Nov
5
My thoughts on Larry Weber’s Marketing to the Social Web
Posted by: deanbillings | November 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment
I recently reviewed Larry Weber’s Marketing to the Social Web. It’s a bit unfair for me to harshly criticize a book that is now five years old, which is ancient history in terms of social media technology. So while the book is highly cited, the content seems somewhat obvious and not highly controversial. However, I will do it anyways.
Social and internet media are changing how our minds work. We now have the ability to avoid commercials and increasingly understand the mechanisms of targeted micro-niche advertising. The old techniques and playbooks of advertising are not working so well. In addition, consumers have access to far more information than they did previously to validate the claims of marketers as well as a greater ability to communicate their problems.
Online communication has allowed a shift from one-directional carpet bombing to a two-way conversation (if done properly), and marketers must seize this opportunity. Marketers should understand these new technologies and phenomena in order to capitalize on these trends. In particular, Marketers should establish, leverage, and listen to social communities in order to proactively guide how their brands and companies are being defined.
There are several key components to building a customer community:
- Observe and Evaluate – Observe what the web is saying about your company. Not just the official channels but also the authentic comments from individuals. Compare websites and find best practices. This includes measuring activity.
- Enlist and provide community benefits – Find key members of target communities and find ways to facilitate them to have the influence they desire.
- Promote and ignite your communities – Find ways to provide an information source to instigate discussion and get people talking.
As one might expect, this book discusses many of the same concepts and themes as other seminal works. The various ways offered to enlist community members are very similar to the technographic segmentation model offered in Groundswell: Each segment needs to be considered and facilitated in their preferred methods of interaction. While both books share the view that online marketing is now a necessity, Groundswell does a more interesting job of ensuring that strategic objectives are incorporated in marketing strategy, reducing the chances that marketers will become excessively enchanted with a technology at the expense of customer relationships. My interpretation is that Marketing to the Social Web seems to imply that the activities of web marketing align with the marketing funnel which in turn aligns with a consumer decision-making process that all consumers go through. In contrast, Groundswells says that users have fundamentally different usage and interaction patterns, and companies should focus on that.
Adding to the mix, the Mckinsey approach materials seem to agree with Marketing to the Social Web in harkening back to the traditional focus on the consumer decision-making process.
In evaluating all these sources, marketers must incorporate and integrate these sometimes conflicting models. Groundswell’s POST method is clearly an excellent high-level framework to organize a marketing strategy. The technographic segmentation is most useful in the analysis phase when a marketer is determining who its overall customers are. Once a marketer has considered in detail who its customers are, marketers should then break down customer behaviour step by step, utilizing the concepts from Mckinsey and Weber.