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Sep 10
Love0

Three Ways Social Media Really CAN Help.

By Communications, Corporate Strategy, Marketing, Social Media

I just finished a really terrific interview with Ted Hissey, SVP and Director of Innovation, Consumer Planning and Global Marketing Services for Brown-Forman Co., marketer of brands such as Jack Daniel’s, Southern Comfort, Korbel, Chambord and Finlandia. Yum. Read it here.

In this interview Ted discusses how social media has really enhanced the way they both learn from and then re-target customers across a wide range of demographics. It’s really worth the read. I took three really good things from it that I think we can all agree are pretty excellent ways to justify and empower social media use in our own companies.

Social media brings some scale to word-of-mouth. If your brand is one that relies on recommendations and satisfied customers sharing your products with others, social tools can really help you empower those customers to do it. Hissey says “Word-of-mouth has always been critical in driving awareness of new and existing brands,” and social tools allow customers to reach many more influencers with a single post.

Most social media vehicles are very targetable. When marketing alcohol (like many other CPGs), marketers can encounter a broad range of customer demographics that respond to different marketing triggers. Social media platforms can allow messages to be targeted by location, age, interests, networks, job, anything. This makes each marketing effort that much more efficient.

You can’t be boring or typical. If you’re going to bother tapping into  a social network of consumers, you have to make your messages worth their effort.  As Hissey says, “if it’s just something boring that people can get anywhere, you’re wasting your time.” If you get someone’s attention and wow them, they will spread that word.

So what’s stopping you from realizing these benefits and addressing these opportunities?

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Sep 04
Love0

If You’re Going to Use LinkedIn, USE IT!

By Communications

We’re in business development mode today, and that means researching potential partners and clients to assess the opportunities we might have to help each other. One of the steps in this process is to look at the company via LinkedIn–who works there, what positions are filled, what content they share, what open positions they are advertising, what their company profile looks like. After all, there are a gazillion benefits to using LinkedIn as a company now that social marketing and social search have gone mainstream. The network has grown over 45% in the past year, and has over 150 million users! Many of those are entrepreneurs who embrace social tools as a method of connecting to new opportunities.

So why, why why would you set up a LinkedIn account and then PRIVATIZE it so potential connections can’t reach you? Maybe you don’t want the “spam” emails, or you’d rather do the finding and viewing of profiles and opportunities, thank you very much. But if you’re going to bother building a profile on this network, it is disingenuous to expect access to information on others that you’re not willing to share yourself. People are looking for ways to connect because they want to grow their businesses, and presumably you want to do the same. Sure, you’ll want to make sure the profile is set up so your time is not being wasted, but setting it to private sends a message that you’re not that interested in connecting, not really.

Is that the message you want to be sending to potential customers, clients, partners, or recruits?

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Aug 29
Love0

Do You Really Think CEOs are not on Social Media?

By Social Media

I’ve been in a lot of meetings lately where the potential client/colleague/friend of mine says something like, “I’m doing outreach. But you know, our audience is in upper management and they’re older. I can’t reach them on social networks.” I think I heard that three or four times last week.

Every time I hear that, I cringe just a little. There’s this stereotype that social media users are all gum chewing, 20-year -olds. I know that isn’t true. And according to an article I read today, 32% of users are over 45. That isn’t everyone. But it’s a pretty good percentage. Don’t believe me? Check out AARP’s Facebook page. The baby boomers may be getting older (like the rest of us), but they certainly seem to be keeping up with the times. There’s a great article about that generation’s place in the digital age on mashable.com.

Look, there are a wide variety of networks out there. Think of the differences between Spotify, LinkedIn and Pinterest. These sites are geared to different age groups and cultures. For those whose job it is to be experts and leaders in their field, wouldn’t it make sense for them to be connected in some way? In associations, chambers of commerce, community forums, etc.

My point is that I think assuming that the more “seasoned executives” are not engaged online is a little bit insulting. The baby boomers are redefining what it means to get older, and I think it’s time we give them a little more credit.

 

 

Aug 28
Love0

How Twitter Might Be Shooting Itself In the Head

By Social Media, Uncategorized

Twitter APII just finished a very interesting article by Bloomberg’s Mathew Ingram covering two new and troubling moves the folks over at Twitter have made in the last few weeks. You can read it here.

The gist is that they have been cutting more and more original partners out of access to their API, which is the way apps like Instagram, LinkedIn and Tumblr USED to allow you to connect with Twitter friends. Those original partners drove a lot of growth in Twitter as users tweeted out what they were creating or reading with those apps. It made the apps better and more social. Now, it appears Twitter is starting to focus on developing media partnerships and driving revenue off of advertising purchased by those partners. In order to do that, it’s narrowing access to the API so that only these media partners (like NBC, who was the test case for this strategy during the Olympics) will be able to really take advantage of Twitter’s “follower graph,” a fancy word for the user data.

I totally understand that user data is the crux of Twitter’s value, and I totally get their desire to exploit that value. What I don’t get is why they are following the path that so many other VC-driven software companies have followed, which is to abandon the very thing that makes them great in an effort to get big and rich. By removing these API connections, Twitter’s relevance to users who remain loyal to the apps Twitter used to support will be eroded. Maybe Twitter doesn’t care, thinking their big media push will more than compensate for these lost followers. But in my experience, whenever a cool app that adds a real functional value gets hijacked by big media money, its relevance rapidly declines. It gets sucked into the financial and editorial vortex of its benefactors, watered down by quarterly reporting requirements, and quickly abandoned as another shill.

I hope I’m wrong. But when these things get too big and homogenous, users typically run away.

 

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Aug 22
Love1

What Social Data Really Tells Us

By Corporate Strategy, Marketing, Uncategorized

This is a VERY interesting infographic from the geniuses at Pivot, presented by that other genius Brian Solis.  It highlights what Brian likes to call The Perception Gap, or the difference between what marketers THINK their customers want versus what the customers actually TELL us they want. It’s a fascinating link worth checking out. While I wait.

OK, now that you’ve seen it, here is what I took from it:

Businesses, regardless of how much they blab about wanting to use social platforms to really get to know their customers, still operate from a blind spot oriented towards their own best interests. 

Which is to say, they OVERESTIMATE customers’ interest in things that are easy for these businesses to provide, like “product information,” and woefully UNDERESTIMATE for things that are more difficult or expensive to provide, like discounts and rewards and exclusive content.

What’s the upshot? USE THE DATA, MR. MARKETER!!! Don’t hide in the sand, own the reality and give them what they actually say they want, not what’s easiest for you! That’s how you’ll get them to become loyal to you.

Happy marketing!