn’t exist on the blog - I searched. While the rules of blogging and the concept of transparency for corporate blogging might be fuzzy, outside of sustainability man, the personalities of the blog are just right. Kinda a Goldilocks approach to authors.
The Point of this Post
Wal-Mart has actually done a great job, despite my jabs at the authors. The team at Check Out have created a platform for collaboration, easily understood content and provides a human aspect to an otherwise less than human organization that used geographic information systems and analysis to destroy downtown Americana. As I read the profiles the other thing I notice was folks work their a long time - how many employers have folks with this type of tenure 7, 13, or 14 years? Can’t be a bad company when folks, like Danielle Pribbernow, “look forward to a long career” there and with a name like Pribbernow there has to be endless fun in meetings. “Ok now let’s plan for the next steps now, no I really mean now - like Pribbernow damn it!” Ok maybe there aren’t a bunch of things do with the name, but I like saying the name. Say it three times fast.
So kudo’s to WM for their efforts at Check Out, while I’m not sure I’m good with their assertion that all lanes are open, I’m definitely good with such a large company trying to engage their customers in a dialogue by understanding the following:
Know you audience - The most likely readers are the gamers, so produce content mainly for them. A great deal of folks who want to save the environment read blogs so put something out there for them. A targeted approach to extend the brand identity to be a more eco-friendly and Rand does that well, What is your PSP?
Don’t Overextend - They don’t try and be thought leaders, just factoid folks who don’t seem to sell that much, but provide information about the products. The type of stuff I might ask in a store from a Wal-Mart team member should I actually be able to locate one. IDEA: Put the blog on Kiosks in-store to help answer questions, locate products and take applications, multiple purposes will help prop up the ROI.
Technorati Tags: Sustainability, compact fluorescent, video game software, video game platform, University of Arkansas
Posted in Brand, Social Media | No Comments »
Saturday, December 15th, 2007 |
So I continue to see more B2C and B2B companies deploying social computing technologies just want to be part of this whole web thing, which many don’t even recognize as social media only perceived as a necessity for success. Damn you Ad Age! The most recent reminder of this was a comment of “we gotta be on facebook” from a friend about his business, but really didn’t know what he meant which is why he rang me up. Next he’s going to ask me about second life or twitter. As an aside, Twitter was featured on a CSI show a couple of weeks ago and clearly was not explained well and this type of random reference will continue to drive a tactic oriented approach to online activity.
I spent some time asking my friend about his product, his target demographic and other buyer class attributes. He explained the his demographic so far from over 2000 orders is typically a female suburbanite over 35 and their pre-launch demographics indicate they typically a master’s degree with a household income north of $150K. Not a typical facebook user, but what the heck - more people are joining everyday and the recent investment and gabillion dollar valuation is changing the mix everyday.
Based other research his team has done he indicated the product requires multiple touches and education. After talking some more he did say and interesting thing is happening where a given instance of the product is sold, clusters are beginning to develop geographically. He was clearly under the impression that “word of mouth” is driving the clustering, so after explaining groups, social networks and other general social media concepts he went back and out a plan for how to use facebook after he browsed around.
So what did he decide to do? He created a group on facebook and invited his customers. The group immediately received 6 customer friends and every day is gets at least 3 new randoms everyday. After a month of Facebooking, his website analytics and sales are showing promise based on this effort.
This truly begs the question of how do you effectively use social media for a given company or product? Here is an excerpt from a forrester report by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff which I have been thinking about and collecting data on for a while, albeit anecdotal, but the recent post on travelers, reminded me to return to this concept and below is the excerpt from the original piece in April:
Many companies approach social computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed – a blog here, a podcast there – to achieve a marketing goal. But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for. Forrester categorizes social computing behaviors into a ladder with six levels of participation; we use the term “Social Technographics” to describe analyzing a population according to its participation in these levels. Brands, Web sites, and any other company pursuing social technologies should analyze their customers’ Social Technographics first, and then create a social strategy based on that profile.
Not only is effective delivery of a social media strategy based on metrics and knowing your customer, it needs to be one of relevant tactics which encourage community:
So if I think about survey above, this has a little “dewey win’s” feel to it, since it is a % of a % of a segment who buy online, which is minimally transferable to the general population and may not capture the REAL influence of social media effectively, but at least SOMEONE is trying to quantify in an objective way. The graph below is what drove me to the Dewey concept which indicates a significant segment of the popluation are apple users, or in the Dewey scenario, telephone users:
While there is a little dewy in this, it clearly validates that random social media tactics, such as just getting on Facebook or setting up a blog because you “have to” typically will not drive conversions for online sales and may in fact be a big time sink which causes frustration.
Back to my friend, his company has had a blog since launch, but the traffic was minimal which over time resulted in less posting and a near abandoment of the blog - not the case now, but this is what can happen if you look at it from a technology perspective and not a way to coordinate awareness, interest and demand. Now with the new multi-channel approach he has seen a growth in blog traffic, increased reader consumption of the RSS feed and online sales growth.
Somewhere I lost the point and this has become a “captain obvious” post, so I’ll close on the following sound bites:
- Online tactics do not equal an online strategy.
- A social computing platform deployment doesn’t mean you are doing what you should be doing.
- You have to link your business goals, social media efforts and strategy to planned out tactics
Technorati Tags: facebook, second life, Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff, social computing, Social Technographics
Posted in Brand, Social Media | 2 Comments »
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