8. Customer service has moved from a cost centre to perhaps your most strategic initiative
9. Marketing sets the expectation, marketing creates demand, marketing helps a consumer differentiate why one choice is better than another choice. Operations delivers. Any gap between the two drives a conversationon the social Web. Dave Evans bit.ly/nublack via Andrew Grill (@andrewgrill)
23. Where Do Your Customers / Prospects Live? Monitor: Web analytics/traffic sources Social networks Specialised communities Comments/Reviews Competitor activity Survey customers
40. Measurement Follower counts Contributor counts Shares/Likes Follower : Contributor Time Spent Sentiment analysis Cost per member Cost per contributor
41. "Consumers only spend about 5 percent of their time online searching and the other 95 percent of the time at the destination. Social media is quickly accounting for a large percentage of that 95 percent.” David Berkowitz, director of emerging media and client strategy for the digital marketing firm 360i
Advertising to consumers looks something like thisMarketers moving to increase frequency or interruption to deal with the lack of response.Leads to irritation.
Yes its message overload and its no surprise
Consumers are tuning out
Not only that they are less trusting of information sources in generalSo radio / newspapers / tv news / friends/ peersNo surprise but advertising is the least trusted of allIn the UK trust is the number one driver of corporate reputation (72%)Followed by transparency and honesty (64%)And high quality products and services (62%)
As the size of our networks have increased..Amount of quality information hitting us has decreased BUTRecommendations from the RIGHT peoples is still there
It is not just about how social media has changed our approach but now because of lack of trustabout co-ordinating across multiple channels both digitally and offline
Social Media does not work though unless you treat services as a strategic initiativeZappos.. First direct.. All do this..By delivering on the services side…Generate positive conversations online Better word of mouth Larger numbers of fans
Lets remember some basics........Any gap..So pretty good idea to over deliverUnder delivering can mean some serious scrambling from your social media/pr agency
So inthis changing landscape The idea of companies pushing out marketing messages to reach customers or even companies waiting for customers to find them is not enough on its own
What I want to introduce is the idea of sideways marketing.Sideways marketing is a way of enabling consumers to have conversations about your brand both amongst themselves and directly with the brand.Evolve the thinking around engagement marketing.. Which last year was all about listening and interacting with your audience
Ok so like all great marketing frameworks – we’ve distilled it down to 3 words beginning with PThe idea is that by looking at each of these we can put together a framework to allow you to have an approach to build strategies for sideways marketing
This is how we think of our target audiences..Customers etcFans are important because they may not be customers but may actively promote your brand to their friends.
Of course people don’t think of themselves in such waysThey have always followed their interests and have their own world viewIt is identifying those which match your own brands which is key. Online helpsTribe members do not restrict themselves to one group either – they move around and change accordinglyWhich leads nicely onto place
The first thing to note though..the website is not the centre of your universe.For the last 10 years we invested in our websites.. Ultimately website is still important but it is not likely to be the first stop online.. But if people are congregating elsewhere Be it fb/twitter specialised sites etcWe need to ..
This actually isnt anything new..Offline in the B2B world we happily exhibit at tradeshowsto meet people interested in oursectorsShops of a similar sector cluster together
So how do you find out where your prospects are?
No longer are we accessing the internet through a nice big desktop screenLaptops.. Netbooks are all growingAnd more are coming – ipad.. tablets.. And then there is mobile..
29% of uk mobiles are smartphones – they are 47% of total page views, 51% of total timeUnique user growth : 19.3%Pageview growth : 50.1%
This is the final piece of place.Services like foursquare and gowalla are allowing users to broadcast their location to their friends. They are signing partnerships with companies to deliver messages based on what is nearby.Whilst apple has recently banned 3rd parties from delivering location based ads – it is widely believed they will roll out their own platform.It is not fully available today but as 2010 progresses this additional data will allow marketers to deliver more contextual adverts which are relevant to the user.
By providing content that is educational in nature rather than promotional can lead to longer term growth in fans and active usersCamping retailer – when they focused on education their conversion rates generated went from 4% to 10% as opposed to a buy buybuy / discount messageShaving manufacturerFood mixerUGC plays into this
Whilst creating content that is shareworthy is more art than science. Creating content that is engaging is about understanding your audience and meeting some but not all of the above words.It needs to be real – add value or be helpful. Don’t forget the phrase – keep it simple!
Here is an example of integrating email marketing with facebook –The agency involved developed 100 different creatives and measured the number of shares generated.This email was off the charts successful – why?Branded simple, female audience, personal, focused on a single network – clearly the right network for this message vs twitter or myspace for example
Ok so to build a sideways approach.. Identify the right people and places that they congregatelisten then work to enable (create communities, seed marketplace with content – they arent going to say things on their own!)then engage (respond in conversations – both good and bad) Don’t be afraid to measure and set goals – we’ll come to that a bit later
Example fromasos – showing a simple way of enabling users to start a conversation with each other
Some obvious metrics are follower and contributor counts..Follower counts are akin to the old race to build email lists.. It is about quality not quantity.Contributors are important – both positive and negative – these could be things like comments, shares, likes It’s more interesting to look at the ratio of these over time and watch how they are changingTime spent is an obvious indicator of engagementSentiment analysis is an increasingly popular area where you can actively identify the view online regarding your brand and manage your responses to it.FirstDirectFinally – it is a good idea to have some roi metrics around cost per member and cost per contributor. It is still early to be setting benchmarks for these but having an understanding of them for your brand will allow you to start comparing across channels.
Ok to finish up..I like the idea of thinking about user attention and spending time engaging where people are – it is not a new idea.David illustrates why social media needs to be playing a part of the mix today