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Social Business: Analysis – Part 2C: Reasons To Participate In Social Business: Internal Reasons And Avoiding Social Business

May 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The Fundamentals series continues the analysis phase with a mini-series on assessing the value and effectiveness of social business. This mini-series will cover the following aspects:

  • Reasons to participate in social business
  • Internal considerations
  • Debunking myths
  • Social business in B2B environments

I’ve divided the reasons to participate in social business into three categories:

  1. Marketing
  2. Reach & Community
  3. Internal reasons & Reasons to avoid social business

Today, we’ll look at prevalent marketing-related reasons to participate in social business.

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Social Business: Analysis – Part 2B: Reasons To Participate In Social Business: Reach & Community

May 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The Fundamentals series continues the analysis phase with a mini-series on assessing the value and effectiveness of social business. This mini-series will cover the following aspects:

  • Reasons to participate in social business
  • Internal considerations
  • Debunking myths
  • Social business in B2B environments

I’ve divided the reasons to participate in social business into three categories:

  1. Marketing
  2. Reach & Community
  3. Internal reasons & Reasons to avoid social business

Today, we’ll look at prevalent reasons to participate in social business related to reach and community.

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Social Media’s Impact On Marketing – Part 2: Re-Focusing Marketing Activities

February 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Yesterday, I talked about social media causing marketing to shift from messages to experiences. Today, I’ll take a closer look at how two very typical marketing activities—PR and advertising—have fared with the advent of the social web and how such developments underline the need to re-focus marketing activities.

Public Relations

PR is exactly what it stands for: Public Relations. It refers to people, relationships and a long-term commitment to building reciprocal value. Despite developments in the PR industry and a number of worst cases, the underlying premise of PR has never been about creative spin, email blasts with press releases or begging for publicity whenever a new product/service is launched.

In fact, the negative spiral in which some parties find themselves in will be detrimental to them. The increased levels of transparency and interactions spurred on by social media will force these parties to change their methods of working as “broadcasting to” becomes “interacting with”, “message” becomes “experience”, and “audience” becomes “conversation partners”.

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Social Media’s Impact On Marketing – Part 1: The Shift To Experiences

February 16, 2010 By 1 Comment

The Fundamentals series continues this week with a look at how social media has impacted marketing. This will be a three-part series that looks at marketing in general, public relations and advertising. At the end, I’ll present what I see as the “Online Value Framework”.

For marketers, the fundamental power shift from organizations to individuals has also been noticeable. With individuals being able to talk back, one-directional mass marketing has lost its edge as a way to get a message across.

However, social media is not there to emphasize polarization. It is there to promote relationships. Just like any relationship, the business relationship between marketers and consumers is a game of give and take. Marketers will need to give (attention, value, quality et cetera) in order to take (money, positive brand perception et cetera).

When a marketer does not give enough, the consumer will lose interest and the marketer is unable to take from the consumer. The opposite holds true as well, a marketer who gives something relevant consistently builds a relationship where consumers have higher levels of brand perception and trust.

Marketers still need to remember that taking is also part of the relationship. Exchanges like a value proposition and a call to action for giving a product or service with real benefits and value keep the relationship real. Remember that relationship marketing is not solely about relationships, it is about marketing as well.

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Marketing Pioneers 2010: Company Pitches

February 4, 2010 By 8 Comments

I’m at Marketing Pioneers, a half-day conference on marketing and sales here in Amsterdam. The event just opened with five companies pitching their business in 6+4 minutes.

Brandfighters

This is a video marketing agency that capitalizes on crowdsourced user-generated content for company marketing, i.e. users are asked to create (hopefully viral) videos for a brand. OK, where do we need the agency? Jan-Paul, interestingly enough, mentioned that Heineken was surprised that the quality of the submissions was so good. I don’t see why a big brand wouldn’t and couldn’t just bypass an agency in such cases.

Mober

This company aims at providing a SMS service with which restaurant/cafe patrons can place orders. I think this service doesn’t tie into the overall hospitality industry well. The problem is that whereas it can simplify or create an extra option for consumers, it creates more headache for restaurant/cafe holders. The logistics, technology and process changes may not be worth it. It’s a lot of trouble for fighting a symptom rather than a cause. Bad or sub-par service cannot be solved w/ an SMS ordering system.

Bureau Vijftig

This is a marketing agency specialized in reaching people over the age of 50. Interesting business projections and a growing market. However, I did find it funny that they used a cliche to break a cliche. If it’s more about behavioral properties than demographic properties, it might blur the concept.

Beemway

Social media agency that does brand campaigns with widgets, things and other stuff ;) Focus was on segmentation and targeting, but the ROI question was a bit dodged; Hans said that it should be played “smooth” and that an initial focus on sales/conversion usually fails. “Smooth”? I think value and relevancy are more important. I thought these pitches were about novelty?

31 Volts

Interesting opening, 80% of service providers thinks they’re delivering excellent services yet only 8% of clients feels the same way. This agency aims to bridge that gap. Their service consists of helping businesses make changes to their service provision to make customers more satisfied. Bit disappointed about the business model re metrics and effectiveness. I don’t really see the innovation either, the takeaways contained a lot of basic marketing stuff.

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