Social media marketing takes the next step in 2010, from the next new thing to a powertool in the integrated marketer’s toolbox, for both business-to-business and consumer marketing, as reported last week in major marketing and technology media articles and blog posts.
BtoB Magazine reports “cautious optimism,” especially over ad budget increases, and the “integration of social media as a marketing tool” as top trends in 2010.
Forbes columnist Jeremiah Owyang opines that “senior marketers must have a plan for social marketing” as consumer adoption grows and CMOs get organized around social media–”get over the cool factor” and relate to customers.
Adweek reports that “big brands are on the hunt for help in figuring out their approaches to connecting with consumers on Facebook, providing service on Twitter and instituting internal social media guidelines.” Are the new experts up to the task?
BtoB Magazine reports on an Junta42 study showing that spending on “custom content,” the lifeblood of social media marketing, is set to increase in 2010, with marketers surveyed planning to allocate some 33% of their overall budget to custom content.
Social media is all the rage and will cement its place in the marketing mix in 2010 as companies realize that people are interested in the “communication” portion of “marketing communications,” whether they are consumers or business buyers. What about good “old-fashioned email,” as I called it in the “Content Marketing Strategy, White Paper Tactics”?
Each member of the social media trinity—Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter—can reach an audience, but that audience isn’t necessarily following your updates as religiously as they’re checking their email. People may log in to Facebook several times a day, but their email windows are constantly open. The fact remains: email is still popular.
Indeed, eMarketer reported in November 2009 that college students are holding tight to email use despite the explosion in social networking sites. “These results may be surprising to some, but not if you consider the role email continues to play in the day-to-day lives of Gen Y,” the report stated. “As long as email remains the collection point for social networking updates, including alerts around new followers, discussion updates and friend requests, it will remain a powerful force in marketing and our lives.”
Similarly, SocialTwist, a widget provider, reported in Social Media Sharing Trends 2009 that, “Despite the social media revolution – traditional forms of networking like email and instant messaging continue to be the most popular mediums of sharing content across the Internet. Nearly 60 percent of overall sharing happens over emails.”
As perhaps the top social and marketing developments of 2009, social media are adding a personal touch to the public web—at breakneck speed. Or more precisely, at conversational speed.
Yet because of its ubiquity, email retains its position as the wires of online communication. Any 2010 marketing strategy should take that reality into account.
At the start of the new year, I set my strategies and goals and plan my tactics on how to achieve them. This year, we are positioning our marketing communications services on content marketing: the use of relevant and educational content to engage an audience and generate interest in an organization and its mission.
A good portion of social media is based on sharing content, whether through articles and blog posts distributed on the social-media trinity of Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Or through pay-per-click advertising, website downloads, or good old-fashioned email marketing.
(And if email marketing is old fashioned, what of print? Maybe it’s not wired but certainly not expired. Most of the projects we do happen to be print.)
The report explains why white papers are written, what they are–and are not–and how to use them to educate an audience and generate leads. We also provide examples of different types of white papers, including a few we’ve written. Our list of white paper and lead-generation resources is excellent.
Feel free to download a copy–no registration required–and pass it on, along with our January Jump Start Offer: 10% off the cost of writing and designing a white paper or report.
My husband and I have declared this to be the Year of Writing—capturing our thoughts, sharing ideas, connecting with old and new friends and acquaintances, and discovering more about what’s going on around us. Collin sent me Steve Rubel’s, “Correspond to Connect,” which seemed to be in line with what we were thinking—with Steve putting it more in terms of a social media perspective.
Here is what he said on writing every day: “This year, vow not to lose sight of the art and importance of daily correspondence. Reach out to new people—even those you don’t agree with or those in other countries. Solicit and share new ideas.” This seems to be what social media is all about: connecting ideas, words, observations, and things I care about that someone else might care about too.
Writing is one of those activities that, when beginning it, I rarely know what is going to pour out. Things flow from my fingers that I didn’t know I cared about. A wonderful way for me to know more about me.
It’s a quiet week, a time for contemplation, review, and planning. Especially review. The best-of lists—for the year and the decade—started some weeks ago. I started to get caught up last week. My Delicious bookmarks from the last couple of days shows:
A best-of selection of social media, content marketing, and media links
The word of the year for Internet marketers is…
Is social media dangerous to your wealth? Focus on sales. Focus on markets. Focus on traffic and conversion. And not so much on this year’s new tools.
Anti-Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing as a demand-generation tool is not yet understood. “Old” methods drive most business. Semi-contrarian view I agree with.
The More than RSS Market
Article and links on state and future of RSS market—we see RSS as more useful as a back-end publishing tool than a front-end reader.
How Can Social Media Help Small Biz?
Lead generation is the top benefit but the statics are mixed. Bottom line is small businesses do not understand nor know how to tap social network marketing, reports eMarketer.
State of Mobile Banking Market in New England
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston survey published in August 2009 from 2008 data. In electronics, 2009 was the year of the smartphone—the mobile era is upon us.
The 2008 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice
Survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on the transformation of consumer payments to electronic from paper. More new choices. Same old story.
I keep a cartoon from The New Yorker near my desk, which seems to sum up this past year and perhaps the year to come. In the cartoon, Charles Dickens is sitting with his editor, and the editor asks: “I wish you would make up your mind, Mr. Dickens. Was it the best of times or was it the worst of times? It could have scarcely been both.”
Looking back at our newsletter articles from late 2008 through the present, it is both. It’s the best and the worst of times. In the past year-and-a-half, the economy was the worst it has been since the ’30s. Trust in various institutions was undermined. Banks failed. Foreclosures hit new heights. Unemployment reached an alarming high. Entire industries shifted or declined.
Yet, of the many difficulties and seemingly endless bad news, encouraging themes have emerged. Our articles this year focused on three resounding themes: new ways of doing business in a challenging economy; leadership; and networking/social media.
It’s the organizations that get creative and experiment on how to provide greater service that make it. Just as nature experiments following a forest fire, said Dr. Bob Wright of the Wright Leadership Institute, companies also need to try on new ideas, new technologies, new ways to do business in a challenging economy.
It may be more difficult to find the business, but there are industries that do well during recessions—and some businesses use the economy as a time to reinvent themselves. Here is an excerpt from one of our late 2008 newsletter articles:
“‘Innovative’ is the key word. A number of speakers and winners at the Chicago Innovation Awards…made the point that it’s especially critical for companies and individuals to focus on innovation. ‘Try as many things as possible, in as short a time as possible, using as minimal resources as possible,’ said keynote speaker Barry Moltz.” To quote Albert Einstein: “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”
Leadership was also an important theme this past year. Companies are recognizing that, to thrive, they must empower their people. Our favorite example is transformational leader Brad Anderson, vice chairman and former Best Buy CEO, who received the 2009 Transformational Leadership Award, sponsored by the Wright Foundation for Transformational Leadership.
Here is an excerpt from our April issue: “In his acceptance talk, Mr. Anderson emphasized that he isn’t and has not been the agent of transformation at Best Buy. Rather, he sets a vision and has created an environment in which employees have the freedom to pursue ideas at their local stores.” People feel empowered by the trust and freedom offered by their leaders. It opens the door and invites creativity.
This is important because “American business faces a crisis in trust,” said Joe Plumeri, CEO of the Willis Group Holdings, speaking at The Executives’ Club of Chicago in October. One consequence of today’s economic climate is that people and companies are afraid to take the risks required for growth and to restore trust.
Yet businesses must be willing to embrace change and new visions, and it’s a shared responsibility for everyone in a company. “Time to stop whining and start designing (the future),” said Dr. Don Beck, a world-renowned expert on organizational and societal transformation, who spoke at the November 20-21 Transformational Leadership Symposium: Staying Ahead of the Curve.
As Brad Anderson said in his address to the symposium, “We’re sitting on something very precious. We’re sitting in a place in time in which we may have an opportunity to do better than we’ve ever done before in our lives and discover a completely new way.”
And, finally, we talked a lot about networking and social media.
Here’s what we wrote in July: “During the course of the spring networking events, one constant in conversations, promotions, and email messages was this: social media. As the conversations suggested, it proved to be an important part of the event promotion mix but not the be-all and end-all it may seem. For promoting an event, the best approach is an integrated approach in which a personal touch predominates.” In other words, it was that final phone call that brought in the extra attendees. People want to connect, whether it’s via a networking event, a seminar, a phone call, Twitter, LinkedIn, IM—the choices keep expanding, because it all comes down to connections and relationships.
From our May issue: “The most critical element of creating and maintaining contact with a network is to use as wide a variety of means as possible—and as often as practical—from emails to blogs to newsletters to social media to phone calls to face-to-face meetings.”
Business happens through effective networks. In our October issue, we wrote that “effective networks are active, living networks.” Networking and social media are part of an entire mix of tools for finding new clients and helping to set up in-person meetings and conversations. All in all, it still is face-to-face meetings—off-line connections, if you will—that remain the goal of most network contacts. It’s important to learn how to be a hub, or focal point, in a network and understand how to maintain your networks—because ultimately, it comes down to relationships. As we wrote in October, “Humans are social, and, in business, it’s always about relationships.”
The Social Media Club of Chicago filled the event space at the CME group on Tuesday night and provided insights into social media from two authors, one covering the macro perspective of social and economic shifts in communication and another telling micro stories of individual success and inspiration. Highlights:
Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics
Erik made his main point through a video he produced, “Social Media is Not a Fad,” a social media version of the highly viewed piece Did You Know?
The opportunity of social media is here and now, especially when some people may be asleep at the wheel,” he said. “The good companies understand that they are losing or have lost control of their brands.”
Avoid old constructs, like requiring an email address to get people who want your content into your database as opposed to distributing content as widely as possible. “Listen first, sell later–be more like Dale Carnegie than David Olgivy.”
Shel told wonderful stories about how people have used Twitter and how it’s changing the communication of and engagement with information in “the new global neighborhoods.”
Among his examples:
Reporting news during a emergency
Responding to a PR crisis
Raising funds after a family tragedy
Getting a student out of prison after an international arrest
Selling products and services, from coffee and snacks to design and copywriting
“The social media people are becoming the feet on the street and were making the news.,” he said. On social media, “I can find people who share interests with me and I can share information with them.”
Check out #smcchicago on Twitter for more quotes and links to other blog posts, photos, and video from the event or you can read the Twitter posts through Google.
I was intrigued by a new Volkswagen advertising campaign that features interactive banner ads. There have been interactive ads before, but what makes this stand out is that it connects to Twitter using their application programming interface (API) in an attempt to help viewers decide which Volkswagen is right for them.
Christina and Collin drive a Passat, so I was interested in what the result would be if I typed Collin’s twitter name: collincanright. The ad said the Jetta was the way to go, so maybe there’s still a few kinks to get out of the system. Regardless, VW made an innovative ad that really caught my interest.
I find that I am getting an increasing amount of great reading recommendations from people I follow on Twitter—which is itself, along with social media in general, a subject of so much material to read and so many panel discussions, live and on the web.
We are in a period of major economic change, and our media habits are at the forefront, as the articles I’ve been reading and saving to my delicious account over the past few days show. (Delicious is a social bookmarking tool, a useful form of social media eclipsed in awareness these days by Twitter, Facebook, and the like.)
Most of these articles concern social media and its uses and influences. There are no tidy answers here but a lot of thought-provoking questions.
In Defense of Distraction
It’s a cheap joke to say I did not finish this long piece in New York Magazine because I was too distracted, but it’s true. The problems of multitasking and attention deficit are well known. Rarely does anyone write about how we can adapt to the new information environment.
The end of blogging
A Fortune magazine blogger muses whether Twitter and Facebook and their short updates are making blogging obsolete, just as people worry whether blogging has made journalism obsolete.
Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Clay Shirky suggests that journalism is far from obsolete but newspapers are. This blog post covers the economics of the business and looks back to the social disruption of Gutenberg’s invention of movable type.
Not by Links Alone
This article, in Josh Young’s Networked News blog, gives a thoughtful critique of the conventional wisdom that news is moving to Google, and that’s good because Google levels the competitive playing field.
If you check my delicious account, you’ll also see that I tagged two articles on micropayments and why they won’t work and an article on integrating a blog into Facebook. I’ll get to them. I’m also looking at a new site designed to help Chicago move toward a green economy and a new map of the Riverwalk along the Chicago River, a walk we did not take because of the Monday afternoon rain.
Lest it seem like I spent the whole Memorial Day weekend looking at a computer screen, here are some pictures Christina took on a trip to the Art Institute’s new Modern Wing, posted, appropriately enough, on my Facebook page.
In a world where technology is constantly changing, this event provides a great way to educate yourself on how you can integrate social media such as Twitter or Facebook into your B2B marketing tactics.
Join me and a horde of other media-savvy Chicagoans at this free event on March 26th for an opportunity to network and learn something new. Space is limited, so jump on it.
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