Online Branding Blog – reactorr.com

Traditional Advertising versus Social Media

Forrester Research report estimates interactive marketing spending from 2009 – 2014 is on the rise. By 2014,  the online marketing budget will represent 21% of all marketing spend. This also indicates that traditional advertising is declining, but assumes overall budgets will as well.

As you’ll note by this graph from Forrester, the majority of budget is earmarked for Search Marketing, but I would think there could be changes to budgets being allocated to social and mobile in the future.

Forrester analyst Shar VanBoskirk alerts marketing and media professionals with a dire warning, “The cannibalization of traditional media will bring about a decline in overall advertising budgets, death to obsolete agencies, a publisher awakening, and a new identity for Yahoo!”

An interesting point to note – when it comes to search engine marketing and search engine optimization, the latter is the larger market. About 20% might click on PPC ads, but the campaign is created almost instantly. With SEO the time to rank can be from 3 months to a year or two, depending on the competitiveness of the industry and a dozen other considerations. When asked which is the best direction moving forward, I’ve always said both. Your SEM campaign can drive business until your SEO begins to work for you.

Does Social Media replace advertising? No, its just another channel to work with. Just like TV never replaced radio, and the Internet never replaced television.

Social Media Impact

We’re on the verge of a huge shift.

I can’t put my finger on it, but a lot of advancements in techology like smart phones, social media, and much more give me the impression that we’ll soon witness some noticable changes in how we go about getting things done.

With the advent of consumer journalism and social media, we are now empowered moreso than any other time in history. We’re controlling what we read, and view, and also have a direct impact on what others see by the power of our vote. News all over the world can now be reported in real time. From Twitter and social bookmarking sites to CNN’s iReport, we’re now the correspondents. Know as consumer journalism, technology and social media are the tools of the trade and they bring truth.

But what’s really amazing is the impact all this can have, and the change that it can make. Take the recent events that are happening in Iran for example. After the recent elections,  a landslide win led to riots over the concerns of voting fraud, and created Iranian protests worldwide. Technology and Social Media makes the truth prevail.

Using Twitter, news of the civil unrest leaked out in real time. People not only tweeted about what was happening around them, they shared via cell phones and uploaded video of riots in the street from their phones to youtube. While the Iranian authorities prohibited journalists from reporting, social media tools kept us informed. Iran’s authorities later attempted to block communications such as TV, radio and cellphones, but the Internet proved to be more challenging. To illustrate the Iran election and use of social media, see this timeline.

When there was an earthquake in China, people twittered it as it was happening! CNN didn’t break the story for another couple hours.

But beyond social media for current events and trends, how do you use it for your business? You can use social media tools to empower your employees.  So long as you have a social media policy of some kind, why get in the way of the conversation? But how you might use it for a business is for another time.

Here’s an interesting clip from the Ted talks that’s a must see;

Clay Shirky – How Social Media Can Make History

Social Media Business Strategies

Using social media tools can allow a business to connect and create conversations with their clients. Savvy companies have picked up on the opportunities and are already engaged. Throughout the customer life cycle a company can educate, support, pitch, introduce and more.

Social media is about conntecting people. Integratration of social media into your marketing strategy is no longer a question if whether if you should, but how you plan to do so. The possibilities are numerous, and your customers will show their appreciation through shorter sales cyles and increased business.

Usually customers are using social media tools before the companies are, so its important to participate, but also understand that you’re not in charge. Simply put, either let go or lose control.

Where does one start? Does your company have a blog? Depending on the nature of your business, you might have several experts within your company and want to have multiple blogs. If you have more than one division or product line you might be a candidate for multiple blogs.  Maybe your engineers are working on different aspects of the business that justify multiple blogs? An example of a company with multiple blogs is GMblogs which discusses everything from new products to events. This approach caters to specific interests and makes the blogs more interesting to read than lumping all related aut content into one blog.

Dell is another example, with 10 internal blogs and over 20 Twitter accounts, they’re maintaining relations and communication with consumers on a few levels. If your business can be segmented, without becoming overly fragmented, multiple blogs might be an option for you too.

In other cases, it can make sense to run forums. This is more of a direct conversation with your audience and can require a higher degree of maintenance. As would creating your own social network. But the return on a successfully create forum or social network provides a direction line of communication with your customer. Be forewarned that creating and maintaining a forum or social network is a demanding endeavour.

By personalizing the customer experience through interaction you involve your customers and give your company a face at the same time. And advantage of having multiple blogs is, when applicable, you’re delivering a more targeted message to the readers. It’s important to keep in mind not to be overly commercial in your conversation, yet still mention informative news. Being informative and resourceful is going to add stickiness and interest to your message, as opposed to using it as an advertising channel.

Studies now show that as much as 60% of consumers find advertising unappealing or irrelevant. We’re no longer living in a society where media can push messages at consumers. They’ll find what they want, when they want. Your brand can be part of that.

Another great example is when P&G developed beinggirl.com to put themselves at the center of the conversation. While its cheaper to sponsor a site than create and support one, the control and equity built are incomparable. The community P&G built surrounds issues of the target market and hold their attention.  Building a community isn’t for everyone, it can depend on your audience and topic. In the case of beinggirl the consumer is higher to participate and join in the conversation, and they would be at the beginning of the sales cycle. Determining their lifetime value it made sense to create the community. This chart from BusinessWeek illustrates contributors by age.

Examples cited might be Fortune 1000, the message is still the same. Brand awareness is more than advertising. Maintaining that top of mind awareness is no longer about repetition. We know that hasn’t worked for some time and consumers are tuning us out the message. Products and services of value are about making life easier, so it stands to reason the message ought to be following the same format. Provide value in your communications and consumers will notice, preach to them and you risk losing them.

Although mentioned previously, it’s worth restating; you can either be part of the conversation or watch the opportunities to speak with your customers pass you by.

It’s Your Brand Too

Social strategy and branding – it’s like ham and eggs, peanut butter and jam, or insert your favorite combo here. The point being, marketing your product or service needs to include some form of social media component.

The web is listenening, and so are your customers. If you don’t join the conversation the blanks will be filled. Wouldn’t you rather be part of that conversation than allowing others to monopolize it? Afterall, if you’re not fully engaged with the conversation of your brand, you’re missing out on marketing opportunities.

It’s easy to understand that social media might be overwhelming, but you don’t have to do it all. When it comes to social media and brand management, you want to monitor the conversation. It would be virtually impossible to include yourself in every social media tool available, but monitoring your brand is a very important part of managing its perception. It’s like a form of proactive customer service.

The Social Media Conversation Prism is about enhancing a community, preferably centered around you and/or your brand. This is where it becomes important to monitor and manage. But its not really something that you “manage” per se, it’s more about being woven into the fabric of the conversation as opposed to arriving later. The conversation is going to happen regardless. You can be part of it and build relations, or ignore it and hope for the best. Which do you think is going to work for you?

As you can see from the above sample, which doesn’t represent the entire social media spectrum, there are a number of places your brand’s voice can be. While each voice is different, there’s a need to be selective in where you’re active.

Your audience will tend to communicate in a variey of different places. Social media isn’t just about user-generated content, it’s much more than that. Marketers now have a unique opportunity to talk to, not at consumers. That’s what advertising was about, and we know how well that works these days.

Look forward to an upcoming post about tools for social media soon.

To Twitter Or Not

Twitter is an interesting idea, but it has a few down sides. First, you’re building your brand on someone else’s site. It’s important to leverage social tools, but keep in mind that you’re also giving up the potential link equity in doing so. Also. you’re inside a network, so it kind of hinders the potential in another way too.

Don’t get me wrong, in some cases Twitter makes a lot of sense. But I think that the effort, even though its micro blogging, is better put to use on your own blog. You can plug Twitter into it so it picks up the feed, and start following a few and commenting to a few directly. It’s really about roi and time management, which will really depend on who you are and how you use it. While that’s kind of a generalized statement, its a question of balance really. Some people will spend countless hours on it, and are addicted. Just ask John Mayer about it.

How you use Twitter is also up for debate. Some companies are using it to maintain communications with customers and open the channels a little bit.

There are some great examples of how to micro blog in 160 characters or less. But there are even more examples of how not to Twitter. Which is probably why I find this animated short so amusing…

Brand Management with Social Media

Despite your best efforts, and what you might think, your brand is managed by consumers. But before you get defensive, because I’m sure you’ve done a great job so far, allow me to explain.

Regardless of whether your brand has an online presence in the form of a website, it exists in the mind of the consumer and their conversations whether online or offline are going to shape your brand.

These conversations have been taking place without your knowledge for some time, and you can use an assortment of online tools to monitor those conversations. Besides just Googling for answers, there are several other ways to tap into the conversation.

Start with Twitter to get things rolling. Twitter is referred to as microblogging, and depending who starts the conversation it can spread within this community like wild fire.

Also be sure to use Google alerts, which you can setup as it happens, once a day, and once a week for notification.

You can also listen to what’s happening within the blogosphere by checking Technorati and a Google blog search for others signs of buzz or fires that need your attention.

Also keep in mind that your site analytics can provide some insight too. You might notice traffic from a long phrase or something unique to your brand.

Social Media Brand Management

Listened to Sean Moffit of Agent Wildfire give an interesting talk on social media today. Despite his introduction, it was an interesting hour. Mostly filled with facts and fodder, he breezed through his the slides of his presentation rather quickly although he had a lot to cover.

His talk on the influencers and the decline of advertising was especially interesting. But the one fact that probably woke a few up is the fact that consumers spend 25% of their media time online, yet media budgets for online are still around 5%. Which is a sign of a need to evolve as online media is more trackable. The drawback is it doesn’t reach the same audiences because online media is so fragmented. With print, radio, or television the advertising only comes in so many channels, stations, or publications. But with the web, people are now empowered to create their own content, and not only is the online entertainment more niche, it can also provide better conversion. Even if the numbers are smaller when comparing, its the conversion that counts.

The conversations you pick with your customers and the tools you use are paramount to your brand, as customers are already having those conversations so you should probably be part of them.

Social media isn’t a channel to replace something any more than the TV was to replace the radio, but rather an extension of the tools available. So when your customers blog or twitter negativity, its because they’re looking for an outlet. Communicate with them and provide that channel to address issues and work them through.