All posts in “Social Media Marketing”

The Evolving Digital Footprint: What is its impact on B2B vs B2C marketing strategies?

March 9, 2012 / Comments Off on The Evolving Digital Footprint: What is its impact on B2B vs B2C marketing strategies? / Posted in: Blog

Ruth Bastedo is Director and Group Head, Client Strategy and Innovation at Social Media Group. Follow @rutbas

These days, it’s hard to know whether you are presenting your “personal” or “professional” face to the world. As an example, I recently joined Pinterest. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. I was faced with a bit of a dilemma though, as an alarmingly large number of my business contacts started to “follow” me, I had to ask myself: do all these people really need to know that I actually really love the kettle green “Aga” stove?  This, is the totally fabulous stove:

Not to everyone’s taste, I grant you. Yet, I love this stove so much, that I compromised and “liked” it, but did not “repin” it. I’ve only actually re-pinned a couple of things so far… but the process did get me to thinking, if you were selling me a B2B service online, say software or consulting services, would it help you to know that I was the type of person to really groove on green stoves? I happen to already own a blue version of the Le Creuset kettle sitting on said stove. Have had it for 10 years. If I posted that information, would that help?

When I did a talk on the B2B vs B2C marketing topic at Social Media Marketing a few weeks ago, I did some musing on this topic. As marketers, we are going to be in a position soon where we have access to unprecedented amounts of information about our target customers.  As this information becomes more available to us it opens whole new doors to create increasingly personalized messages, offers and communications based on disparate pieces of knowledge, readily available with a little digging and the right tool set.

What are the implications of this?

The traditional differences between B2B and B2C Communications have typically looked like this:

While these differences are still very valid, I have to wonder if we’re moving into new territory. The world becomes a funny place, when we consult a variety of user reviews, professional reviews, social networks and blogs to buy either a funky green stove or a new piece of software for our business.

Observationally, I can see that the process of “making a decision” is starting to look remarkably similar, whether that decision is oriented to a business product, or consumer product.

The commonality is becoming the customer’s decision journey, especially in an online environment. The fact is the “customer” is increasingly becoming an individual person. The smart marketer, will start marketing to that person, reaching out to him or her in accordance with the individual’s unique worldview, tastes, interests, life stage, peer group, background and life experiences. The B2B and the B2C approaches to customers as people, actually start to merge.

As marketers, our job becomes pretty simple in some ways. We need to reach out to our customers at key points in their decision journey. We need to really work to understand where our content, offers and experiences can add value, build loyalty and trust, and anchor the customer to the product and/or brand experience.

I encourage you to check out the deck below for some pretty interesting examples of emerging models for “Customer Decision Journeys”. Any of us in the digital communications industry can start to see that there are a plethora of tools, platforms and mechanisms to reach our customers at the touch points that matter most. The big question for all of us will be, what kind of content are we going to provide to each particular customer, so that it is relevant, valuable and adds something to their noisy, and over saturated digital lives.

I bet a lot of people who also “liked” the green Aga stove on Pinterest at some point in their careers have been in a position to buy some kind of software product.  You just have to wonder if “green stove” people buy different types of software than “stainless steel stove people”… maybe yes, maybe no, but it’s an interesting question, and one worthy of consideration.

Social Marketing to B2B vs B2C: What's the Difference?

Is the Future of Advertising Many Lightweight Interactions Over Time?

March 8, 2012 / Comments Off on Is the Future of Advertising Many Lightweight Interactions Over Time? / Posted in: Blog

Leona Hobbs is Vice President & Partner at Social Media Group.

From Paul Adams (currently at Facebook, formerly head of social research at Google) comes this interesting post where he muses about the future of advertising:

To be a successful advertiser on the web in the future, you will need to build content based on many, lightweight interactions over time.

Now this certainly strikes a chord with me, as we work at SMG to bring content marketing services to our clients and shift their marketing activities from mass/broadcast to targeted/value-add. Mr. Adams considers the way people build relationships (any relationship) over time. We meet someone in passing, bump into them at a party, and gradually, over time we develop a friendship – a lasting relationship.

Because marketing and branding are very new relative to the history of our species (only 150 years old at best) it makes sense that we would build relationships with brands the same way. Many, lightweight interactions over time is how we’re wired to build deep, emotional connections. Therefore, our marketing plans should be built around this insight. We have intuitively and subconsciously made rough attempts at this by spreading our messages across multiple media—magazines, billboards, TV, radio, web banner ads. Add on the other lightweight interactions we have with brands—in the retail store, chatting with our friends, seeing other people use the brand—and we have an interesting framework: many, lightweight interactions over time.

Paul Adams thinks disruption and attention as the framework for advertising is ending and I am inclined to agree. Attention, however, is still what we’re after, and as marketers, we need to earn that attention. Many of our clients are facing the reality that their marketing must change to provide a sustained stream of value-added branded content, quality interactions and experiences with fans and followers and remarkable experiences offline and on. Maggie and I have been singing this song for a few years now: success with integrated digital and social media marketing = sustained momentum in channel + campaign.

Because we build relationships with things through many lightweight interactions over time, advertising will need to do the same to be heard. Although specific short-term campaigns around launching new products and new product variants will exist, they will be built on top of a solid ‘always-on’ foundation. The ‘always-on’ foundation will be far more important than short term campaigns because that is how people act in real life. Our real life relationships with friends are ‘always-on’. Our real life relationships with brands are ‘always-on’. Advertising will need to be the same.

The entire post is certainly worth a read. Also, Paul Adam’s book Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web contains more relevant insights for marketers as we shift our modi operandi to build lasting relationships with our customers.

Social Media Roundup for August 26th, 2011

August 26, 2011 / Comments Off on Social Media Roundup for August 26th, 2011 / Posted in: Blog, Social Media Roundup

August is certainly not a quiet month in the tech and social media worlds. This week was a busy one. On the 24th, Steve Jobs, again, successfully announced his latest “mind-blowing” product called “iQuit”… but I think everyone has already seen this news in their feeds and across the front pages, so we won’t spend too much time on that subject!

On the social network front, Facebook and Twitter both made announcements this week.

Lets take a look at Facebook first:

Facebook has made some significant changes to its privacy settings. Users now can now share to specific people or groups, essentially increasing user control over who see what.

Privacy

They also updated their location services. In addition to the existing Places check-ins, users can now add location information to wall posts and photos.

Facebook Location

From allfacebook.com

Here’s a list of the major improvements.

  • The privacy settings are moving toward individual post windows and profiles.
  • Users are gaining the ability to approve tags of themselves in others’ posts and photos.
  • All tags will include an attribution of the person who did the tagging.
  • Places no longer require physical check-ins, so people can add locations to posts, even from the desktop.
  • You don’t need to be friends with someone to tag them in a post or photo.
  • You don’t have to like a brand to tag it in a post or photo.
  • Facebook has changed the word “everyone” to “public” in privacy settings, for clarity.
  • You can customize privacy, or visibility of information, on a post-by-post basis.
  • Users can edit the visibility of individual bits of content anytime after they post.
  • The changes don’t affect mobile users, at least not for now.

Speaking of Twitter:

Twitter has begun its new photo sharing feature to its users. The new photo service allows users to attach photos with their tweets, which could pretty much replace the similar functions provided by 3rd party vendors such as TwitPic over the past years. It means that users can now generate richer content on Twitter than merely text. But on the other hand, the new function makes Twitter feeds resemble a Facebook wall post, which has always allowed users to share many types of media content.

Twitter photo

Are we forgetting about Google+?

Last week at a Social Media Today Webinar, Our CEO Maggie Fox presented some of the latest stats of Google+ as it approaches its two-month birthday. Instead of going into detail on people’s reaction to functionally, I think it is better to let the numbers do the talking.

From singlegrain.com

  • 74% of Google+ users are male

Top 10 Occupations of Google+ users

  1. 10.05% Software Engineer
  2. 10.77% Designer
  3. 13.57% Developer
  4. 24.56% Engineer
  5. 4.88% Writer
  6. 4.23% Web Developer
  7. 3.67% Software Developer
  8. 3.05% Programmer
  9. 3.05% Photographer
  10. 2.79% Artist

Google+ has gained over 25 million registered users in about two months. But the question is, how many active users are there?  Or let me ask you this, when was the last time you checked your Google+ account and saw new feeds from anyone of your circles?

It is not hard to recognize that some of the latest changes Facebook and Twitter made align to the aesthetics of Google+.  So do people really need Google+ if other platforms are offering the exact same services? I think we are all still looking forward to see what Google will do next in the social space battle.

Social Media Roundup for January 14, 2011

January 14, 2011 / 4 Comments / Posted in: Blog, Social Media Roundup

We Love Our Facebook

OnlineSchools.org released a great infographic this week, detailing the ways that people use (or sometimes over-use?) Facebook.

It’s interesting to note, but not too surprising, just how far Facebook’s reach extends: 1 in every 13 people on Earth are active on Facebook.

The one statistic to which I turn a crooked eyebrow is that “57% of people talk to people more online than they do in real life.”  Saying “in real life” when meaning “offline” is a popular turn of phrase, but a misguided one. Online communication and activity is just as “real” and can be equally as meaningful as what we do offline. I’d also be interested to see how this factor was measured – is real life just face to face? Where do phone conversations fall?

Nonetheless, there’s no denying the remarkable impact and reach of this platform. Do the statistics outlined here indicate “obsession?” Or just that people like to communicate with one another, and this is the popular tool du jour?

Social Media Trends for 2011

The folks over at Focus Research have published their 2011 Trends Report on Social Media Marketing. This is a targeted, concise guide to what experts like Jay Baer, Stephanie Marx, and our own Maggie Fox predict for the year ahead. Be sure to check it out!

Surprise! Your Airline Wants to Do Something Nice For You!

This week, four members of the SMG staff got stranded in various airports around the U.S., thanks to the wintry weather, myself included. As we can attest first-hand, waiting for a flight can be a stressful, long and incredibly boring process.  KLM Royal Dutch Airlines wanted to make it a little more fun for a few of its passengers. Using their checkins on FourSquare and mentions on Twitter, KLM identified a few select passengers to receive small gifts, personalized to them (based on information available in their public profiles). Check out the results!

Social Media Monitoring Platforms – How to Choose?

There are a lot of social media monitoring platforms to pick from out there, and it can be hard to cut through the clutter and pick one that’s right for you and your business. This week, J.D. Lascia and Kim Bale at Socialmedia.biz put out a great resource to help you compare and contrast all the different choices, including tools like Radian6 and Sysomos.

Cat Face – He’s Got a Big Cat Face

And finally, the video we can’t get out of our heads this week: Cat Face.

In terrible news for my productivity both at work and at home, it seems that there are 23 more Cat Face videos. I will be watching them all.

Social Media Group & Digg Co-Author whitepaper: Best Practices in Online Conversational Marketing

April 22, 2010 / 2 Comments / Posted in: Blog

At Social Media Group, we work with our clients to deploy programs to add scale to social media efforts. We’ve had some amazing results with DiggAds, so we teamed up with our friends at Digg to co-author a brand spanking new whitepaper: Best Practices in Online Conversational Marketing to share the core tactics for success in this emerging space.

From the whitepaper:

Even though media and communications technologies are changing quickly, smart marketing best practices still hold true. Great marketing has always been a conversation; a conversation that companies need to listen to so that they can learn how to join in the discussion appropriately. More and more, that dialogue directly involves brands, including yours and your competitors. Digg users are already bringing you into their conversations on their own. For example, 166,000 pieces of content about the iPhone, 10,000 about Nike and 19,000 about IBM have been submitted by users over the last three years.

The fact that people interact, share and create content with their families, friends and communities is a core foundation for social media-fueled digital communications. The Edelman Trust Barometer tells us that  recommendations or content from “people like me” are trusted almost three times more than your marketing materials.

It is also true that generating earned media takes work, but is so worth the time and investment because earned media is such a credible social object and asset to the brand. Companies spend gazillions of dollars creating whiz-bang digital properties for marketing campaigns.  All too frequently, these high-quality assets aren’t given the right kind of support from paid media to drive interaction and engagement with the customer.

Sixty-two percent of advertisers say their traditional ad channels are not working as well as they have in the past.

We need new approaches to drive intent and consideration and conversational marketing to add scale to our social media and digital marketing programs. And for the love of Pete, in doing conversational marketing we must remember what we know to be true about social media – we listen first, we enter conversations to add value and we participate respectfully in an honest and transparent manner.

Over the past while, our team here at Social Media Group has been experimenting with various approaches and platforms to add scale to social media campaigns. One of these experiments was with DiggAds, in their closed pilot phase last year. We learned a tonne and had a blast generating some pretty cool results.  Chas Edwards, publisher and chief revenue officer at Digg, Maggie Fox, Michele Husak, Director of Communications at Digg, and I put our heads together, had great chats about insights and trends and wrote up “Best Practices in Online Conversational Marketing“, a whitepaper to share with you.

Please check it out and let us know what you think.