Posts tagged social media


Marketing strategy & social media: Some rationality, PLEASE!

Jun 26th

5 comments

I LOVE marketing and tend to think in marketing terms all the time, which is problematic in a romantic relationship.
Me (at baseball game): Look at that billboard for hotdogs in right field. If it asked you to Tweet, could we all be tweeting to each other during the ballgame? Could I get a coupon for a hotdog on my cellphone? Could I tweet-redeem it?
Wife: Please shut up.
So my passion for marketing knows no bounds. That’s why I get so upset when so-called professionals make statements like this in a recent blog post: “social media should be at the heart of every company’s marketing strategy.”
Puh-leeeeeze!!!!
Repeat after me: Not all companies and products can equally benefit from social media. (Did you really repeat it? You did? Cool!) Consider …
  • If you’re a company trying to sell wheels to GM right now, you’re not going to Twitter your way to success and should be fired if you try to.
  • If you’re selling fertilizer to farmers in Lake County Wisconsin, you will probably benefit from a billboard along the interstate more than an account on Facebook.
  • My local family-run homebuilder is going out of business because of this recession and could give a rat’s patooty about social media. He needs to focus his strategy on cash conservation and making it to the other side, not a how-to video on YouTube.
  • When I go to Home Depot, I am going to buy my sandpaper based on what I need to complete my project at the lowest price, not because the company president has a blog.
Sometimes I think Twitters believe everybody on Twitter is the known universe. That is not the real world, at least not yet. I know it’s hard to believe but MOST people sell stuff to other people who have never heard of MySpace.
So, let’s insert some rationality into the discussion. Most major consumer product companies will benefit from social media. Most B2B — less certain results and they probably won’t focus on this channel until the economy improves. Services aimed at youth — yes; services aimed at geriatrics, no. Businesses who live by couponing – yes. Businesses who live by long-term contracts, not so much.
To the purveyors of social media hyperbole, I humbly request that you dust off your textbook from Marketing 101. The channels have changed but the same rules apply. Stay connected to the basic rules of business when considering any marketing channels. Somehow, you have to figure out how to drive this activity to the bottom line.

As I mentioned in my B2B series last week, many businesses, even traditional industrials, will benefit from a dose of social media community-building. But please gentle readers, join me in resisting the breathless enthusiasm that already created one Internet bust. Social media marketing is ONE CHANNEL, ONE CHOICE, ONE OPTION for SOME businesses.

And by the way, I would definitely buy that hotdog if I got a Twitter coupon. Then my sweetie would understand!
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How do you handle a crowd of followers?

Jun 25th

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My article on “Why do I need 10,000 followers” seemed to tap into the frustration and anxiety of many people who are struggling with the meaning of our new Twitter relationships. One Twitter friend, who I have never met, called me and discussed the issue for an hour!
If you haven’t read some of the blog reader comments, please do — they’re great! The article also enabled a lively debate on Linked-In. I wanted to cross-pollinate the conversations and those folks allowed me to re-print just a small selection of their insights:

Steven Soshea

“If I happened to accumulate 10,000 followers through organic growth, I would consider that to be a good thing. There’s no way you can have “an effective, reasonable connection” with everyone … Like a famous musician, actor, or even writer, you’re not going to be able (or want) to spend all of your time connecting with your fans.
“To be quite blunt, I’m only going to spend a certain amount of time with them, collectively and individually. So my engagement with Twitter isn’t going to scale proportionally to the volume of my followers … I’m very happy to have this asymmetric relationship …”
“Once I was following 400+ I found that it was just too much to keep up the same quality level of interaction. That web page just seemed like a huge wave of noise coming at me. One approach I’ve found helpful is to segment and to create individual Twitter ID’s for different sectors with which I work … I also use Tweetdeck or Seesmic to review the multiple accounts independently or collectively at a glance.”

 

Nancy Scott
“Before I follow, I read somebody’s blog carefully to see if I can connect with their knowledge and their perspective. I started out primarily following marketing bloggers, but have expanded to following all manner of folks who interest me.”

 

Mark Ruvelson
“I’m not sure what the magic number is as far as how many followers you should have, or how many people you can actually keep up with following … I have a friend who’s tweeting on behalf of his business, and his approach is to follow as many people he can and grow his community through follow backs. OK, so he has close to 2,000 followers, I have just around 300. Is his group more valuable than mine? Larger yes, but maybe not better, as I’m not so sure how relevant some of his followers are. I’ve chosen not to follow his approach; I feel like the right thing for me anyway is to keep on posting clever, interesting tweets, and let the community grow at its own pace.”
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Why do I need 10,000 followers?

Jun 23rd

13 comments

Photo credit: I don’t know. Probably some porn site. This is an actual Twitter follower of the guy mentioned in the article. If this is a picture of you and you’re not in the porn industry, I apologize. I was just trying to make a point. Now go put on a tee shirt.

The other day I received a direct message on my Twitter account that gave me pause:

Mark – why so few followers when it seems you have great content? Is that part of your strategy? Just looked-thought it would be more …

At first I felt defensive. Well — I LIKE my 400 followers. I’ve only been doing this a few weeks. That seems pretty good. Right??

So I decided to check out the guy who sent me the message. He has over 12,000 followers and 700 connections on Linked-in. I felt Twitter Envy swelling in my chest. Is it possible to exhibit alpha male behavior on Twitter?

I looked over his list of followers and what I found astounded me. Many of them had names like “HelpYouMakeCash” or “Psychic123.” Tons of them had names like “pS5bo1g6″ with no photos. And a very high number featured icon photos with women baring their chest, or nearly so. Who would brag about a community filled with this stuff?

When I get followers bearing (baring?) those attributes I knock ‘em out. First, I’m not in the same game that they are. Second, I would not want any one in my Twitter community I would not proudly introduce to my kids.

What’s the point of all of this social media stuff anyway? I’m writing this blog and Twittering on a regular basis to contribute to the dialogue with a group of insanely cool people. I have learned SO MUCH from you guys out there. I like my new online peeps. I get excited when you respond to a blog post or RT one of my Tweets.

I genuinely want to CONNECT with my growing community but already have some concerns as the followers grow each week. At some point I think it will become too much and I haven’t thought of a next step. I want to be a good community member. Is that possible with a thousand followers? How do we build a sustainable, manageable community with a meaningful dialogue?

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Let social media pre-populate your business relationships

Jun 18th

3 comments

This is a picture of me building business relationships in Italy during World Cup. Well sort of.

Let me relate three quick stories that took place in the last 24 hours:

  • Yesterday morning, I went to a networking meeting and recognized somebody from his Twitter picture — a fellow I had followed for several months. Even though I had never spoken to this person before, he greeted me like an old friend, asking me about a common interest I had discussed on my tweets.
  • In the afternoon, I had a conference call with a potential customer from California. She had read some of my posts on Linked-in forums and was interested enough to go to my website (where she read some of my longer articles) and my blog. Based on my web and social media content alone, she was convinced I was the right marketing “voice” for her company and offered me a significant new business opportunity.
  • In the afternoon I received a call off my website. This young entrepreneur had also gotten to know me through Linked-in discussion boards and he referred to recent blog articles. We agreed to meet next week and discuss a new business engagement.

I’m not telling these tales to demonstrate my good fortune on this particular day. I’m providing examples of how a social media strategy can be used to attract potential customers and “pre-populate” business relationships.

What do I mean by this? In normal business relationships, it might take weeks or months of discussions and meetings for a new potential client to know and trust you. Through original web-based content and participation in forums related to my profession, these nice people felt they had a personal relationship with me — before they even made a single phone call.

In effect, I was able to pre-populate the business relationship with my life, talents, hobbies, opinions –and probably a few flaws — to significantly expedite the sales cycle.

Here’s an important point. In NONE of these cases did I actually try to sell something to somebody. One pundit likened social media to a dinner party. If you stand there and simply talk about yourself and your product, people will quickly try to get away from you. But if you offer something of interest, they’ll listen, seek you out, and perhaps become a new friend.

What are your experiences with this topic? Does it make sense to you? How is pre-populating sales leads relevant to your business situation?

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