Tag Archives: marketing

February 17, 2012

Establishing a Premium Position in the Market

By Gerardo A. Dada

Today I had the opportunity to present at the Austin luncheon lunch on how to establish a premium position in the marketplace.

The key points form the presentation:

  1. Building a premium product is about differentiating by focusing on a segment of customers who are willing to pay more for a product that serves them better. Premium products are created by value.
  2. People buy emotionally – then justify their decisions rationally
  3. People buy experiences
  4. Price communicates value
  5. Packaging communicates value
  6. Happy, empowered employees create value

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January 23, 2012

Building a Global Online Strategy

By Gerardo A. Dada

The World is flat. If you have a website or run an online business, it is global by definition. As a business grows it starts thinking about how to optimize their online presence to better serve customers around the world.

Photo courtesy of wilmack via Creative Commons

The way it usually works is that a subsidiary uses part of its marketing budget to create a local site and local content. Over time this problem gets bigger and bigger, often ending up with multiple websites with no coherent strategy. The result is uncoordinated infrastructure investment efforts, inconsistent experience for customers, back-end integration challenges, privacy governance problems and continued investment in localization.

What is missing is a global online strategy. While building a global online strategy must be done in a way that is relevant to your own business, I want to offer a few ideas or best practices that could help:

1. A single online infrastructure and one global user experience.

In a world of global consumers, political boundaries and languages are becoming somewhat irrelevant (not totally, of course). Customers travel, migrate, commute and deliver services globally. B2B companies have subsidiaries and regional offices in multiple countries. Privacy, compliance and user experience governance is better done centrally. With all this under consideration, it makes more sense to have a single, adaptable, global site.

This means a single global infrastructure that allows you to have a single strategy, one investment and consistency across regions on aspects such as your content delivery network strategy, PCI/HIPAA compliance, video management platform, personalization, back-end/ERP integration, privacy compliance, CRM strategy, URL shortening, social strategy, etc..

It also means having a central point of view and strategy for user experience: registration, social integration, newsletter subscriptions, profile and personalization, order history, and other preferences.

Web infrastructure is not cheap: content management systems can be expensive, especially if you are buying one for every region. Implementation and maintenance (people) costs are usually about 10x the cost of the software, which means using Open Source instead of a commercial app can have marginal cost savings benefit, sometimes negative if open source requires more customization and maintenance. Maintaining multiple content management systems can get quite complex, especially when you consider content federation, syndication, localization and content lifecycle.

2. Define your language translation strategy and priorities

The two key pieces of information you need are country (for shipping as well as to present local stores, events, promotions, etc,) and language – these should be ideally two separate preferences.

Plan your user experience to allows international visitors to find their locale (country and language) quickly and can change their preferences easily. Their current IP address should be used for suggestions only – you don’t want all your sites to switch to Japanese if you travel to Tokyo for a week.

The first decision is to decide what languages require support and in wat priorities based on your business strategy. Start by understanding the revenue contribution from each country, primary languages – and most importantly, what countries and customer profiles require a localized online experience.

It could be that your target customer in a particular country actually prefers English content. This is common for technology buyers who perceive (correctly) that English content is more compete, more up to date and more accurate (free from translation mistakes).  It could also be that your buyer is more comfortable in English but the actual end users require localized language. It could be that the culture in a particular culture requires localization as a business courtesy and a sign that you care for customers in that country and respect their nationality.

Once you understand priorities, a site map should be used to determine what content needs to be translated. Some companies translate only the top one or two levels on their website, others only pre-sales content, others a mix based on more complex decision-making. A best practice I have observed when one the top-level of content is translated is that at content that is not localized is still made available but there is a mark on the link (as simple as an asterisk) that indicates the content behind that link is in English. Once you have this, you should start forming an idea of the amount of content required to support each additional language.

The next step is to decide on your localization process. It can be as sophisticated as manual, outsourced translation by native speakers to using Google translate. A balanced approach could use assisted translation: machine translation that is reviewed by translators for accuracy. Using a standard dictionary for consistency of use of technical terms, informal language expressions and phrases is a best practice here.

A very important, and often overlooked, part of this process is to think about how will you update content. This means having a strategy not only to translate the initial set of content, but also considering ongoing process to update content based on what changes in the original site. It also means building the dependencies between localized and original content in case the original content is retired, updated or deleted (i.e. for legal reasons).

3. True internationalization requires taking into account Culture

Building a global online presence is tricky because of all the little things that change from culture to culture. Certain colors, terms or images may be offensive in a particular culture. Certain words change meaning from country to country. There are historic cultural sensitivities that impact, for example, using Spanish from Spain in Latin America. Religion, business practice, privacy and many other factors come into play.

For large organizations. it is useful to establish a central location (i.e. a Wiki) with guidelines and tips to make content more culturally sensitive. This means, what colors to avoid, what tone to use when addressing specific cultures, what type of advertising or messages could be considered inappropriate, etc.

4. Centralization with Local Empowerment

Centralizing your online presence after the local marketing team has built a country or regional site can present organizational challenges. The local team should welcome the fact they won’t have to invest time and resources maintaining online infrastructure, however there will be a concern over loss of control and a legitimate need to be able to have control over local promotions, local activities and local content.

The worst possible outcome is that the new global site becomes the excuse for poor regional financial performance. This can be avoided if you involve the regional teams from the beginning of the project, if they provide input in the requirement gatherings phase and if the site is built to enable some degree of local control.

Most modern content management systems enable delegation features that make it easy to determine what parts of the site can be changes by regional teams and which ones should not. It is important to define these rules from the beginnig. For example, for brand consistency and IP protection, the global/corporate team should be defining global logo usage, site images, colors and overall brand image.

Local teams might have the ability to create certain number of pages, control local offers, maintain the local event calendar, promote local case studies, feature local press activities and influence the SEO strategy to include keywords relevant in a particular region. In other words, they could enjoy the benefits of a global site while still maintaining some level of autonomy and power to influence their local business.

All the decisions and points above have budget and process implications. How will they affect corp/local budget distribution? Who will pay for localization? what to do with existing web-aligned people in the regions? etc. No one said this would be easy.

5. Global Site as a Service and Governance.

This brings an interesting concept: The global online team as a service. For a central/global web team to be effective there needs to be an agreed SLA with the regions/subsidiaries and a defined process for capturing feedback and allowing them to participate in the definition of future development of new features and enhancements

Reciprocally, the local team must agree to abide by a set of agreed rules, made very clear in a policy document with specific enforcement controls, for aspects such as buying and using domains, social media participation, launching and maintaining tactical regional microsites, and probably most importantly, a customer data strategy, which brings us to the last point.

6. Customer Data and Privacy Strategy

In some countries, violation of privacy laws is punished severely and could result in people going to jail. In many global companies, a violation of the policy (creating a microsite around corp guidelines that allows customers to register or sending an email with an excel file with names and email addresses) results in immediate termination of the employee.

You probably have heard of the Google execs that went to jail for allowing an end-user to upload illegal content to YouTube in Italy, even after the video was taken down quickly after it was flagged. This is an extreme case, of course, the intention is not to scare you but to make you aware of the importance of the legal aspects one must consider, starting with privacy laws.

A basic set of guidelines will define what information should be captured, what re the guidelines for allowing people under age to register and what is considered ‘under age’ in each country, clear policies for handling PII (personally identifiable information) including how it should be stored (a central repository with encryption) and deletion, credit card information handling and PCI compliance, opt-in/opt-out, global unsubscribe and customer preferences.

It is a lot of work, yes. Is it easy? absolutely not. But it is certainly worthwhile. The Web is quickly becoming the most important customer interaction channel for all types of organizations – it already is for many. The good news? once you build a global online presence based on a solid strategy your company (and hopefully you) will enjoy its benefits for many years to come. I hope this posts helps you get there.

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February 13, 2011

Adaptive Marketing

By Gerardo A. Dada

Welcome to The Adaptive Marketer.

As I reflect on my career I have been thinking about how the marketing profession has changed over the last few years:  the internet, mobile devices, social media and now tablets are just examples of drastic changes in the world we live that are changing the marketing profession.

In a way, the challenges marketers face today with social media (“I guess I need a Facebook page but I don’t know what to do with it”) are very similar with the challenges marketers had 10 years ago with the internet (“I guess I need a web page but I don’t know what to do with it”). The way people interact, research information and buy products has changed.

Consumers are evolving faster than corporations. The gap is a threat for existing businesses and an opportunity for entrepreneurs.

A great case study is Blockbuster. The company recently went into bankruptcy and was de-listed from NASDAQ.  What I find really interesting is that the rise and fall off Blockbuster happened over a span of only a few years. The chart below shows the stock price for the last 10 years. It is reasonable to assume the business failed because of an inability to adapt to the new world, a new world that created an opportunity that was captured by Redbox and Netflix.

It is easier to be a historian than to be a prophet, of course. I imagine there were conversations in the Blockbuster conference rooms talking about market dynamics and threats – but it is hard to change the status quo. It is really hard to fundamentally change a business when it is generating billions in revenue

Today marketers at large face a similar dilemma. The marketing tools that worked 50 years ago don’t work anymore.  Marketing no longer can be only about creating messages and buying media to broadcast those messages. Today’s marketer must think about how to empower and amplify customers to be advocates. CMOs know they need to balance their investments by shifting dollars and focus to digital and social, but the path is unclear. Marketers know mobile is another disruptive change – few know what to do with it.

As Christopher Stutzman from Forrester puts it, “To Avoid Extinction, Marketers Must Replace The Bad Habits Of Traditional Marketing With The Habits Of Adaptive Marketing”. In short, marketers must become adaptive.

I considered choosing a name for the blog that was centered on Social Media, but then I realized that social media is only one of the discontinuities that is impacting marketers. I already had a blog on Mobility. I have blogged about the web too. If I call my blog something about social media, I would have to change the blog in a few years. Or months.

Peter Drucker published The Age of Discontinuity back in 1968 (before I was born!). he wrote  “Businessmen will have to learn to build and manage an innovative organization. They will have to learn to build and manage a human group that is capable of anticipating the new, capable of converting its vision into technology, products and process, and willing and able to accept the new.”

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August 18, 2010

The 10 Rules of Customer Centricity

By Gerardo A. Dada

I was reading Bruce Temkin’s report, The 6 laws of customer experience, which has a number of similarities with an article I wrote for 1 to 1 Magazine published in January, so I decided to post the full article here: 

The 10 Rules of Customer Centricity

Build long-term relationships and business success by acting in the customer’s best interest.

Many companies claim customer centricity in their list of company values, in their organizational tenets, or in their mission statement. Being customer centric is not easy. Use these 10 rules to assess your organization’s customer centricity:

1. Co-create with customers. Involve customers in the design, test, and ongoing improvement of your products with tools like advisory boards, customer design meetings, and beta programs. Don’t focus on features and specs; instead focus on how you are helping customers get a specific job done. At Threadless, for example, customers design, vote on, and order shirts before they are produced. Starbucks captures customer ideas and feedback via StarbucksIdeas.com.

2. Incent your sales team to be customer centric.  Most sales teams get bonuses based on quarterly or monthly sales and profitability, yet satisfaction and loyalty are the leading indicators for future profitability and long-term success. At leading companies, customer satisfaction is measured twice a year and the results directly impact executive compensation.

3. Empower front-line employees. Ritz-Carlton hotel employees at all levels are empowered to spend up to $2,000 per guest to do whatever needs to be done to make customers happy.

4. Happy employees = happy customers. Simple, but true. A company that values employees is a company where people enjoy working and, therefore, they do a good job.

5. Your customers are not assets, they are your reason to be.  Peter Drucker said the purpose of the organization is to create a customer. The relationship you build with customers is, therefore, the foundation for success. Are you trying to extract as much money from customers or are you building relationships? Are you charging “convenience fees” that generate what Fred Reicheld calls bad profits like car rental companies that charge outrageous prices for gas? Kimpton Hotels’ loyalty program members are delightfully surprised by getting $10 worth of mini-bar items for free.

6. Contact Us. Really. Go to your website and measure how long it takes you to find your organization’s contact information: a real email and phone number. Pretend to be a customer to learn your response times via email and your toll-free number. At customer-centric companies people answer the phone within seconds, executives answer customer calls directly, and they publish names, phone numbers, and email addresses on their site.

7. Listen to customers proactively.  You can do this the old-fashion way via customer service reports that feed product development, customer surveys, and other tools. Today companies are also required to listen – and respond – to the social web: Twitter, blogs, Facebook, etc. Beyond listening, you must empower people to respond and to fix problems. Do you have the processes to capture, organize, prioritize, and act on what you are hearing?

8. Focus on the customer experience. Get in your customer’s shoes. Pretend to be a customer to understand their end-to-end experience and what goes on in their mind at each step. Executives at a courier company went through the experience of actually shipping a product and tracking it to delivery. Software product managers go to customer’s homes to witness their experience from installing to using to troubleshooting the product.

9. Customer orientation. This means putting the customers’ needs first. The customer is not always right, but you really need to focus on making them happy. I owned a computer store in the 1980s. A customer walked in ready to buy a new computer because the old one was very slow. I suggested buying more memory, which solved the problem. The customer was blown away that I offered an inexpensive product when he was ready to buy a new computer. Not only was he my customer for life, buying multiple computers and accessories, he also referred lots of business to me and we became great friends.

10. Make money from your customers. Making money from customers is OK. They will gladly give their money to a company they value. Ritz Carlton estimates customer lifetime value at over $1 million – what is yours? An unhappy customer will probably tell a dozen people about their bad experience. Acquiring a new customer usually costs $300 or more. It is a better business proposition to keep your customers happy and make money from them over time by building a long-term relationship, not a transactional one that ends at the cash register.

Truly embracing customer centricity requires transforming the organization. The book The Discipline of Market Leaders suggests that organizations align behind one of three core disciplines: operational excellence (think McDonald’s), product leadership (think Apple) or customer intimacy (think Nordstrom). The “chosen” discipline defines the company strategy and culture and therefore the chances for success. Embracing customer centricity presents an incredible opportunity for differentiation, becoming a source for competitive advantage.

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February 17, 2010

The question no one is asking

By Gerardo A. Dada

I have had the privilege of working with online communities for over 10 years. In the technology world, online communities -mainly forums- are a fundamental part of how people learn, share and help each other with technical questions.

As companies evolve their thinking about how how to leverage social media, CMOs are realizing social media is not a strategy, but a tool to support a strategy. This was one of the central points for my Web 2.0 presentation almost a year ago. The freedom that social media strategists enjoyed to experiment (and spend) without any ROI measurment is coming to an end. As Mike Svatel told me yesterday, pageviews don’t make payroll.

I started wondering what was the success rate and what was the longevity for online communities. Marketers celebrate the launch of a new community but no one talks about a community that dies. So I went back to the press releases from major community vendors to see how the communities they bragged about a year or two ago were doing now. The results are captured in my latest slideshare presentation.

Please note, my intention is not to discredit or attack community platform vendors, the companies or the marketers behind these communities. My goal is simply to point out building communities is really hard. I believe internal (employee-facing) have the potential to transform gow businesses operate (in a good way) and I have always believed in the value of support communities.  Maybe this is why Gartner puts social suites right at the trough of Disilusionment in their latest hype cycle.

Customer-facing standalone community sites can be successful when you have a very loyal following. When I was responsible for developer comunities at Microsoft it was easy because developers make their livelyhood on their knowledge related to Microsoft technologies. Developers and IT Pros advertise their Microsoft certifications on their business card. There are thousands of user groups (offline communities) worldwide. It’s their livelyhood.

Harley Davidson can pull it off because the members of HOG are a community of people who represent a lifestyle. people tatoo the Harley logo on their body. Unless your customers tatoo your brand on your bodies or self-organize in user groups around the country, building a standalone community site is really hard.

Marketers want to own the conversation. But they can’t. It was years ago ben McConnel and Jackie Huba wrote about the shift of control to customers. Brands can’t create a community. They can participate, foster, enhance a community. Because a ommunity is not a site or a marketing campaign. After all, a community is about the relationships between like minded people and the ideas they exchange.

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November 18, 2009

7 Steps to a Successful Trade Show

By Gerardo A. Dada

It seems every good marketing plan needs to include industry event participation to be complete. Sometimes we go to trade shows to leads, sometimes because “you have to be visible” and sometimes because we went last year so we signed up for this year as well. Yet , in my humble opinion most marketers do a poor job at events.

Here are my 7 suggestions to make your trade show participation a success.

1. Define a Strategy - Why are you going to the event in the first place? Are you there for awareness? to drive leads? to engage with press and analysts? defining a very specific and clear goal is the first step to a successful event. Think about the number of leads you will get in relation to the total costs for exhibiting (booth, travel, opportunity cost, etc.), the right conclusion may be not to be at an event.

2. Refine your Value Proposition – Have you ever walked a show floor? think about how you scan booths as you walk by. Most people probably spend two or three seconds reading the signage on a booth before deciding if it is something they are interested in – otherwise they will continue walking and scanning. Next time you go to a trade show study how people walk by the aisles.

This means you have about 8 words to tell people why should they stop and talk to you. You have one chance to get their attention. I find it amusing how bad we marketers are at this: most booths have meaningless slogans like ”High Performance Digital Solutions” – what does it mean? what exactly do you sell?  why should I care? You could play bulls##t bingo walking a trade show.

3. Focus - Attract the right people. Surely you have studies the event prospectus and you know what kind of people will be attending. From here, based on your strategy, you need to decide what titles/roles and company profiles you want to talk to. We are too quick to think in terms of booth visitors, coming up with ever more creative giveaways. Handing out t-shirts will surely keep your booth busy, but will it attract the type of people you want? Would the qualified buyer you wanted to talk to walk by because your team was too busy handing out t-shirts to everyone?

4. Time Management - For most companies, the goal of trade show participation is to generate leads. This means three things: first, qualify every visitor to your booth. Second, spend as little time as possible with non-qualified leads: be courteous, hand out a datasheet or a giveaway if they request one and move on. Third, spend quality time with qualified leads but not too long: once you know the lead is a viable prospect, you have provided valuable information to increase their interest and captured their contact information, it is probably smart to move on to the next customer. There will be more time later to continue the conversation with this customer, do an in-depth demo or needs assessment. Of course, you need to use your judgement based on your product and buying process, customer interest and how busy your booth is.

5. Ask, don’t tell.  Good sales people listen 70% of the time. Do the math: you only need to speak 30% of the time. Most booth staff are too quick to jump into a sales pitch and a demo as soon as someone walks by. After qualifying a person ask them why they stopped, what problems they are trying to solve, what solutions they have considered, how much they know about your company and your product and what specific questions they have. This will accomplish a couple things: first, you will come across as more genuinely interested in helping the customer; second, you will know enough to tailor your presentation or demo to the specific needs of the customer; and third, it will save them from spending 5 minutes listening to a pitch that makes no sense at all.

6. Follow Up. Marketers do a terrible job at following up on trade show leads. Often, what happens after a trade show is that a spreadsheet with names and contact info is sent to the sales team or to the telemarketing team where they go to a black hole. If you involve sales from step 1 when you are defining your strategy, you should have a follow-up strategy and plan weeks before the event. At the very least send each prospect an email thanking them for attending, providing useful resources and contact information. Tink about creative ways to engage customers in the form of a poll, a free analysis, a white paper, or some other high-value material.

7. Learn.  Trade shows are great opportunities to learn about the market, trends, your competition, and above all  to learn about customers. Often times, the most valuable conversations I have had at an event have been during lunch or dinner when I go to the main meal room and seat at a table with 9 customers or industry peers that I had not met before. Yet, most booth people miss this opportunity: as soon as booth duty is over they have lunch together as a pack. Make the most of every opportunity to meet customers. Some times, I seat at more than one table during lunch to maximize my opportunities to learn – and to have an extra dessert :-)

Have fun at your next event!

 

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July 28, 2009

The Online Marketer’s Quest for Web Effectiveness

By Gerardo A. Dada

Online marketers, like most other professionals, are expected to do more with less – especially in challenging  economic times. Onlinemarketers are trying to find out how to increase Web site and campaign effectiveness, which can be measured in terms of unique visitors, click-throughs or leads. Marketers in eCommerce companies have a bit more focused goals, focusing on conversions and average order value, often acheved via up-selling and cross-selling.

Key to meeting these objectives is to ensure people visiting your Web site or receive email communications from your company are presented with the most useful information and the most powerful offers for them. In this quest of finding the best message, the best offer, the best banner ad, marketers have tried a number of different tools from personalization to analytics to a/b testing. It is easy to get too exited about these tools, but at the end of the day, it is critical to understand these are only tools to improve relevance.

Relevance is the key to Web site effectiveness. But how to make your messages more relevant? Most studies show Web site visitors have very limited patience: if they can’t find what they need in three clicks, they are gone. This means you have one or two chances to give each individual customer exactly what he or she is looking for: the product they want, the answer to the question they have, the information they need. This post aims to provide an overview of the tools available to increase relevance.

The first step is Analytics. You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Analytics can tell you how many people are visiting each page or consume each of the resources that you make available  on your site, what are the most common click-through paths, exit pages and many other useful data points. Unfortunately, most organizations don’t have the people or the time to properly study the analytics data to derive business insight and to act on this insight. maybe because it is hard to show ROI for these activities outside of media and online commerce.

One of my favorite phrases is “Your opinion (as a marketer), while interesting, is irrelevant“. No matter how smart you are, you can only guess what will be most attractive for your customers. therefore, one of the fundamental principles of marketing communications is to test everything. In this age it is inconceivable to run a banner ad without at least testing a few messages. Testing multiple messages takes very little effort and, in my experience, the results often surprise you. When testing 4 or 5 different banner ads, it is not uncommon to find a 5x difference in performance. The same applies to direct mail, email promotions, etc.

But testing banner ads and messages manually is very time consuming, although certainly worthwhile for large campaigns. This is where a/b testing comes in. A/B testing tools automate the process of presenting multiple offers to customers, sometimes based on a specific segment, reporting results in real time and adapting your site to use the message that proved to be most effective in tests.

MVT Testing take this concept further by testing multiple variables: message, color, position, offer, etc. – and all their possible permutations. MVTcan be incredibly powerful to fine-tune offers and promotions in any website. As good as they are, adoption of A/B and MVT tools has been very limited, mostly in eCommerce companies. As with analytics, resourcing is part of the problem.

A/B and MVT have their own challenges: First, it is still for the most part a manual process. Second, you could be testing all the wrong things – the process still requires someone to decide what messages or what elements to test. Last, these tools require some time to run (the more variables in play the longer it takes for MVT to produce statistically-valid results) and they are focused on past behavior.

This is where a new breed of tools come in: Content Recommendations, offered by companies like Vignette, Omniture, Loomia and others. While there are differences between how these products work, the fundamental premise is the same: to observe customer behavior, and to automatically determine what is the most relevant content, product or offer for a particular customer based on what similar customers have found to be useful.

A short story to illustrate: An architect builds an office complex with multiple buildings a parking garage, a cafeteria and other services.  The buildings open to the tenants but there are no concrete pathways between buildings, the architect has left all the open space covered in grass. After a few weeks, the paths that people take to go from one building to the other are clear from the wear in the grass. Over time, the grass is gone in these paths. The architect then paves thee paths with concrete. He did not try to guess which way people would walk. He observed and acted on actual behavior. Recommendation technologies pave the path between website visitors and the content they want.

Now a specific example: An online tax service is trying to make their website more useful. During tax season, many customers would go to their site and look for “Form 1099″. Traditional search tools would use a keyword-based algorithm to find the web pages and documents where the keyword “Form 1099″ occurred more often. Instead, Recommendations technology observes that most visitors who type “form 1099″ in the search box actually end up opening, downloading and printing a file called IRS1099-A.pdf and then spend some time in a page labeled “how to fill your tax return”, so it presents these two resources at the top of the search results, even though the keyword may not even appear i the actual page or file. This scenario is what is being called social search.

Another advantage of Recommendations is that it can adapt in almost real-time to changes. Imagine a celebrity appearing on TV on a Friday afternoon wearing some very chic aluminum sunglasses. Everyone who is watching the TV show wants to buy these sunglasses. The first visitors to your eCommerce site would have to navigate a bit to find the exact product, but after a few visitors buy the item, recommendations technology “paves” the way for other visitors, a process that could take minutes. Your analytics person or campaign marketer could be asleep or on vacation and recommendations technology has learned from customers  and adapted the site to show the now very hot item in the most prominent position.

As with any new technology, there are differences between the offerings from recommendation technology vendors. There are a couple key aspects to consider when evaluating them:

  • The observation technology – it can go from the very simple (clicks-based) to te very advanced (some measure over 30 heuristics).
  • The algorithm to determine what to recommend – some call it the wisdom of crowds engine
  • How similar visitors are grouped – behavioral segmentation and integration with your explicit profile data
  • Content database – how it is organized, categorized and updated as items become available or are retired
  • Presentation model – how the recommendations are integrated into your overall website experience

This is very exciting technology that is likely to produce big results for most web sites who implement the technology but more importantly for customers in general.

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December 12, 2008

Marketing and Social Hubs

By Gerardo A. Dada

Today a colleague pointed me to an interesting post that talks about Social Hubs and how companies participate in these hubs. I posted a loong comment that I thought I could share as a blog post on my own:

 

I think marketers will continue to do traditional marketing and advertising. But participation in social networks will be part of the marketing toolbox, and in many cases more important than traditional marketing. Jackie Huba (author of Citizen Marketers) calls this the fifth ‘marketing P’ – Participation.

 

You bring a really interesting point – maybe not explicitly: the social networks exist, and sites like Twitter and Linked in are simply tools where the people that form the hub meet. It is like a group of friends who can meet at a bar, at a sporting event or at a friend’s house. The group of friends is the social network itself and the bar or venue is the tool they use to interact. The community exists independent of the tool.

 

Like you, I am a firm believer in the power of social + enterprise content (what you call user generated content with professional content) and that integration deliver tremendous value to end users. But I have a different vision on how to get there: I don’t think marketers should moderate or editorialize social media. As you say, it is about trust and transparency – but this requires authenticity and personal conversations. The marketer can present both social and professional content labeling each as such: “here is the unedited content from the community, and here is our official corporate content”.

 

We did this at Microsoft where in our web properties and some of our products a search query will produce the official company “editorial” results, content from Microsoft bloggers and answers from the community. Social media is integrated on the website, technical support, marketing activities and also in the product Help system. Even the technical documentation is now a wiki.

 

Measurement tools and paradigms need to shift. It is not enough to measure community engagement or activity, maybe we should measure trust and sentiment. Maybe even loyalty. It is about winning hearts and minds.

 

About your question of how to identify the hubs? I see this as one of the intrinsic values of social media: it fosters the gravitation of people with similar goals and interests towards areas where they can have a conversation. Social media is enabling conversations across geographies, cultures and organizational boundaries.

 

Here is quote from the Cluetrain Manifesto written almost 10 years ago:

 

“Markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking…the human voice is unmistakably genuine… Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It’s going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.”

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