The Sales Pitch Is Deceiving.

In the days before Madison Avenue was paved with gold, a good door to door salesman often sealed his sales pitch to the vulnerable housewife with,
“Don’t worry, it won’t cost you anything upfront”.

Similarly the perception today is that Social Media is a cost-free medium that Marketers can use in the face of shrinking budgets.

But don’t believe anyone who tells you this. Whether for a small or large enterprise, Social Media has hidden costs that are revealed once you engage it. The first cost is in man hours. The second is data management. This post will focus on the former.

The Human Touch.

Social Media platforms rely on real time conversations and that’s not something that can be automated. It takes flesh and blood to moderate, converse, answer questions, mediate and to engage an online audience. This kind of resource is often underestimated and should you try to rely solely on automation, it may open the door to negative PR.

A case in point was the ‘Best Job In The World’ campaign devised by Sapient Nitro for Tourism Queensland, where resources were severely underestimated and the project could easily have fallen apart, except for the quick resolution of those involved.

Having worked with ad agencies for over 20 years, I can picture the initial campaign pitch:

“We need a Blogger, so we’ll run a promotion to find them, and for six months they’ll extoll the virtues of tourism in the state from a cool house on a tropical island. It’ll be everyone’s dream job.”

“OK – and the cost?”

“A Blogger’s salary and a PR campaign. We’ll do some channel marketing via POS and run some classified ads. We’ll get the tourism suppliers to chip in, and get some cross promotional activity happening. If we want candidates to come from overseas we can run it through Reuters and Breakfast TV via our US parent group’s PR agency.”

What Happened.

While this particular campaign launch was successful and generated an enormous amount of global publicity, the people behind it were ill prepared for the influx of responses.

With a goal of 400,000 impressions, the campaign site quickly hit a million and crashed. The team were forced to engage ten servers and thirty seven staff to respond online, to review the 34,684 application videos and to keep the conversation going 24/7. And to top it off Sapient Nitro staff were also rostered to participate, in order to stop the whole thing falling apart.

It has been claimed that the site garnered 47,548,514 page views in 56 days. The publicity it generated organically has been estimated as being worth AU$100million from an initial spend of $1.7m. International campaigns were later created to maintain the interest, increasing the spend, plus, the Blogger’s tenure was extended.

Fortunately – the winning candidate was diligent in their blogging. But the requirement was far too big an undertaking for one person to handle.

After the launch, moderators were still required to maintain all the connected feeds, that’s Twitter, Facebook and YouTube supporting the blog. It was also necessary for others to be involved behind the scenes to provide support in site building, gaming and maintenance across all channels, also teams were required for editing, research, moderation, production and community management, while PR support was ongoing.

Human Resources necessary for Social Media.

Dependent on the approach, I usually suggest that a company that invests in Social Media should appoint a full time Community Manager.

This role should be held by someone inhouse, as it is their role to liase with Marketing and PR to find relevent information to feed through the chosen channels and to have the ability to resolve conflict by reporting to management in instances of crisis management. They should also be thoroughly familiar with the brand culture and competant in Customer Relationship Management.

A Community Manager can work with the Planner to manage the volume of communications and dependent on the bredth of strategy, should have a team of Moderators to assist them.

Moderators can be a team of rostered part timers who have the ability to maintain the brand personality and use the correct voice. For example if your main demographic is Formula One enthusiasts, your moderators must understand the culture and jargon, with an enthusiasm for motorsport.

It is very important to use your Social Media team as a community barometer and for them to be able to report sentiment or identify trends. This will give you the opportunity to identify brand advocates in your audience and allow for targeted communications down the track.

Another piece in the HR puzzle for Social Media is the Data Manager. Having a person who can report and assess sentiment, demographics, statistics and categorise your various communities, will give you unique insight upon which to improve services and build campaigns.

It won’t work without the batteries.

Entering into Social Media unprepared is akin to buying a new appliance from the door to door salesman and finding that it’s useless without the pricy but necessary accessories.

While you might find the cost involved to buy a website rebuild or a customised page on a Social Media platform reasonable, you must also consider the ongoing cost of human resources when setting down your budget.

Consider, when you experience six star service, it always involves the human touch. And logically the core of brand interaction with online communities is based on excellent customer service that evokes a personal touch. It has to be maintained and have continuity to reflect the desired cachet. Be aware and calculate the ongoing costs, because now, you can’t say that nobody told you.

Social Media is like online dating.

So everyone has said that the place to find your soul mate is online, but getting started is a bit daunting. Where do you start? Once you look around you realize that there are lots of options, but how do you pick what’s right for you? How should you project yourself and what exactly are you looking for in the ideal partner?

In the same way, the buzz is that Social Media is the next big thing for Marketers to get involved in. But where do you begin? Everybody knows Facebook. Do you start there? How do you go about it? And what does a Social Media Marketing campaign actually look like on Facebook?

Often the first thought is to do a viral campaign. Shoot a piece of funny video that gets seen by millions on the internet. Nice idea, but fundamentally flawed. Every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. Even though two billion online videos a day are viewed, it doesn’t mean that yours will be, or that it will be shared virally.

So how about a blog? Everyone reads blogs, surely it can’t be too hard to tack one on to the corporate website? And Twitter, what can we do with that?

Once you start exploring Social Media you also see that there are a great many platforms. The AddThis share button that appears on most Social Media savvy sites can facilitate sharing information to over two hundred Social Platforms.

Just like in online dating, the way to begin is to start finding your customers online and merely eavesdropping to see where they are, and to understand what they do in that space. Once that’s done you select a social media platform that many of them use and begin to engage them. You create an appropriate persona and begin courting, giving away enough about yourself to attract interest, flirting and chatting your way into the lives of others until a loyal bond is formed.

Unlike dating however, the key idea behind Social Media is to organically grow your own extended community on appropriate networks.

Scoping the opportunities

When scoping out Social Media goals for clients I do a cultural audit of the brand I am working with. From there we identify key messages that we wish to deliver, a personality to project and a way of engaging the audience that will encourage positive word of mouth. I then identify appropriate platforms with which to engage the target audience.

The first step is to build an online following and you do that by giving the public a reason to engage with you on a regular basis. One simple move is to examine the content of your website to see if it provides good or interesting content that would warrant social sharing. If it does, then tools such as RSS feeds and AddThis can easily be applied to start word of mouth happening.

Which platform is right for you?

A great way to begin Social Media activity is to create a promotional activity that will draw a following on one particular platform. Discounts, sampling offers or competitions can be an uncomplicated way of starting an online following. A number of platforms already facilitate this kind of activity.

If you have an existing email database you also have an opportunity to use that to promote your campaign by driving traffic to your social feed. Be mindful however that you will need to continue to interact with the community that you create from the campaign, once the offer ends, as this will become your ongoing social capital.

Similarly a Social Media add on to an above the line campaign can also be a way to launch your brand in the medium. But it should utilize a platform that is flexible enough to allow followers to interact with the brand after the campaign has ended.

For some brands an Ambassador Program can be an ideal social jumpstart. Harnessing the social influence of customers already involved in social platforms, blogging and/or micro blogging can be invaluable. These programs require long term commitment by the brand to the community, evolving in order to capitalize on the ongoing value of social advocacy.

Small businesses are often successful by starting their word of mouth marketing strategy in micro-blogging. Short sharp blog posts or picture posts require lower involvement if resources are stretched. Also consider using Twitter as one of the easiest ways to initiate online conversation on a personal level, provided you have dedicated Moderators who understand the difference between spamming and the appropriate mix of dialogue with broadcast.

If customer service is your social goal, Twitter is again a great platform to launch in. However if your customers are looking for time saving devices or a value add to your products, a phone app could be the ideal vehicle for your social efforts.

And let’s not forget YouTube. If you’re in the business of creating regular video content, then harnessing the power of this huge community through a brand channel and promoted videos on YouTube’s home page might be the ideal platform for your brand. If photographs are a big part of your fan base’s enjoyment, then consider a photo aggregator or platform such as Flickr that already have millions in their communities.

And then what?

Once you’ve dipped the toe in, you will garner a better understanding of your community and can gradually build on your efforts. Adding a blog to your site will benefit if you have already begun to carve out an online following. Member areas for websites can continue the growth of your following and interactions. Tools, apps and geospacial add-ons can be utilised too. Semantic web technology can be adopted to understand and create intuitive responses to your followers needs too.

You can extend your reach by hooking into more social platforms as you find appropriate. But the most important thing is once you’re in, maintain your efforts and allow your target audience to have open dialogue with you. Just like in online dating, in Social media remember to maintain a transparent honesty, to have a sense of humour, have a bit of fun and to always to attend to feedback or dialogue in real time.

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I always look forward to Marta Kagan‘s aggregation of Social Media statistics. Her series of presentations, “What The F*** is Social Media” take a standard Social Media acronym #WTF to create presentations that don’t take themselves seriously and may even have you #ROFL.

The format is easy to follow and the irreverent humour make for a good benchmark for contemporary communications. Your eyes certainly don’t glaze over during these, just as with the Socialnomics video I posted previously.

At best, the WTF series illustrate the global impact of Social. At worst, there are those who have seen them and then presumed to know everything about the medium. Trust me, these presentations are great for enlightening those who have yet to know the Social Media impact on Marketing and Communications, but you will need a Planner to help you utilise this medium effectively.

For those who’ve never seen these pieces, I offer you them all. The first was written in 2008, the latest was uploaded four days ago. A bonus of viewing them together is that the rapid spread and uptake of platforms across web 2.0 is plain to see. As Marta puts it, “Two years later, the stats don’t just speak for themselves—they literally boggle the mind.”

If you’re worried about showing your executives a presentation that implies expletives, she has also published her last two pieces sans the F***.

Enjoy and use to enlighten, and as a user of Social Media platforms, please respect the creative commons:

© All Rights Reserved Marta Z. Kagan

Sir Timothy Berners-Lee addresses TED March 2009

It’s not just for Boffins and Geeks

For those of us who have long been immersed in the evolution of Social Media – also known as Web 2.0 – we are now looking forwards to the evolution of Web 3.0. Let me introduce you to the future zeitgeist, otherwise known as The Semantic Web. The excitement lies in the broad scope of possibilities.

A year ago in the above video, Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, inventor of The World Wide Web, addressed TED in 2009, encouraging us to have an ‘open web’, where we upload all the data we have, to share it and allow others to freely merge data and draw new and interesting insights.

This merging of information we call Mashables, and they are giving rise to an amazing array of infographics that help us to have a better understanding of a wide range of topics. One year later at TED he reviewed some of the emerging mash-ups. You can review them here.

This enormous mine of data is ripe for Developers, for whom Semantic Web is described as the creation of intuitive applications, most notably for search and data. Semantic Web helps us wade through the volumes of information we deal with on a daily basis.

It has been claimed that the current generation of children will process more information while at school, than their grandparents encountered in a lifetime. So intuitive navigation of data is going to be vital to us all.

The lifting of privacy in Social Media

Marketers are accused of hijacking the term Semantic Web and sullying it for the purposes of creating branded Social Media promotions. But as I have held in previous posts, Social Media is just part of the way we communicate today, it is not unique to consumers, it’s open to commerce and hence Marketing.

As Sir Tim puts it, Social Media is data rooted in relationships and interests, so merging learnings from your profiles, forum contributions, reviews, tweets, status, comments and blogs will just be a part of the data mix. The lifting of privacy on Social Media platforms such as Facebook are their first steps along this path to creating more accurate search mechanisms. It will also potentially create more revenue for them.

Acknowledging that the technology has been bubbling along for some time now, many developers conclude that The Semantic Web is ten years away. But what I perceive is that Marketing muscle, by way of funding, is what will accelerate the development of Semantic Web technology.

The potential of harnessing this data will become invaluable for brands, so Marketers will be using the power of raw data in the near future to their advantage. With Facebook now also opening up, Social Media savvy Marketers will have access to even more sensitive and personal data about their customers.

What can Semantic Web do for brands?

One of the huge advantages to Marketers will be the ability to take this personalised data to drill down to find your core customer accurately, using Semantic Web.

While once Direct Marketing promised to take us directly to our primary audience, our current Social Media platforms go closer still. Using Semantic Web, it narrows the field considerably. The technology is there. It will just take the merging of creative marketing minds with developers to hook into it.

In short, Semantic Web can answer the questions Google can’t cope with. Take for example Apple‘s recent purchase of ‘Siri‘. It’s a Mobile App “Assistant” – using Semantic Web tech. I feel strongly that this is an indication of what will roll out on a broader level through Social Media in the very near future.

This is how Siri describes itself: “You can ask Siri to find a romantic place for dinner, tell you what’s playing at a local jazz club or get tickets to a movie for Saturday night.” Basically what it does is scan multiple aggregators, sites and search engines so that you don’t have to, forming a virtual assistant that does all the leg work.

Coming soon

For me, web API and Smartphone applications already feel clunky and inefficient, as I know it’s possible to do so much more with Semantic Web tech. Wouldn’t you like to just say into your phone: “Tell Dad I’m running late” or “Move my meeting from 3pm to 5pm” “or deliver 20 data lines to HSBC Sydney HQ” and have it automated for you? Soon you will be able to do just that.

For the benefit of Marketers, this will be pitched as time saving tools that you add to your promotional mix. Imagine saying to your phone: “Making Masterfoods Chilli con Carne, 7pm tonight, invite”, resulting in your phone app assistant sourcing a recipe, scanning data of the contents of your fridge, creating a shopping list and ordering the ingredients online to be delivered when you get home.

Then it will update your status to your select group of chilli loving friends on your preferred Social Media Platforms to say, “Hot stuff! Making Masterfoods Chilli for the gang tonight – be there 8pm”  including an RSVP prompt, placing it in their calendar, and adding a link to the recipe. Meanwhile you’ve received a list of attendees, any allergies they may have, a video demo of the recipe and a countdown of what you need to prepare.

For some this is a crude use of the technology. Realistically its practical use indicates the early future of Semantic Web for commerce.

But of course it’s not all about commerce

In a more noble vein, Sir Tim mentions that it may also help significantly in the development, understanding and diagnostics of medicine. Of course there’s also fantastic scope for philanthropy, altruism, for artistic applications, social justice, gaming and a way to simplify bureaucracy. In fact, the more imaginative we are, the more we can put all that data to work for us.

So it’s time for society to invest in the future and for the big dreamers to all put our heads together with Semantic Web Developers.

Looking at the big picture, The Semantic Web is exciting stuff indeed.

Also watch this short piece by Kate Ray – ‘A story about The Semantic Web’

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The Social Media Strategist’s Best Friend

This updated presentation by Socialnomics author Erik Qualman encapsulates most of the media statistics that have broken across Web 2.0 recently.

It’s a handy tool for explaining the reach of Social Media to clients, employers and staff. And potentially a good motivator for those attempting to wade through the mumbo-jumbo of the medium.

Mr Flibble. Copyright © 2008 Dominick Reed

Cowboys, Snake Oil Salesmen and Bloggers

Like the cry “There’s gold in them there hills!” Social Media has become the business perceived as a license to print money, attracting every shark that smells there’s something to be made from nothing.

Somewhere along the line, word got out that Bloggers were the passport to advertising online with zero financial outlay. Supposedly they’re the golden ticket to Word of Mouth marketing and by harnessing them via press releases and sampling, you can charge your clients tens of thousands of dollars worth of Social Media Marketing without spending a cent.

You just have to read the discussions in LinkedIn’s Social Media Marketing groups to see how many self-named Social Media Experts – with zero relevant expertise – are expounding the joys of utilising bloggers for marketing. And then there are the mountains of online excrement that tell you about the art and science of Social Media, but actually show a lack of insight into the medium.

In all honesty, it’s these kinds of people who give Social Media a bad name.

In the blogging community approaches by some PR companies have already damaged the reputations of those they represent and Search Marketing companies are joining the ranks. Within that, include Market Research survey companies and free competition/promotional websites. Why? Because these so called ‘Experts’ put up their hands to court bloggers, without regard to the psychographics of the medium.

But what would I know?

Under various pseudonyms, I write a number of blogs, ranging from the personal journal to those targeting various communities of interest to FMCG, Service industries and SME’s. And when I say communities, I’ve since met a lot of my local readers in person, many also blog.

Those who regularly read my blogs comment on posts, talk about them in external forums, in Google Buzz, in Twitter and on Facebook. Many now hook up for social gatherings, swarms and tweet-ups too. They also email me, and like me, the Bloggers have a file full of unsolicited mail, aka spam from the kinds of companies I mentioned above.

So I know firsthand and have seen evidence of the visceral response from Bloggers to approaches by brands. Not all Bloggers are averse to being courted by advertisers, but the approach has to be couched appropriately. And this is where most companies fail, at the first hurdle.

Some Insight

Because it is a crowd sourced online medium, the crux of Social Media is listening, chatting and understanding. In approaching Bloggers you must apply all of the above. And by doing this, in terms of identifying your target market, you drill down even further than Direct Marketing ever has. But this is where merely downloading a list of blogger’s email addresses and sending out a templated email will be your undoing.

Blogging outside of business oriented sites is often deeply personal. The name comes from ‘Web Log’ – an online journal. Just as in life, in blogging communities you have niches within subcultures and if you ignore that, the drawbridge will be raised, subjecting your brand to firebombs of negative online PR – from exactly the group of readers you were hoping to promote your brand to.

Clumsy examples: acquiring a list of Food Bloggers and asking a Vegan Blogger to promote Quick Service Restaurants; or asking a Mummy Blogger with four kids to test drive a compact car for review. Hell hath no fury like an irate Blogger, especially when the current statistics are that 90% of the public trust personal recommendations. Those who give may also take away.

You have to understand the philosophy and values of the bloggers you approach before courting them. They’re not professional journalists. Nor do most aspire to that. For the most part they’re amateur Writers, passionate about the subject they write about, that’s what drove them to blog in the first place.

For example, unlike Journalists, sending out a press release does not work. Unlike subscribers to sampling websites, sending promotional packs may also be ineffective. Telling Bloggers that you want to publish their posts or images on your website (but that you own the intellectual property in the T&Cs) is bound to invoke scathing criticism. Telling them to be a Brand Ambassador will see scorn heaped upon you.

The most influential Bloggers are savvy to the fact that you want make money out of them for no remuneration. Would you volunteer to boost the sales of a corporation that posts profits larger than the GNP of some countries, for zero compensation? I think not. You’re not, your ad agency isn’t. So why expect Bloggers to?

A considered Approach

For brands to get results, avoid the smooth talking Snake Oil Salesmen of Social Media, they have but one angle. Talk to Social Media Marketers within your advertising agency. They should take the time to understand who to work with online and then offer an insightful and creative promotion to take to Bloggers on your behalf.

Have them support the campaign with traditional media and PR. That way you can ensure that your established brand values and corporate image will marry with the appropriate gatekeepers for maximum exposure.

The Bottom line is, if you want Bloggers to be your friends, treat them as you would yourself, with manners and dignity.

DT2PQZWUWPJF

By Mr Flibber. Copyright © 2008 Dominick Reed

Social Media is dead

While some people prefer a cosy niche, I don’t like pigeon holing people. It feels too narrow in scope to bring out potential.

I’ve never been enthused that Advertising creativity is specialised within the traditional silo’s of media. I have always seen advertising as a whole, with channels appropriated to suit the customers. And now I am at odds with self appropriating the title of Social Media Strategist.

I can carry this title because I came to use the tools and platforms long before many in advertising were aware that they were potentially of consequence to marketing. Ten years ago I was initiating mobile phone marketing, online forums and various web tools that companies could use to reward, educate and motivate staff. At the time it was considered HR oriented, and not appropriate to Customer Relationship Management, but already, back then I knew the time would come.

Instinctively I knew that as the general public became more educated they would decide how they wanted to engage brands, and that time has come. This is a new era. A time where consumers will shape brands, customer service and product development by choosing at which level they engage. More importantly, by making public their views of the brands observed day to day.

I appreciate that company titles make people comfortable. But I envisage a future paradigm where we will have planners who have advertising and marketing skills across all channels. There won’t be Digital specialists, Social Media specialists and Traditional Media specialists.

We will all be adept at thinking through the big picture and running an idea into many facets of branding. And most importantly, gathering the public feedback and devising engagement via Social Media platforms will not be left to Public Relations staff, but will be entrusted to those who understand the full impact and quality of this data, in the manner of Direct Marketing analysis.

This requires an understanding of the psychology of your target market and marketing of your brand as a whole. This insight will guide you in the best way to move forward.

So if a Social Media Strategist approaches your company, ask them what they’re actually offering you? Many such people focus on sending out blanket emails to bloggers or to online survey groups offering sampling, but how do they integrate that into your marketing as a whole? What data will they give you in return and how well do they know the online influencers they are dealing with?

You may be approached by a Social Media ‘Expert’ who is a smart phone application developer or those who will tack a forum or a blog onto your website, but they may only be offering the physical structure. Again, what will they broadcast, how will they converse with your customers and what data will they collect? Do they train the advocates that moderate these platforms or will it be left to you? Do you know how best to interact with online communities?

My advice would be to find a company that is already offering a three hundred and sixty degree view of your brand’s marketing. Find a company that builds your brand personality in a variety of ways across traditional and digital media. But they must also have Senior people able to use Social Media as a quality research tool, who understand the online stakeholders who can build your brand by word of mouth and to provide utilities that suit your customers, as well as being cognisant of the importance of online Customer Service.

Backing that up they’ll need resources that can provide you with the bells and whistles of new media that engage customers. That would be in the form of widgets, Smartphone applications, online TV and radio, to name just a few of the goodies on offer in the Social Media grab-bag.

It may seem premature to declare the death of the Social Media Strategist. I call myself one because via long term immersion, I am one of the rare few brand advertisers that understand this medium, overlooked by many in the industry. But I know that as I educate others, this will no longer be a specialty, because brands ultimately deserve broad thinkers.

The title Social Media is already redundant among early adopters. It is now known as the Semantic Web. It is the natural evolution of communications and in a relatively short time, your brand will also evolve. So please, future-proof your brand by putting it in the right hands.

Technorati DT2PQZWUWPJF

Mr Flibble. Copyright © 2008 Dominick Reed

It’s time for advertising to reflect the change in how we communicate.

As someone who has worked in the advertising and marketing sphere since 1987 I have borne witness to a seismic shift in the way people communicate. While technology has been instrumental in providing new means of reaching each other it has been the change in societal attitudes that have brought about the most fundamental changes in the first world.

The core values that bound traditional communities have eroded. The church and intimate extended family relations no longer drive who it is we socialize with and work with. Class structures are less predominant, along with cultural differences, especially in new world countries settled by migrants.

The nuclear family has eroded leaving a generation who’ve grown up in blended households. They open up to their peers online in order to bond. We are adrift, making our own way, seeking out others with whom to traverse life’s path, through work and play across a significantly larger pool of other people. Our voices can be heard globally.

The instrument that we are increasingly using to seek out others with whom we share common interests and values is the internet. Rudimentary online forums and basic blog rings have evolved into online communities founded on mutual interests. The title Web 2.0 was coined to describe movement towards this user generated content online. Now Social Media has taken its place as the buzzword.

The social media landscape is dotted with many villages that cluster like minded groups of people both locally and globally. Going a step further, Facebook is said to have so many users that were it a country, it would be the third most populous in the world.

Word of mouth recommendations within these online communities hold as much sway now as those of the traditional ‘wise man’ of the village. And so marketers are now turning a keen eye to these communities. After all this is a natural and obvious space for businesses to market themselves to the public. However it’s also a place where traditional advertising has no place.

The transition in advertising

In the late eighties, pioneering Direct Marketers declared that to advertise broadly to the general public was not enough. Why trawl the ocean when you can shoot fish in a barrel? Go directly to the people who are exactly your audience. Later, they instigated Customer Relationship Management, which reached even further into the pockets and minds of consumers to sell brands and products. Traditional advertising agencies then had to change gears, with marketing dollars now being shared with DM agencies.

Then after the dotcom crash came the rise of digital advertising agencies and digital media agencies, who could service marketers with websites and the various forms of adspace now available online. DM embraced email and e-commerce websites as part of their offering. The pie split again and in order to consolidate the shrinking ad dollar, traditional ad agencies annexed both DM and Digital as part of their offering. Now brands are choosing to divert funds into Social Media and ad agencies are struggling to get their heads around the medium.

Social Media combines all the advertising tactics mentioned above, yet it slipped under the radar of advertising agencies, initially allowing Public Relations agencies to move into this space. But in the main, traditional PR agencies are being shunned by online influencers. Why? Because online communities have their own unwritten rules, their own voice; they’re savvy and anti establishment. They can’t be approached as you would a Journalist or a TV Producer.

Why pursue Social Media?

Today we are aware that for many consumers, word of mouth drives more sales than traditional aspirational brand advertising. The term ‘Dead Tree Media’ is affected disparagingly by a time poor populous who want variety and news in real time, and on demand. Today our markets increasingly turn to online citizen journalism unbound by editorial guidelines and legalese, turning away from magazines, journals and newspapers. With PVRs in many homes many no longer even watch TV ads. Conversely, billions of pieces of video footage are viewed online, on demand, and smartphone technology is amplifying this growth.

A different strategic approach is required to corner this market. It has to come from within the social media space. But unlike DM and PR you can’t buy lists and issue a blanket email to online influencers.

You can’t build a social media platform and demand that influencers supply free positive commentary for your website or for them to produce glowing advertorials for no return, because online influencers are driven by their own passion. They’re not media professionals, they’re in their communities because it allows them freedom of expression within the safe confines of a tribe that share their attitudes and opinions.

You need a Trojan horse. Once you’re on the inside you can evaluate what that community wants from your brand. And that fundamentally, is the crux of Social Media Marketing.

In this next wave of marketing, consumers direct exactly how they wish to be addressed, they’ll tell you what they expect from your business and how you can improve your brand. And that kind of information is invaluable, but it will take a fundamental mind-shift to break from traditional corporate practices in order to embrace it.

Welcome to the brave new world of communications.

By Mr Flibble. Copyright © 2008 Dominick Reed

Once upon a time…

When business Sales departments evolved from companies sending out traveling salesmen, to using a business tool called Marketing, it used advertising to create inspiring imagery coupled with adjectives that would inspire the householder to buy consumer durables. It shifted sales from talking one to one with customers, to storytelling that would bait them. Ostensibly it began broadcast – or to ‘talk at’ – the public.

First World general public could choose to take note or completely disengage in the advertising space. That is until Direct Marketing emerged. Businesses then began to re-engage the customer one-on-one.

But they were still talking at the consumer, mailing out personalised advertising, until telemarketing kicked in. The knee jerk reaction to telemarketing was antipathy from the public. It’s not that it was wrong to connect directly with customers, they just really hated the intrusion of being approached unasked and were vexed by the relentless sales spiel.

In today’s market place, consumers are better educated to marketing ploys and hence more resistant to the advances of advertisers. Many say that they are not easily influenced, don’t read, listen to or watch ads and don’t worship at the altar of brands. Millenials have shown to be very anti traditional advertising, which as they mature, bodes poorly for mainstream advertising, digital marketing and DM alike.

Word Of Mouth. The next wave of marketing.

Gradually, the next wave of marketing is emerging in Australia; we’re a little slower than the USA in this. In fact North American early adopters are already showing signs of fatigue. But the Australian public have recently raced ahead, in terms of time spent engaging with the next wave. So the opportunity is here.

It’s a reversal of all that advertisers have been accustomed to. It’s no longer what brands broadcast. It’s in fact, all about what the public say about your brand, and they’re doing it online. This is being referred to as Social Media.

Essentially Social Media is a description of the multiple platforms that facilitate the online conversations that billions of people are having online. In order to work with this, the first thing a brand needs to do is to listen to the online conversations that involve their products or services. Appraise how your brand is perceived. Then see what’s happening around your competitors.

Evaluate your brand in the eyes of your target market. Look at what they suggest you need to change and improve on, register what it is they like about your brand. See who influences them online. See who they are and what they represent.

Why is this action vital? Because the current statistic is: 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations.

Eighty six percent of Australian’s online are looking to their fellow Internet users for opinions and information about products, services and brands, and Australians’ engagement with online word of mouth communication is going to increase in coming years as social media plays an increasingly important role in consumer decision making.”*Hitwise

Advertisers have often held that while you may be talking to the lowest common denominator, you shouldn’t underestimate consumers. When you begin to assess your online brand engagement, a picture of public perception will emerge, and it can often be brutal and confronting.

The next step is to allow your customers to engage in dialogue with you. Effective Social Media relies on two-way dialogue between customers and with the brand, and that doesn’t mean simply broadcasting offers or statements about the brand. It is answering comments and discussing topics with consumers.

The key to this is transparency and trust, requiring a brand champion with access to information that can help customers choose your brand and who can also address customer service issues. While it requires a specific voice and personality, it is not PR broadcast.

In simple terms your entry point into Social Media could be setting up a twitter stream and politely responding to any comments made about your brand. It could be establishing an authenticated correspondent to speak on behalf of the company in popular, relevant online forums, or it could be as simple as enabling comments, the ability to share links and ratings on your website’s pages, that are moderated, answered and monitored by a company representative.

This is only the first step, but is a vital stage if a brand is to engage social media properly, avoiding the pitfalls that less prudent marketers have fallen into.