Social Media Will Change Your Business

This lengthy article in Business Week

was first published in May 2005 and recently updated. It still is a great general description of blogging its effect on media consumption and business.

As for the difference between blogs and MSM - or main stream media - I like this quote from the the article

If this were a real blog, we probably would have posted our story pitch on Day One, before we did any reporting. In the blog world, a host of experts (including many of the same ones we called for this story) would weigh in, telling us what’s wrong, what we’re overlooking. In many ways, it’s a similar editorial process. But it takes place in the open. It’s a discussion.

Why draw this comparison? In a world chock-full of citizen publishers, we mainstream types control an ever-smaller chunk of human knowledge. Some of us will work to draw in more of what the bloggers know, vetting it, editing it, and packaging it into our closed productions. But here’s betting that we also forge ahead in the open world. The measure of success in that world is not a finished product. The winners will be those who host the very best conversations.

 

Make Web 2.0 deliver business benefits

This ComputerWeekly.com article presents a great overview of the potential web 2.0 is starting to show for business.

Previously most of the media attention has been on the personal aspect of applications like Facebook, MySpace and YouTube and many managers have been wary in embracing the term. This attitude is starting to shift and rightly so as these tools can produce tangible benefits if introduced and used properly in a corporate environment.

 

Cluetrain at 10

Unfortunately I missed this event but Josh Benoff of Forrester summarized some of key comments of Doc Searls which I quote below:

1. Advertising as we know it will die.

2. Herding people into walled gardens and guessing about what makes them “social” will seem as absurd as it actually is. (Facebook is his example.)

3. We will realize that the most important producers are what we used to call consumers. (Yup.)

4. The value chain will be replaced by the value constellation. (Many connections.)

5. “What’s your business model?” will no longer be asked of everything. (What’s the business model for your kids?)

6. We will make money by maximizing “because effects”. (”Because effects” are what happen when you make more money because of something than with it.) E.g. search and blogging.

8. We will be able to manage vendors at least as well as they manage us. (Agreements between companies and customers shouldn’t be skewed in favor of the companies.) At Harvard Law they call this VRM — vendor relationship management — which is what Searls is working on (projectvrm.org).

10. We’ll marry the live web to the value constellation. (The Live Web isn’t just about stars. Relationships of anybody to anybody.)

All this might not be readily accepted by marketers today, but let’s remember that most of what the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto loudly proclaimed ten years ago about how the web will change consumer behavior and marketing has come to pass. My take is that he’s right again.

 

Making sense of social media

Adam Weinroth of iMedia Connection has a very informative post on this high profile subject, including his definition of what makes up social media and how to be effective in this key area of the web today.

As I’ve stated on this blog previously, it’s all about the conversation, how to monitor, embrace and join it. Ignorance is not an option!

Tags: socialmedia, social networking, UGC

 

Super Bowl Advertisers Fumble Search, Social Media; Gain Elsewhere

this report in MarketingVOX makes the example of how E*Trade used their commercial in social media, which I posted on yesterday even more noteworthy.

Of course, network TV advertising is still used by and large for branding by companies with the necessary marketing budgets and cross media integration is the exception rather than the norm.

The article, however, seems to indicate a pretty strong shift to include paid search in the equation.

Good news for Google, it seems!

 

Great example of integrated web marketing

The E*Trade commercials, here’s the one on banking:

were some of the best that ran on an otherwise pretty lackluster slate during the Super Bowl.

What’s even more impressive than the creative, and certainly very effective, is how the company is leveraging this strong TV presence across the web by using YouTube, where they have their own channel featuring all their latest TV spots, their own home page and Google search results.

The entire integration is explained in detail with screenshots in this post on NetBanker.

Certainly credit unions don’t have marketing budgets allowing for Super Bowl commercials but the use of all the other tools mentioned here is open to anyone and do not require a substantial budget to run. Combined with an effective, dynamic website that can convert the interest and the qualified leads generated through web based marketing, this kind of integrated campaign should be a fixed part of any CU marketing program.

 

The Google Blog on Yahoo

BoomTown Decodes It, So You Don’t Have To!

a follow up to my last post. Parsing Google’s response trying hard to play David to the perceived new Goliath! Believable? Hardly. Stay tuned as this unfolds, or should I say, drags on and on and on…..

 

Microsoft writes Yahoo!

BoomTown Decodes the Letter, So You Don’t Have To! A great “reading between the lines” by Kara Swisher on the story that dominates the web and all business media right now. Enjoy!

 

Social Influence Marketing

A term we certainly will hear more of in future, is introduced in this interview in Chief Marketer. It’s described as the third dimension in marketing by Shiv Singh or Avenue A | Razorfish.

HIs comments give great insight into some of the issues marketers will need to deal with in this environment marked by social networks. I found this comment particularly relevant:

Social influence marketing takes many different forms…

Companies and individuals will need to think hard about what social media means for them and for their networks, organizations andindustries. For example, the way the travel industry will leverage social media should be very different from the financial sector.

Being engaged in these two industries myself, I completely agree with this statement that there are key differences in how the web 2.0
and future tools yet to be introduced on the smarter web will be used by customers different contexts and how that can be leveraged
effectively for businesses in these sectors.

Tags: socialnetworking, social media, web 2.0, travel 2.0, marketing, razorfish

 

Are you a Meatball Sundae?

For any business planning to start using web 2.0 tools, including blogging, I recommend a visit to Seth Godin or read his latest book “Meatball Sundae”. Seth is one of the most experienced marketers who has worked with the web since the earliest days and a guy who knows what he’s talking about.

Here’s a short excerpt from the introduction:

What’s a meatball sundae?

Maybe this is familiar. It is to me, anyway:

You go to a marketing meeting. There’s a presentation from the new Internet marketing guy. He’s brought a fancy (and expensive) blogging consultant with him. She starts talking about how blogs and the ‘Web 2.0 social media infrastructure’ are just waiting for your company to dive in. ‘Try this stuff,’ she seems to be saying, ‘and the rest of your competitive/structural/profit issues will disappear.’”

Just grafting these new tools onto your organization is a recipe for disaster. The risk of cognitive dissonance by your customers is great. .

This is not really new, the same was true when websites first appeared on the scene about over a decade ago and most executives - after first ignoring the web - thought that having a site would be a panacea for all their marketing problems. After huge amounts wasted, we now know how wrong that assumption was.

The corporate culture and the brand have to be consistent to be believable and communications need to be consistent across all channels and touchpoints to be credible. There are no shortcuts to success.