The image above illustrates the 6 segments of social media user demographics. The numbers have changed, in a marketers favor, since Forrester released this report - more people are joining the social media landscape. For example, in 2008 the percentage of inactives was down to 46%.
I anticipate the percentage of inactives will continue to drop significantly in the US - to the point that eventually most people will use some sort of social media application in their daily lives; South Korea shows an active Social Media population of 65%.
The number of Social Media Marketing avenues can be overwhelming. It is important to understand where your customers dwell; and when you find them you should be able to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
In order to succeed using social networks you need to help your brand advocates spread your message. You need to energize the people involved in your social networking efforts to participate in your campaign, enabling them to spread your message to other people. Of course, you also need to measure the results to see the extent of your campaign’s success. Measuring the results of your social media campaign enables you to see how you were able to energize the market, and to what extent.
Take the MySpace campaign of Adidas, for example. In their MySpace profile, they made visitors chose between two types of Adidas shoes according to their philosophies. People who are team oriented and are precise with results should choose the Predator type, while those into showmanship choose the F50 Tunit. The site enables the visitors to become participants of the campaign. This is different from other traditional advertising campaigns, where the advertisement is one-dimensional and hardly involves the market. Here, the consumers who participated in the campaign become part of the advertisement. They taunt each other regarding their choices, they rationalize their preference, and they even design their MySpace profiles using Adidas wallpapers. Adidas did not “shout,” as advertising tends to do; the campaign did not force their products on the people. Instead, they developed the campaign in such a way that the people become so engaged that their preference has changed.
According to the analysis on the campaign, over four million people have been exposed to the Adidas campaign through the poll, the wallpapers, and the banner ads, among others. This is beyond the people who were engaged in the campaign itself, since only 50,000 people were friends with the Adidas MySpace profile. This means that Adidas used the people who were engaged in their campaign to turn their marketing method into something beyond what was intended.
All over the world, different brands have had similar success. Pizza Hut in South Korea launched a campaign in the Cyworld social network. It used a mini homepage in Cyworld as a campaign for its new Italian-style pizza. In eight weeks time, more than 50,000 orders of the pizza were made through the mini homepage. Also, the mini homepage generated more than four million views and made “friends” with over 50,000 Cyworld users. A South Korean movie Typhoon also used an Internet-based campaign, using banners which people can put on their Cyworld profiles; the result: over half a million members used the banners, and the views are obviously more overwhelming in number.
This is the power of Social Media: when using Social Media, you let go control of the campaign and trust your customers and your audience. When it enables the people to participate, they feel as if they belong to the brand or the service. It promotes loyalty and gives consumers a sense of belongingness. If advertising is communication, then using Social Media is engaging your customers into a meaningful conversation.
There are plenty of brand mentions to go around in Social Network Sites. Consumers continuously shape brand perception with their online conversations; This means your company and your brands’ reputation is on-the-line. What can you do? give the influencers something positive to talk about.
The above graphic by PR firm immediate future illustrates the number of brand mentions, for the top 25 brands, throughout a significant portion of the social media landscape for 2007.
Many companies have used social network sites to spread their message and to create brand awareness. Adidas and its campaign using a MySpace poll in its profile is one of the most cited examples of big companies using social networks. The poll itself generated more than 50,000 votes, but the whole campaign was seen by around four million MySpace users. For a campaign as minor as that, four million is a figure hard to ignore. Pizza Hut in South Korea, on the other hand, used Cyworld, and that too garnered an overwhelming response. Results such as these have prompted other brands to follow. And soon enough, Pontiac, Skittles, Victoria’s Secret, among several others, have used MySpace, Facebook, and other similar websites.
But despite these success stories, it is still a generalization to say that using social network sites as a means for promotion and marketing is for everyone. For some companies, this process will fit like a glove, which will obviously result to a positive outcome. For a number of brands, however, the process may be more strenuous, the results less sterling.
So how do you decide if you should use social network sites for your brand? Here are some factors and tips you should consider.
1. Are you customers members of social network sites? According to Social Media demographics, the online population can be classified into six types: producers, commentators, gatherers, joiners, observers, and inactives. Joiners, as the name implies, are those who join in various activities online. If majority of your customers are joiners, using social network sites as a means for marketing will be effective and can produce positive results. This simply says that you first have to make sure that you can reach to a significant number of customers before you make any marketing efforts through social networks. Age is one of the key factors you should take note of. If your brand caters to people ages thirteen to twenty-three, you must use social networks. If your customers are aged from twenty-four to thirty-five, your efforts will probably succeed too. On the other hand, if your customers are older, your marketing efforts may not yield substantial results. However, sites such as Facebook are exerting efforts to reach out to older people, so marketing through social network sites may become imperative regardless of the age of your clientele in the near future.
2. Will your customers be active? As in the case of Adidas and Pizza Hut, it has been proven that customers can be active in social network site marketing tactics. The level of participation will determine the success of your endeavor. If the level of participation will not be significant and the brand enthusiasm online is low, it is best to exert marketing efforts in other areas. At this stage, it may be imperative for you to know the online buzz regarding your brand.
3. Does your brand have online presence even before you exert effort? Social networks have been around for a number of years now. It is possible that someone has already created a MySpace profile or Facebook group of your brand. So before you use social network sites, check what’s already out there. If there are already existing groups or profiles, this should not discourage you from using social network sites. The fact that you will maintain the official page of the brand on MySpace, for example, will attract avid and enthusiastic customers, since you can use this to disseminate information and as a base for future marketing attempts. But on the other hand, you should not discourage these groups too. You should find a way to incorporate these existing pages and accounts. One of the mistakes of a number of organizations is shutting down unofficial profiles, just like what then presidential candidate (and now United States president) Barack Obama did with an unauthorized MySpace page. Do not view them as competition; rather, treat them as an ally.
4. Can your brand promote interaction through social network sites? If you do create MySpace or Facebook profile for your brand, the members who will add you as a “friend” are those with an existing relationship with your brand or service. So rather than just using the social network site profile as a means for marketing, you should use it to interact and communicate with your “friends.” This way, you are creating a deeper relationship which, in turn, could lead to brand loyalty. This can be done by using widgets, wallpapers, and other promotional tools and spreading them through your social networking profile. You should also respond to comments left by members; in bulk or individually, depending on the content. Of course, you will need to people to program your profile and to reply to messages and comments. With this done, you can use social network sites as a main base for your advertising effort.
Customers are talking about your brand - they expect you to listen; and they want you to join the conversation.
Reading Mike Blaneys‘ post reminded me of how many brands still don’t get it when it comes to customer communication. Your customers want to hear from you are you talking with them or still yelling at anyone who will listen?
Marketing is integral to the way brands and businesses “talk” to their market. Talking to the audience, in turn, is essential to making them loyal customers. In a way, this can be considered as a brand’s personal touch, as if a certain product is reaching out to the consumer personally, and the consumer is responding to its effort. All of them are vying for their action (purchasing a brand) and their loyalty (choosing the brand over others for a long period of time). And this is done through marketing. But in order to become more competitive today, you cannot simply rely on traditional forms of marketing; you need to join market conversations online, in blogs, discussion forums, and on social networking sites.
To grasp this concept fully it is imperative to understand how traditional marketing works. Marketing, simply put, is defined as the promotion of products. Traditionally, marketing is done through advertising and public relations. Advertising is a type of communication that aims to persuade people. This persuasion is not limited to convincing individuals to buy a product, although advertising is typically used for this purpose. Advertising can be used to persuade people to believe in a certain movement or information, to persuade people to change their perceptions about a certain issue, product, or person (as in election campaigns).Public relations, on the other hand, is a practice done to manage the flow of information, normally between an organization (or a person, a company,) and its intended public. Public relation professionals say it is about “doing good, and letting the public know about it.” And true to their word, this is how PR works. Public relation officers provide press releases to reporters hoping they will be interested to turn the information they provide into a legitimate news article. Of course, news articles or news broadcasts are more reliable and trusted compared to advertisements.
Of course! These methods do not always guarantee that the brand or product communicates or “talks to” its audience. At most, marketing helps the audience becomes aware of a product. This is mainly what advertising does, which is why communication experts say advertising “shouts” rather than “talks.” Advertising is more concerned with quantity rather than quality. It is concerned with getting the message or information across the most number of people possible at the most number of times without even bothering if it has changed the perception, the action, and the loyalty of the market. There are five factors that are between the advertisement and the buyer: awareness, consideration, preference, action, and loyalty. At its most effective, an advertisement can change the preference of an individual. But it takes more than that to turn this preference into action, which is what you need to do in order to make it benefit your brand or your business.
Today, people learn from each other rather than from advertisements or press releases. For one, people today are more perceptive. Once their perception is changed by a particular advertisement, they need more supplementary materials to validate their perception. They want answers to their questions regarding your brand—Is this really as good as it claims to be? Is it worth my money? Would I be satisfied?—and they turn to other people, presumably those who have already used the product, for information. Looking closely, this is how word of mouth works. Word of mouth is considered as genuine information, so it is more effective since the communication process is more dynamic. And thanks to social technologies, word of mouth is transformed, revved up by new, more dynamic mediums.
Conversation in these mediums is more dynamic because this is where people in the middle of marketing funnel (preference) talk about the product. Hence, this is a crucial arena, where preference can be transformed into action. Simply put, when a person’s preference has changed, he seeks information about the product. He goes online and reads blogs and discussions regarding the brand. And what he sees here can change preference to action (of course, it also works the other way around).
So how can joining conversations in Social Media be more effective than traditional marketing? Simple: because in Social Media, the communication is two-way. For example, there is a discussion about your brand, and customers post their questions on Social Media. Using the tools provided by Social Media, you can answer and address their concerns and questions directly. This type of action will seem like hard sell in advertising, but it is accepted in Social Media. In fact, people actually expect you to respond, or at least they would you to. If you do this, there will be an actual conversation. Unlike in advertising, answering queries, addressing issues, and clarifying information is not considered shouting. Instead, this can considered as talking, since both you and the consumers get to have their say on any existing matter or concern, which can shape preference into action and loyalty.
New Marketing is about listening to your customers, joining their conversations, and giving them something to talk about.
After reading Tibi Puius’ post, which aptly describes social media and social media marketing, I consider it expedient to expand upon the fundamentals of social media marketing by describing the 5 elemental activities that make-up a fruitful social media movement.
Social networking websites are easy to maintain, but many companies and brands still hesitate to use Social Media to advance their business. On the other hand, there are brands that use Social Media blindly, without any clear intention or goal. It is true that many companies use the Internet to promote their brand and their business; in fact, Social Media and Internet marketing strategies have been part of the mainstream for the longest tine that they already considered as two of the main marketing tools. Even multimillion companies use the Internet to promote their brand and their products, although Internet-based marketing strategies are often regarded as alternatives to mainstream business strategies. You look closely, however, and you would see that the objectives of brand and companies in using Social Media are integrated within basic and important business functions. Here are five of the basic objectives you can pursue in Social Media, and what type of basic business function it relates to.
1. Listen to your customers. Listening to your customers is one of the most important and worthwhile objectives to pursue in Social Media; in fact, it is considered as one of the basic strategies you can do on the Social Media for the benefit of your brand. For example, you post a blog entry on your company website regarding a particular product or service. You can instantly see the reactions and comments of visitors through the blog’s comment function. This can help your consumer research department since it can make monitoring the conversations of various consumers, as well as their preference and reactions, easier and much more effective. This can be used instead of traditional surveys, which can be strenuous and costly. Listening to customers works best for companies who actively seek the insight of their consumers.
2. Talk directly to your customers. Besides listening to customers, you can also respond to the customers directly; in a way, this function is similar to marketing, except the process is two-way, instead of the outbound communication done in traditional marketing. You can instantly respond to comments and issues raised by a customer through the comment page of a blog or a thread in a forum. When you talk to a customer directly, you are not merely talking to the person who raised the issue; in effect, you are talking to everyone who has access to that content, which makes the communication more like an open forum more than a private conversation.
3. Energize the market. In this objective, you make your most eager and most enthusiastic customers help sell the product to each other through word of mouth. This is how viral videos work; enthusiastic viewers send the view to other people, who will send the video to other people as well. Enthusiastic customers will share the information you provide to other people who are interested in your product or service, which could help further your sales. Word of mouth using the functions and features of Social Media has been used by companies as a means to spread information regarding a product. Of course, this strategy has been used for ages, but Social Media has made it easier since it enables people to send information to a number of people at a time.
4. Provide your customers with a venue to support each other. Since Social Media engages people to interact with one other, this is a perfect venue for your customers to support each other through the formation of forums, groups, and other related functions. This is especially true when the customers of a certain product have a natural affinity for one another, and where a level of support or camaraderie can help further the business. An example: video game console buyers are naturally inclined to go online and search for Social Media groups so they can interact with other console players.
5. Incorporate your customers. If you need to integrate the feedback of your customers, their output and reference, Social Media is the best way to embrace your customers so you can seamlessly integrate them into the very function of your business. This, however, can only be done if you have already succeeded in the four previous objectives, making it the most challenging (but also the most rewarding) out of all the basic objectives to pursue in Social Media.
