Think social media and conversational marketing might be the next train to heaven for your brand but don’t know where to board? Well, here’s three social media marketing models that will make sure you’ll find your station.
If you wanna get moving into the social country of love where conversation rules you’ve gotta get one thing straight. Valuable content is king. Buying a loudspeaker and start tweeting wont get you anywhere. Swedish brands like Comhem and Boxer have effectively proven that just twittering the 140 sign language doesn’t earn you any followers. Every social network will provide you with it’s own possibilities and traps. A well executed strategy is a must or you’ll end up in a minefield.
Here are 3 models by Johan Ronnestam that will guide your brand towards a successful social media strategy.
3 Models That Will Guide You Into The Social Media Landscape
The Social Staircase
The Social Staircase is a model that focus on the overall process. It’s the stuff that pays for your ticket to love.
The Social Tool Matrix
Now you know what kind of presence your business needs. Now it’s time to map the tools to make sure you know what to keep your mouth shut, when to speak and when to listen.
The Social Viral Spiral
This is about speed. Spread that love I’m talking about below. But make sure you do it with finesse and timing. Create a couple of Social Viral Spirals and you’re ready to make out!
Students over at the Berghs School of Communication asked for some advice on research about social networking behaviours in Europe.
As I gathered my links and sources from my Delicious account I ran into this wonderful presentation below by Tom Smith from Trendstream. The presentation was given by Tom to the IAB Europe Social Media Research Showcase, sharing insights from Wave 1 of the Global Web Index. It’s well composed and extremely valuable if you’re into branding, communication, advertising, business development and social media. So I thought I should share it with you too!
Tom lists three big trends that will impact your brand in 2010 based on Social Media involvement across Europe.
The passive impact of social media is bigger than the active one
We increasingly consume content and information based on the consumer network
Digital networks are much now bigger than our face to face ones
So there you go. Nothing to blame on now. Just get going!
I’ve always wanted to write a book. This is NOT it!
So far this year my blog have had more than 115 000 unique visitors and just over 240 000 visits. I’ve written more than 500 blog posts covering everything from design, gadgets, trends, technology, advertising, innovations, personal things, branding and more.
About 28% of the visitors during this last year have ended up reading a post that was tagged with branding. That’s probably not a coincidence since besides trends and creativity I’d say branding is the subject that is the most dearest to me.
When I’ve been looking deeper down into the stats I’ve seen that many of you visitors haven’t really explored my blog beyond the posts on the first page or the actual post you came to read. This is why I thought it made sense to gather them all like this – ‘Top 10 Blog Posts on Future Branding and Communication From Ronnestam.com’- My first book.
A Book, MashUp, PDF or Whatever You Wanna Call It By Johan Ronnestam
Even though this isn’t actually what I would call a book it’s been the perfect opportunity for me to experiment with the production process of a book. I’ve put a big block in my calendar covering January, February and March and if everything goes right I will present my ‘real’book sometime in April or May next year. It will be a book on how to integrate future communication with product and service development. One things for sure – I’m doing it on my own. But for now you have to do with this first book, mashup, pdf or whatever you wanna call it.
4 Ways to get your hands on Top 10 Blog Posts on Future Branding and Communication From Ronnestam.com With Love
1. Buy a signed copy of the printed book – 39€ including shipping world wide.
I’ve printed 150 books in Denmark at Norhaven. Out of those 150 I’m giving 50 signed copies away to the first 50 Twitter retweets of this post (if you live outside Sweden you have to pay for the shipping). If you wanna get your hand on one of the other 100 signed ones you either hope to get one at one of my speaking occasions during 2010 or you contact me to buy one for €39 including shipping costs.
2. Download the PDF for free (pay by linking or tweeting this blog post)
We’re fed up with boring old school advertising. We don’t want your information and rational explanations. We wanna dance, laugh, feel and love. We do not want be treated like idiots!
James Dean knew how to seduce people while looking pretty darn boring. But face it. He’s dead and would be pretty out of date now!
Information is all over us. We’re accessing it everywhere faster than ever. The more shit we get our hands on the less we wanna mess with, so you’ve gotta stand out.
Future brands don’t buy media they create brand dramas that build value and generate SEO equity – only then will you reach your future friends (aka. target group). Future brands tell stories.Future brands rely on drama and constant innovation – totally integrated.
Branding today is about creating a brand platform, then dramatize it and start screaming to people – COME ON AND BUY MY PRODUCT. IT’S GREAT. Of course in a slightly creative and modest manner than that. But it very often about traditional advertising in classic media channels.
Branding of tomorrow is about knowing who you are, what your brand stands for and start experimenting with innovation, partnerships, entertainment and above all involving your potential audience as a part of your product development. And note – call them audience, cause the will pay to stay but leave if they don’t like the show.
It’s all about constantly innovating your brand and then making sure you know what people think of your work. Do they like it? Do they hate it. What do they miss, what would they do differently. Speak to them. Learn their language. Once you think you know the formula to success – erase your brain and start all over again. We do not want repetition from brands that lead we want the new stuff, the shit that makes us go wow!
The first step to keeping on top of your game is getting into the conversation. There’s no need to wait even if people aren’t talking about your brand just yet. Get in there and learn!
First step – automize your intelligence information
The key to becoming successful when becoming a brand conversationist is to know…yep, you guessed it, where people who talk about your brand are hanging. Put your ears to the rail and listen for. And remeber that most of these things you can output as a RSS feed into Google Reader or Netvibes. Built a dashboard!
The 59 services you can currently keep track of using Friendfeed.
Get into the discussion
Once you know where people are discussing your products, your brand or anything else related to your mission (cause you have one of those huh). These are the tools you should get accompanied with.
And don’t forget to get into blogs and comment on subjects relevant to you!
Spread your digital presence
Getting into the conversation is not only about spying on others and then going after the buzz. Your digital presence – website, campaigns, digital events, groups…everything has to go beyond their own sphere and servers. In order to do this you’ve gotta start spreading your information socially. There’s tons of tools but a first must have are these.
The god of spreading content – SEO (Note, not paid search)
And more and more and more and more. This goes on forever. But you’ve gotta be everywhere!
Last but not least! Create advertising and communication that matters to people. We want to have fun – as I said earlier this year. You’ve gotta be a clown!
Ok, that’s it for now. I’m aware that I’ve left a couple of question marks in the heads of you guys who don’t know what RPC, RSS etc is. But I don’t have the time to elaborate on that now. I’ll get back to it soon
There’s a lot of talk about viral marketing through video. But given that you have produced something worth seeing, how do you actually get it on the run?
Well, it’s not necessarily that easy and the biggest single mistake brands do is they believe a good little piece will take off by it self. Is that the case? Of course not. You gotta give that moving beast of yours more than a push, you’ve gotta strap some rockets to each and every frame and hope for a safe launch into outer space.
Spreading video online is not about putting it on YouTube. You’ve gotta see the whole web and each and every site’s own potential.
Björn Falkevik, professional new media producer is one of the most competent consultants there is when it comes to new media publishing. He is sharing this great process map of video spread on Flickr and his blog. Unfortunately it’s in Swedish but I think you’ll get the picture anyway.
Björn Falkeviks social video publishing (Swedish)
Apart from spreading it SEO is important. Scott WilloughbyRand Fishkin and SEOmoz.org clears more questions in this short video.
Finally. Use tools like Tube Mogul to administrate the spreading of the content. And you might wanna consider using agencies like Unruly Media to spread it. If you end up pushing something out there Viralvideoshart compiled by Unruly brings some intelligence to why and where you’re getting spread.
Nothing comes for free but learning the tricks of the trade keeps you ahead of the competition!
Last year, inspired by ReadWriteWeb I stuck my nose out and tried to predict what 2008 would bring us in terms of trends, technology, communication and ideas. About 70% of my thoughts were confirmed but I of course missed out on some too.
2008 is coming to an end and it’s time for me to let that poor nose of mine feel the heat again. 2009 is harder to predict than ever since we have a free falling economy in the world at the moment. How will smaller budgets effect advertising, investments in technology, self confidence and personal evolvement? Hell if I knew, but here are some ideas. [click to continue…]
In order words. You sure as hell wanna make sure that brand of yours is found among the top searches on Google. SEO is more important than ever. Building websites that get listed and linked up is key.
So, if you wanna get our management team on board, do the following 3 steps:
My scotch whisky blog keeps on jumping back and forth from page 2 to page 9 on the global Google.com search engine when you search for ‘whisky’ and it makes me go mad.
I’ve tried every trick in the (SEO) book to keep it steady on that second page since that drives about 1-2000 unique visitors [...]
ronnestam.com was voted Sweden’s first blog on Innovation, future trends and digital communication. It’s written by Johan Ronnestam. He's widely regarded as one of Sweden’s leading speakers and authorities in the field of modern creative and conceptual thinking and skill of innovating brands and their communication.
