Last week I caught a blog post at FutureNow which cited Ted McConnell, General Manager-Interactive Marketing and Innovation at Procter & Gamble Co from a recent interview in AdAge. To quickly paraphrase both FutureNow and McConnell, social media is mislabeled - it's not a form of media in any traditional sense of the word where people come to engage with information but rather a communication tool in which the user is an active participant and you [the advertiser] are competing to take them away from their intended goal. Acknowledging that social sites really are about a user to user relationship and not about showcasing advertising brings up an interesting question - should you even bother engaging in social spaces? My answer is unequivocally yes but with a different approach than you've ever used before. Click in and I'll explain...
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It's no secret, user generated content [that would be reviews, forum postings, blog contents, and so forth] drives business to those with a good name and drives it away from those with a bad one. The effects are even more impressive for smaller businesses like those in the travel industry; after all, picking a condo in Hawaii for a week is basically a crap shoot unless there's a comment to direct otherwise. So how do you go about getting your customers to talk about you without building a complex website or spending the time to create your own social campaign? Simple, you ask your customers to do it.
Click in for more information and sample create you can start using tomorrow.
Don't worry, this isn't a marketing blog gone political and you won't find any endorsement in here [cough * vote for whoever you like, just vote * cough] instead this is about the marketing and product offerings that have accomplice this "historic day."
For years now much of what I've read from the movie industry is stories about how this that or the other is impacting ticket sales; how the industry is hurting and how no matter what they do, piracy and a host of other issues is keeping them from getting the numbers they should have. Well putting aside the skyrocketing price of a movie ticket, overcharging for popcorn (see this book) and the fact that many Americans now have large screen TVs with rocking home theatre systems all of which has helped make the issue worse, I've always said the real heart of the matter is the product, not the customer. Case in point, Batman opened last Friday to a lot of hype and fan fair and it delivered for the customers and the studios.
The other day I came across a question on LinkedIn about the role of social networks in office productivity. The person asking the question seemed to be getting at the benefits of social networking by employees as a means of building the brand's social campaign which is a great topic but what I'm going to talk about, and most of what I responded to, was the perception of social networking and its impact on productivity. Most of what follows is taken directly from my answer with a little further clarification.
