What Really Brought it HOME for ME: Audience Centric v. Brand Centric

November 19th, 2013 • COMM464, EMarketing

Showcase your brand all you want when creating that $15000 Google Adwords campaign. Use the best descriptors and showcase all your brand or product’s many wonderful attributes when beautifying your high end website or your company blog. In other words, make sure that all your actions in this realm are brand centric because the reason why consumers come to your website is because they are looking for a solution to a problem and are there ready and willing to be marketed to.

But stop there! Because, once your enter the social realm, the audience is different. No longer are they looking for a problem, at least actively. They are there to build and be a part of a community whether it be by silently observing, by commenting on the content or by actively contributing content. But to reiterate, they aren’t there to be marketed to. This is what, according to this article, most marketers still fail to understand despite understanding all the technical terms of social media marketing.

On the brighter side, just because they aren’t there to be marketed to doesn’t mean that we cannot market our wares to them. Enter audience centric marketing – a relatively new form of marketing that focuses on a long term approach to marketing and is focused on engaging the audience. As Brian Solis, the principal of Altimeter Group and author of Engage! says, social media has democratised influence which means that now potentially anyone with an internet connection and a social media account can influence anyone’s buying decision and that no longer is it a top down simple consumer decision journey with just one way communication from the marketers to the consumer. With this democratisation effect, it is important that engagement is present to avoid missing major opportunities to shape our marketing messages.In order for social media to mutually benefit you and your customers, you must engage them in meaningful and advantageous conversations, empowering them as true participants in your marketing and service efforts.

Social media is quick, generally with easy to use interfaces, relatively inexpensive and is a great platform for conversations to humanise the brand. But investing in social media has its own challenges: measurement of ROI is one issue especially because you can’t tie results to any particular campaign and another issue is using any and all data available for measurement. Using the Garbage In, Garbage Out idea, using irrelevant data can prove to be costly in the long run.

Finally, commitment. Social media requires commitment. Unlike the banner ads or the one time email advertising, creating a social media account for a company carries an implicit promise that the company will generally respond to messages within a day and that it will ensure that the content on the site is relevant, reliable and timely. Then there’s the matter of fit. Does it make business sense for a particular product like say, Coca Cola to participate in social forums on the topic of healthy eating? No! Addressing these two issues will save a company a lot of pain and also ensure that they don’t fall in the trap of shiny object syndrome and over indulge in social media.

Learning about social media in the context of marketing has been an eye opening and refreshing experience and I will always remember these lessons learned!

Dissonance between Marketers’ Perception and Consumers’ Reality

November 19th, 2013 • COMM464, EMarketing

A very interesting study by x+1 and Research Now in late 2013 in the paper The Marketer’s Playbook: Aligning market strategies with consumer expectations was detailed in E Marketer recently. This paper was extremely useful in squashing some myths and reinstating some age old beliefs.

Unlike the bad reputation that banner ads get from marketers, customers actually rank banner ads as one of the top 3 most important factors when making a purchase decision, one of the later stages in the consumer decision journey. Also, while marketers may get carried away by the use of social media for marketing, they shouldn’t forget the benefits of the age old, seemingly staid email marketing which the highest proportion (16%) of the consumers believe that is the MOST VALUABLE marketing channel!

Also, while marketers may highly value mobile ads, mobile applications and SMS as valuable marketing channels, the percentage of consumers who believe the same is much, much less. For example, 35% of marketers believe that mobile apps are valuable but only 5% of consumers believe the same. However, this is not to say that marketers are wrong, it may just mean that consumers are probably unaware of what marketing influences them the most. They may also not want to admit for example that mobile apps are in fact effective. However, whatever the situation may be, this again highlights that big spends on emarketing should only be done after carefully analysing the situation and being aware of the possibility of being influenced by the shiny object syndrome.

#AskJPM – One question that JP Morgan would not want to answer anytime in the future!

November 19th, 2013 • Comments Off on #AskJPM – One question that JP Morgan would not want to answer anytime in the future! COMM464, EMarketing

Engaging with the public, a seemingly noble objective is apparently not for everybody and definitely not for JP Morgan. Last Wednesday, the US Bank attempted to host its first public free-wheeling Q&A session on Twitter where in the questions would be answered by Jimmy Lee, a veteran dealmaker. However, soon after the announcement, the bank was bombarded with thousands of negative public reaction, close to 25000 negative tweets, who vented using the hashtag #AskJPM. Related hashtags were #toobigtojail and #banksters. A sample is below:

This highlights the risks executives face when engaging with the public. Carried away by the shiny object syndrome, executives may be persuaded to use any relatively inexpensive means such as Twitter in an attempt to increase their brand value. However, keeping in mind the FIT that a social media channel has with the brand is essential. An article debates that when a much loved tangible food brand like McDonalds can face twitter backlash during such situations, people are much less likely to have fond associations with a services firm. In this case, a more covert means of communication like say, the public asking questions by email or posting questions through an application or by DM on Twitter and then the bank selectively choosing the questions to answer would have been more useful.

Learning from past mistakes is good but what makes a company great is learning from other’s mistakes. British Gas unfortunately chose to have a similar Q&A session on the same day as announcing a 9% price increase and the result? A hilarious but sad outcome of events:

This teaches us that while social media has many advantages and is a relatively inexpensive way to communicate with the public, it can have many pitfalls especially when the company is not in control of the channel. This also teaches us that while we may love to pay for and orchestrate positive brand messages and evangelists, social media ensures that evangelism is something that is necessarily earned, not paid for or orchestrated.

Business Intelligence and Marketing- The New Kid on the Block- DOMO

November 18th, 2013 • COMM464, EMarketing

While data is critical to any business function, it is the lifeline of marketing with 83% of the marketing professionals saying that it is critical to have real time marketing data. However despite this need, there is a disparity here in terms of an overwhelming 37% of marketers saying that they cannot access data in real time.

While accessing real time data is one issue, analyzing large mountains of data from multiple sources such as email marketing and social media and gaining insights is a whole other issue.

Enter DOMO

This Software – as – Service company provides real time access to business data and puts business intelligence in the cloud and displays it in a format that is easy to use and draw insights from. Having talked about the use of data and the importance of data management with the use of tools such as databases, DOMO seemed instantly appealing to me. According to various sources and websites, DOMO is able to draw data from various sites, aggregate it, analyse it and then finally display it in a easy to use format. Despite not yet being released full scale, it has already garnered a lot of attention for the capital that it has raised and the various uses its clients are using it for. One example is that of a Fortune 500 retailer seeing real time what colours of products are selling in real time and making changes to production and manufacturing in real time. Such applications can be seen in marketing as well as you can assess in real time, the ROI of different marketing spends and decide if we need to change any aspect of the campaign.

DOMO’s magic doesn’t end here! Not only does it help the marketing professionals achieve excellence by providing them with access to insights but it also is seen as an example of a great user of social media for its own growth. The CEO of the firm Josh James MANDATED his staff (yes, all 130 of them) to essentially complete 20 social media tasks such as tweeting, applying the new Timeline feature in Facebook etc within 8 weeks. The reward? They get to keep their jobs, earn small badges along the way and finally get a day off if everyone completed their goals. This experiment was a huge success and had a positive impact on their brand and in terms of numbers, their twitter followers count increased by 300%, Facebook increased by 28% and Pinterest by 91%. This is DOMO’s magic!