There are no secret formulas, no secret recipes or magic potions when it comes to social media marketing. All you’ve gotta do is take in one single fact: People have moved lots of their behaviors online and you’ve gotta follow.
To succeed in moving your business, communication and advertising into the digital world, ask yourselves the following questions:
If people search for things related to my business via Google - how can I make sure they find me?
We’ve used to organize events in the real world -where can we organize events in the digital world?
When people started to use phones you gave your sales people phones - why are you not giving them Skype, MSN, Twitter, Facebook and live streaming accounts?
You would never automate a personal relation that could lead to sales - why are you automatic every single sales process online?
People don’t listen to brands, they listen to other people -how can we make sure other people say good things about us?
Since people tend to spend their time alone behind the screen -how can we continue to build human digital relations using video, photos and copy?
In the real world you do PR towards paid media – how can you shift your PR activities to be picked up by earned media online?
Traditionally you’ve spent lots of money on media -how can you shift focus to spending lots of money on value that leads to eyeballs online?
In the offline world you would value how people navigate in your store -how much do you value how people navigate in your online world?
Building a great house requires an well paid architect – why then are you hiring the cheapest architect when building a great online presence?
In the old world comparing products was hard - does your products stand the future transparency were everything can be compared?
Back then you could create a 3 year marketing plan – what can you do to turn it into a 3 month marketing plan?
Focus groups used to lead you right -is your organization prepared to listen to real time data instead?
Building brands took years and years -how can you build your brand in months?
Competitors introduced themselves at the next fair - are you prepared for the ones who wont introduce themselves at all and don’t care about the old way of doing business, only your old customers?
You used to write business plans - how can you get moving and learn on the way.
If you’ve got 15 right answers then you’re fine. If not – start running!
State your problems first. Then it might turn out social media is not what you need. And if it is. The do something unique made to work. Don’t just treat it like another channel where you can dump your offline activities.
A sloppy little drawing I did this morning inspired by the works of Al Baik.
Oh…like when you do traditional advertising you actually need money. It’s not free to reach success. And oh nr 2 – online communication is about creating equity over time. Campaigns might work every now and then but overall you should strive to build a socially distributed content driven platform over time. Then you might get fans. Might…
Every now and then when I spend time online I find things that make me shiver cause they’re so freakin cool. Today I found an open source project that matches that description and I’d like to share it with you. It regards an organization called Ushahidi and their kick ass crowdsourcing platform.
Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, was initially a website developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Ushahidi’s roots are in the collaboration of Kenyan citizen journalists during a time of crisis. Since then Ushahidi have grown from an ad hoc group of volunteers to a focused organization.
Crime reporting in Haiti with the Ushahidi platform
Now the platform is available as an Open Source platform and it kicks ass. It’s among the coolest mashup platforms I’ve seen. Since launch the Ushahidi collaboration platform has been used to collaborate on crime tracking in Atlanta, , wildlife tracking in Africa, monotoring of voting in Mexico, mapping the crisis in Haiti and even cleaning up after the Snowmageddon in Washington and a lot more. The platform lets you contribute via mail, Twitter, SMS and online reporting.
You might have read the book Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. If not the short story is basically that Clay writes on how internet fundamentally changes the way we communicate due to the fact that this world wide web thing creates a never ever seen platform that enables people to create, share and consume information at a close to no cost. The Ushahidi platform is more or less rocket fuel for the ideas Clay is bringing forward in his book.
What do you wanna mashup? Head over to Ushahidi and get going!
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!
ATweet from Gary Hayes caught my eye this morning. I followed a link and found this wonderful social media counter. Gary has built and coded this app based on data collected from a range of social media sites.
Sit tight and watch the thing start counting. After a couple of seconds you’ll grasp the power of social media. But also note the stats that tells you how many SMS’s that has been sent globally. People pay for that stuff!!!
This post is probably most stupid post one can write since CEO’s and board members seems to have decided to stay behind with the dinosaurs while the rest of us look for new ground where we can thrive and prosper. Basically on average they read three local newspapers of their own choice, Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine and watch a couple of TV channels. They haven’t got a clue about blogs, feed readers and social networks. But I’ll give it a go anyway.
Dear CEO and board member. In most cases you’re probably +40 years old. You have a wife, two kids and live in a house that cost above average. Two cars in the garage and a [click to continue…]
And now to a very sensitive issue – monitoring. As some of you know my profession is leading brands into the future of communication. One of the more important parts of this is teaching them how to keep track of their own brands in the jungle of conversation. What are people saying about my brand, where does the conversation take place and how can we respond to it – simple questions really.
However, quite many brands don’t have a clue on how to do this or even worse – they haven’t even started to think about tracking conversations related to their brands.
When I speak about this we often end up talking about me and how I track my own brand. I try to keep track of every conversation out there that in one way or another has my name or brand in it. As often as I can I also listen to, respond or in other ways take the conversation into account – just as any brand should.
One of my Netvibes dashboards that I use to monitor Ronnestam online
Since sharing is caring – here is how to track keywords online on a daily basis without paying for it. NOTE – this doesn’t give you a 100% guarantee and the more generic your brand is the harder it is to monitor it, then professional help might be your solution. It also applies better to smaller brands rather than large ones. But you will gain some [click to continue…]
Candy brand Skittles have produced some kick ass TVC’s (Skittles leak being one of my favorites) through out the years and now they’re innovating the use of social media within fast moving consumer goods.
This blog post started in my head after seeing this discussion below between two of the bloggers I’m following. David Armano from Logic+Emotion and Jackie Huba with Church of the Customer Blog. They’re talking about Skittles and how they changed turned their entire website into a Twitter search for the keyword skittles. Jackie doesn’t like it, David does.
Skittles is of course not the first FMCG brand to do cool things online. Altoids has been rockin’ the web with cool content since about 2001. Jackie Huba mentions Jelly Belly and their content heavy site. The thing though with strategies like this is that you’re not taking advantage of the social crowd out there. Instead you’re constantly paying to pull traffic to your own site instead of placing yourselves where the customers are on their terms.
What’s really cool with all this to me is not the fact that Skittles is using Twitter but instead the little widget they’ve created that goes on top of whatever they want.
So, instead of building they’re on site or even mashup, they’ve created the ultimate mashup – a Skittles widget that navigates you directly to the respective channels online – Youtube for video, Twitter for chat, Facebook for friends, Flickr for photos and ultimately Wikipedia for product info.
This case is a simple yet cool explanation what you can do online today. I’m speaking quite often about the power of distributing your content outside of your own domains and this is a good example of it.
Sum up. Experimentation has to be a part of your communication. Sitting at home waiting for the ultimate strategy won’t work cause the net is ever changing!
Today his Majesty King Carl Gustav was proud to announce that princess Victoria was getting engaged to her boyfriend Daniel Westling. This is cool both because it’s time for the girl to get married and the fact that the King did it on YouTube. It’s obviously not only Barack Obama that has gotten the idea [...]
[updated] It turns out someone fooled us all and created the Dalai Lama name on Twitter. At more than 16,000 followers in one weekend, the fake Dalai Lama was one of the fastest growing accounts that Twitter has ever seen. If you didn’t know about Twitter before you’ll definitely learn about it now. The American microblogging service has [...]
Blogger and planner Jonas Söderström a nice guy who’s running his own company – Planning STHLM posted a question the other day. I started to write an answer to Jonas in his commentators field but then felt I needed to elaborate a little bit more. On top of that I think my thoughts might be [...]
Who is heading your brand? Does he or she have an understanding for all, and I mean all, steps in the consumer interaction with your brand. The new generation of consumers crave 4 things from their favorite brands. These 4 things was something we found in a global focus group study we did for one [...]
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.
