Social media is great at promoting social media experts but useless at promoting actual products and companies.I hardly see any product or company discussions in my Twitter or Facebook streams. I see occasional gripes about airlines, cable TV service, and sometimes I'm asked to become a "fan" of a company on Facebook. But that's about it.
The fact that airlines lose luggage, are late, are rude, is not new, it's par for the course. Same for cable TV companies. Social media does nothing to improve airline service or inform me much about things I didn't already know about a product or company. As for joining a corporate Facebook fan page, one click is about the extent of that engagement.
Yet social media is great at promoting social media experts who say that they advise corporations on their social media strategies. Or maybe social media is not good at promoting social media experts because I don't see the results of their work.
Recently in Advertising Management Category
A social conductor is an individual or organization that enables people to use their organization to achieve wants, needs and desires. The opposite is a social producer who uses people to create direct benefits to their organization.$20M is a drop in the bucket for Pepsi, which will certainly continue to spend advertising money in the traditional way. Having said that, thinking different for marketing purposes is certainly a great and timely idea.
Pepsi Initiates the "Conductor" ModelTime Magazine states: To Pepsi, and to companies around the world, the days when mass-market media is the sole vehicle to reach an audience are officially over. Instead of pouring millions of dollars into a Super Bowl commercial, Pepsi has started a social-media campaign to promote its "Pepsi Refresh" initiative. Pepsi plans to give away $20 million in grant money to fund projects in six categories: health, arts and culture, food and shelter, the planet, neighborhoods and education.People can go to the Pepsi website refresheverything.com -- which can also be accessed through Facebook and Twitter -- to both submit ideas and vote on others they find appealing. Among those on the site now: "Help free healthcare clinic expand services to uninsured in rural TN" and "Build a fitness center for all students in Hays, Kansas community." Every month, the company will offer up to 32 grants to worthy projects.
"This is such a fundamental change from anything we've done in the past," says Lauren Hobart, chief marketing officer for Pepsi-Cola North America Beverages. "It's a big shift. We explored different launch plans, and the Super Bowl just wasn't the right venue, because we're really trying to spark a full-year movement from the ground up. The plan is to have much more two-way dialogue with our customers."
Brokers and agents have numerous local opportunities to stand out without spending much money.
Samuel Palmisano (Chairman of IBM):
A few years ago, the world crossed a threshold. For the first time, more than half the human race is living in cities. By 2050 the figure will rise to 70 percent. We are adding the equivalent of seven New Yorks to the planet every year.Things we know:This means the most important locus for 21st-century innovation--technological, economic, and societal--will be our cities. They present the most promising opportunity to make our planet smarter.
Cities bring together the systems by which our world works: education, transportation, public safety, and health care, among others.
We have the capacity to inject new intelligence into those systems. Enormous computational power can be delivered in forms so small and inexpensive that it is being put into phones, cars, and appliances, as well as things we wouldn't recognize as computers, such as roadways (to monitor traffic) or rivers (to monitor pollution and better allocate water use). The data captured by these digital devices--soon to number in the trillions--will be turned to intelligence, because we now have the processing power and advanced analytics to make sense of it all.
Our challenge is to apply this technology to improving the places we live. Consider the applications:
- Networks, particularly wireless, will be faster and pervasive
- Mobile technology is exploding, and will be the right tool at the right time for most real estate professionals, see the latest version of our branded iPhone app. It is faster, easier to use and more convenient than most traditional website search and analysis tools.
- People are flooded with data. Turning that data into useful information - the "value add" and building relationships is the key to broker business growth.
- Some of the broker concierge services schemes from dot com boom #1 may now actually happen. Our Main Street software includes an extensive set of CRM/customer for life, transaction and concierge tools. One real time system from leads to closings.
- The key question for all organizations: "what is your value equation?"
We share a common belief that trust is an important currency in today's world especially in the digital realm.Fascinating, though not really surprising given the amount of social media "spam" circulating around the internet. Useful, timely content and commentary will always add value. Spam clearly detracts.Trust, we are taught, is hard won. It takes a long time to establish trust yet it can be destroyed in minutes.
But is that really true?
I've been looking at the Edelman Trust Barometer reports and it shows that trust in businesses, in media both social and traditional, in NGOs, in governments, jumps up and down by large margins from year to year.
I've been particularly interested in trust in social and traditional media. In the latest report, trust in peers, which represents social media, plunged by 20 points from 47 percent of those surveyed in the prior year, to 27 percent. Trust in other forms of media also fell by large margins.
Details here: 3MB Edelman PDF, website.
Roland T. Rust, Christine Moorman, and Gaurav Bhalla:
Imagine a brand manager sitting in his office developing a marketing strategy for his company's new sports drink. He identifies which broad market segments to target, sets prices and promotions, and plans mass media communications. The brand's performance will be measured by aggregate sales and profitability, and his pay and future prospects will hinge on those numbers.Brokers have a great opportunity to build AND own their marketing platform today, via a single entry system, blogs, a branded iPhone app and active cultivation of their clients via a pervasive CRM system, like Main Street.What's wrong with this picture? This firm--like too many--is still managed as if it were stuck in the 1960s, an era of mass markets, mass media, and impersonal transactions. Yet never before have companies had such powerful technologies for interacting directly with customers, collecting and mining information about them, and tailoring their offerings accordingly. And never before have customers expected to interact so deeply with companies, and each other, to shape the products and services they use. To be sure, most companies use customer relationship management and other technologies to get a handle on customers, but no amount of technology can really improve the situation as long as companies are set up to market products rather than cultivate customers. To compete in this aggressively interactive environment, companies must shift their focus from driving transactions to maximizing customer lifetime value. That means making products and brands subservient to long-term customer relationships. And that means changing strategy and structure across the organization--and reinventing the marketing department altogether.
Satisfied with your Google ranking? It just may change before the day is out. Marissa Mayer on Google's race against spammers..."We have two, three, five changes every week that are visible to the end-user in the user interface. We don't [publicize] the ranking changes. We are making changes to our ranking algorithm at the rate of two per day. Interestingly, some of our competitors haven't made any changes to their ranking function for quite some time. Search needs to evolve: the user interface, the ranking function. It's a process of making lots of small changes all the time and to constantly make things better."Now factor in personalization and that people are using more words per query and you get the sense that SEO as we know it really could one day be extinct.
What is a "mashup"? According to this wikipedia entry, "In web development, a mashup is a web page or application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service."
Real estate brokers and agents may wish to take advantage of "free" internet api's (application programming interface). Websites such as flickr, facebook, youtube, yelp and many others offer programatic interfaces to their data and media.
What are the benefits of such API's?
- Aggregate local information around properties for sale or rent.
- Enhance your website "experience".
- Avoid the cost of collecting and managing local information.
- Bad data. Automated information aggregators often lack local expertise. Information may be outdated; a long closed restaurant may still have a review on your website.
- Inappropriate content. I created a Facebook demonstration for a client some time ago. The resulting page included an advertisement for Filipino Girls.
- What motivates the data aggregator? Is their strategy aligned with yours?
- Does the data make your site more generic?
- Competitive stealth advertising on your site. Savvy competitors will figure this out and place their content on your site via the API's.
Your agents have a wealth of local market knowledge. Hire or appoint a "blog-o-spondent" or "blogger-in-chief". This person creates and aggregates your own content (text, audio, video, maps) on your blog, around your website(s) and via appropriate social networks. Over time, agents and staff post directly and incorporate your listings, services and our unlimited use maps (for a fixed price). Create your own platform that emphasizes your brand. This approach improves recruiting, retention and internet marketing in ways that you control and at a much lower cost than traditional advertising.
Main Street reliably supports the tools you need, from blogs, dynamic short links, lead management, surveys and multimedia to market reports and live charting tools.
As always, there is no "free lunch".
ONLINE social networks are handy not just as a means of wasting time but also as a communications tool for business. Dell, a computer-maker, has made $3m in sales from Twitter since it started "tweeting" about its outlet that sells refurbished computers in 2007. Marketers are eager to use fast-growing networks to tout their products. An Australian online-marketing company, uSocial, wants to help them--for a price. On September 16th the firm started selling Facebook friends and fans.After trawling Facebook for users by criteria like age, location and interests, uSocial then recommends potential friends to companies, who approach them directly. A firm pays $727 for each 5,000 users who agree to be its friend, or 15 cents each. "Fans", who merely express support for a firm, are cheaper.
It is not the first time uSocial has tried to sell the benefits of popular online destinations to marketers. It sells votes on websites such as Digg, which let people share content and vote on which articles should appear on the site's front page. It also sells Twitter "followers" (people who follow a user's updates) to companies looking for some positive buzz. Those websites disapprove. So does Facebook, which may try to bar uSocial from its service.
Tim Bradshaw & Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson:
In 2008, the only advertisement any marketer could talk about was Cadbury's drumming gorilla. The advert was made for television but was also viewed millions of times on YouTube.Agencies were delirious at the crossover success to the video sharing site. Here, finally, was proof that traditional agencies could conquer the web with old-school marketing skills. Gorilla scooped the grand prix in film at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.
By June this year, Cannes was a very different festival. For a start, the Croisette - normally packed with partying ad men - was deserted as agencies stayed away to nurse their shrinking budgets. But in any event, rather than television adverts winning awards for online work as Gorilla had, it was the online campaigns that impressed the judges across every category.
The campaign that won the most awards was the web-led Tourism Queensland contest to fill "the best job in the world" - a caretaker on an "island paradise". This word-of-mouth hit generated press coverage, including a BBC television documentary on the search for the winner, worth an estimated $100m (€70m, £62m) from a budget of just $1.2m.
This digital discombobulation, combined with the recession, has taken its toll not only on advertising budgets and fees but also on the self-esteem of a vast industry, in which the top five global agency groups are expected by Jefferies, the investment bank, to earn revenues of $45bn this year, with the marketing services industry as a whole turning over $80bn.
The saga of the prank Domino's video could be a case study of how fast-moving social media can both giveth and taketh away.It began April 13, when five YouTube clips showing a Domino's Pizza employee performing unsavory acts with food began spreading on the video-sharing site.
One clip shows a male worker, identified in the amateur video only as Michael, sticking cheese up his nose and adding it to a sandwich. In another, Michael sneezes into a cheese steak sandwich "to be served to some unlucky customer that's in need of some snot," said the video's shooter and narrator, who identified herself as Kristy. In a third, Michael rubs himself with a sponge, then uses it to clean a pan.
Predictably, the vast YouTube community was revulsed, yet watched anyway. Within a day, the clips had been viewed about 200,000 times, while anti-Domino's comments began to spread on Twitter and other social media sources.
