What are your thoughts?

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In media such as prints, TV ads, consumers will understand and recognize that these are all paid advertisement and they are perfectly fine with that. After all, this fact is known from the outset.

However what if this is not known from the outside? a trend that I see, from conversations with friends, clients and agencies is the notion of seeding conversations in Social Media. For example, firms employ (and pay of course) individuals to post comments on blogs, forums and such as to create a favourable image for the product and hope that it will generate more traffic and of course generate leads.

Is this right? I don’t know – Well for me, I hate to read comments that are not genuine especially if I found out later that this was a paid post or comment – some one who is employed by the company in question. I would lose credibility in the site or for that matter the product – trust is built in incremental steps but once lost, it falls exponentially – isn’t trust (and candidness) the bedrock of social media? Trust is one of the antecedents (drivers) of Word of Mouth (WOM).

From a marketer’s stand point, sure WOM is something they wish to achieve i.e. a result, by seeding comments, would one lose that trust if found out?

But I can understand from the agencies’s point of view is that it generates discussion in the comments section. Afterall social media is interaction and its success stems from conversations.

What are your views, I’m keen to hear them out.

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Fairfax Digital Australia, SEOMOZ.org etc were present – Had a great chat with Gillian Muessig, CEO of SEOMOZ on emerging SEO topics. She is such a character!

The topics presented covered a wide range of today’s hot topics, ranging from social media, SEM for the CEO, Search marketing & the recession & branding, ROI measures (measuring offline success of SEM), and reporting metrics for your boss to copywriting. Very impressive indeed and it would grab any marketer’s attention in relation to digital marketing.

The expo gave a good basic introduction to the world of Search Engine Marketing for individuals or businesses who have not started or just started in SEM.  In my humble opinion, the expo is not really for the more experienced individuals who wish to experience hand ons/practical  in the expo. Well I guess the expo is targeted more for the former audience.

The main take away point from the conference are 1) digital marketing is a force to be reckon with 2) it has alot of potential (with figures to back it up) and then moving into the future, 3) it will gain a bigger pie share of any client’s budget (with figures backing this trend as well) and 4) SEO is here to stay and its a strategy in itself.

And opps (how could I forget this) oh yes, pull marketing is indeed the flavour moving ahead and the term that Seth Godin came up with “interruption marketing” is now over, now we are living in the world of “invitation marketing”…buyers can smell a sales pitch miles away so should you engage in content marketing or social marketing, just entertain and educate and indirectly you will make the sale - (doshdosh.com has an excellent write up on this titled: Give before you try to get.)

Present generations of net users hate to be pressured and want to just make informed decision and they want products to improve their lives… Businesses have to earn the trust and loyalty of potential customers before they can make a sale (but hey that is not new too as well). But why even more so now, thats because consumers can now “talk” easier about your brand and learn much more about your brand than yesteryears – thanks to digital.

Well thats all from me now.

P.S. Did you go? Drop me a message if you did.

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social media marketing tools

Jer­emi­a­h Owyang chats about social media marketing, for businesses and how companies can best engage their online customers..

Two key take away points from this are 1) companies need to understand what is their business objective of using social media? and once they got that figured out, then they have measure it according to that objective stated at the outset and 2) tdudes/dudettes that venture online tend to want to express themselves and interact with others instead of looking out for advertisement (a good insight I might just add).

The question from me, is social media marketing suitable for all companies, are companies just following the band wagon? “Cause everyone is doing it so I must do so as well” I must do so as well.

I feel ultimately it boils down to the company’s objective and its means of competitions and how they view social media (Facebook, Forums, Twitter, Blogs). If the culture of the organization is pretty much conservative and bounded by heaps of regulations perhaps social marketing is not the right platform for them.

Enjoy the YouTube.

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Social Media Marketing has received centre stage in most of today’s marketer’s planning plateau, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube etc. Not is it without a day passed without a mentioned of them.

Marketers are curious about this ‘new’ media channel, proponents of it highlight its strong ability in improving the bottom line. Well to be honest, it’s really not a surprise, given that that many studies depict a sense of positivism in it. For example, TNS USA study in 2007 found the following…

“if you had 15 minutes of free time…”

1. 17% Social networking
2. 17% Talk on Cell
3. 14% Watch tV
4. 10% Surf the internet etc.

and Forrestor Research’s highly positive report on social media. For more information please view my previous entry found here.

If these numbers hold water, it definitely paints a picture that social media networking is a force to be reckon with and companies should engage them, afterall one of marketer’s many tasks is to seek customer engagement though many of the touch points available at its disposal.

However the reality is social media marketing is something of a black box, marketers inject programs into the black box and cross their fingers at the output. Though we appreciate the art of it, there should be some science involved to track. After all in the boardroom, numbers do the talking and in addition, there has been a saying, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”.

If this mantra is true, does this really hold water in the social media networking or marketing world? Well maybe, well maybe not. I do not know. But what I can offer is if we were to approach the measurement, we could perhaps look at alternatives – after all there is no such thing as a one off solution, no?

Perhaps the standard quantitative notions of approach to analyzing data (bounce rate, CTR, regression, path analysis etc) may be cast aside for qualitative methods? afterall social being social requires the need for verbal and face checks, no? or perhaps we should just get companies to state their objectives and we just track certain metrics. Do we really need to measure it? that is the question. Or shall we just let social media play its role and just cross our fingers and hopefully the spread of it is positive and will correlate positively with profitability and hope that we can control the spread if its negative.

Well what are your thoughts? I’m keen on hearing them.

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Academics and marketers have always promoted the notion that in order to compete in this competitive landscape – one must provide superior customer value relative to competition. But really what is customer value?

Down to a simple formula; Would the below attempt be it? What are your thoughts? Any truth? Can it expand?

From the customer’s perspective:

Customer Value = (Quality + Emotional appeal + meet expressed needs + a hosts of other benefits) / Price.

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• How to engage customers and be more relevant in their everyday lives.
• The proper way to speak to our customers.
• How to maximize behavioral targeting in our email and display marketing efforts.
• How to better leverage email, search and social networking
• Increasing the budgets for online media in areas such as affiliate marketing, search and email
• Finding a way to monetize social media.
• Diversifying our online advertising campaigns to include more emerging technologies
• We will be discussing going all digital with our marketing efforts.
• Targeted direct marketing based on user online behavior.
• The decision to increase on our email marketing spend to enable better segmentation and targeting.
• To make on-line marketing even more measurable for increasing sales…proving it’s ROI….every dime counts.
• How much of our offline budget should be shifted to online to supplement what we currently have.

Which of these do you think is the most important? and perhaps what others are important? but one take-away point is social media is on top of most’s radar attenna.

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC4CXRLfrso

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The field of strategic marketing is organised around a central question. The question is “why do some firms persistently outperform others” This question does not presume that there will always be persistent performance differences between firms. Rather, it presumes only that it may be in some situations, persistent performance differences will exist between firms and that those differences cannot be explain by traditional economic theories of firm performance. And here comes marketing (woohoo hooray) into the picture.

A major trend of marketing in the last decade, marketers have consistently emphasised that success in the marketplace rests on the firm’s ability to attract, satisfy, and retain customers that is being customer oriented – the essence of the marketing concept and market orientation a derivation from it as a strategy to achieve sustainable competitive advantage – a cornerstone of modern marketing thought.

Customer satisfaction is the primary determinant of customer loyalty and subsequent retention and the key to creating a valuable business organization. Continued success rests on reinventing oneself in the eyes of one’s customers and to meet their expressed or latent needs. This requires a thorough understanding of customers in the marketplace and ways to use this information to take market action. The fundamental objective of this perspective is to provide superior customer value relative to competition in order to attract, satisfy and retain customers.

As such leading-edge companies increasingly seek ways to measure customer satisfaction, as means for setting strategy, growing revenues and market share. This trend has been accelerated since 1988 by the American Baldrige National Quality Award, which places considerable weight on customer focus and satisfaction.

As a result, we has seen firms advocating the provision of customer satisfaction (how many times have you heard “everything we do is from the customer’s point of view” “we place our customer on the pedestal) as it is believed that it is an effective way to improve one’s bottom line in this fast changing landscape that we live in today. Much progress has been advanced. So if that is indeed the case, why do customer accept half baked solutions even though a better alternative is available? If the above holds water, there has to be another explanation.

Is it because at that point in time a quick fix solution is preferred (believer of context)? or is it because we resist changes due to the fear of not knowing what to expect should we change – the uncertainty element or we need to learn new things (learning curve is steep)? or are we just be plain lazy? Maybe…or maybe not…

I have a more sinister explanation (*evil eyes*)– its most probably due to higher profits through customer lock-in as a competitive tactic. What do I mean by this? Think about this.

• · Customer lock-in acts as a shield from abrupt customer preference changes and competitive influences – making it more costly for the customer to switch.
• · Customer lock-in has the ability to reduce the volatility of customer base and achieve higher stability of the revenue stream as compared to customer satisfaction.
• · Business environmental uncertainty has the ability to influence the satisfaction/lock-in doctrines and its link to business performance.

Reeks of inferior solution? shouldn’t the firms provide superior customer value a means of competition instead of tying them down. So I say its not only because of the reasons cited above such as a quick fix solutions, plain lazy etc. Firms have made it a strategic direction of locking customers in.

Some examples, with many complex products such as ERP, extensive user learning is required to reap full benefits from it. This is also true with simpler office application such as Office. Most people need time and support from experts working with a new spreadsheet to learn how it works. People typically become more effective in using software as they gain experience. hmm….doesn’t this then become switching costs caused by learning.

My view is that the impact of learning costs on a brand’s competitive position can be tremendous. Consider the struggle of Sun’s Star Office against Microsoft Office. (I wont talk about network effects here – just learning). Star Office an excellent product – why did it fail to over throw MS office? Don’t think its due to being an inferior product more likely its due to user’s switching costs and of course the IT department doesnt help (they are control freaks)  and also due to the fact that they are am certified in Microsoft blah blah blah not Staroffice – I rest my case.

More recently, seen the cool Mac VS PC advertisement? Steve Job knows this really well. In order to compete with MS, he has to convince new customers that Apple is no different from PC. “Whatever you can do in PC, Mac can do it better” was its selling message. Kudos to its communication strategy team. Apple not only convinced its existing loyal customers that Apple is a great product but have made them evangelists. Making every loyal Apple customer is brand ambassadors in promoting apple. Well done! A picture speaks a thousand words.

Apple has a great solution here – its simple, works right out of the box and its simply beautiful and of course its way cool to be associated with Apple. Brand gurus would tell you

People do not buy products but images associated with products

Apple has done a wonderful job here removing some of the lockin tactics employed by Microsoft – (one of which have helped in this removal is the Mac Vs. PC advertisements)

Concluding…This suggest that the important question is not that of which mode of explanation is a more appropriate one, but rather that of the conditions and/or context under which a given mode of explanation is most appropriate. no?

Feel free to offer your views by commenting.

P.S. Ever wondered why Doctors, lawyers, accountants are all professions but managers not? hmm…

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In the last 10-15 years Asia has seen explosive growth and unfortunately direct marketing was not a key strategic priority for alot of companies. But I do see, moving forward a lot of client’s money shifting towards relationship marketing/direct marketing. Why? in a recession, customers tend to be more focus and value oriented and firms have to do more with less (budgeting cuts – yes you heard it cut, firms still cut marketing budget even research time and time again suggest not too, firms that continue with their marketing investments become even stronger after the recession whilst its competitors lag behind. Oh well here I go ahead – I shall reserve this for another entry).

Ok back to the topic – With the right target at the right time and right place – i.e. customised marketing piece would have greater influence than any generic marketing campaign is my view. Of course ensure that you have a quality product to begin with – one that resonants well with your consumers. With permission based marketing, the probability your client reading it is much higher and hopefully make an influence in positive customer behaviour.

What is happening now in my view is very natural, now that the market is slowing down, its becoming naturally more competitive, clients want to do more with less. And as a result targeted communication becomes more of a priority. simple logic. Treat your customers like pampered beings, once they feel valued, you bet they will keep coming back! You dont want to react this way do you (see picture below). Remember they could spread negative WOM, not something you would like.

What are your thoughts here? Do you think direct marketing has alot of potential especially so in this current economic climate?

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