Yes, its blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and MySpace.
It’s also thousands of other lesser-known networking platforms, Nings, wikis (as in wikipedia), touch points, metrics, SEO, influencers and raving fans, crowdsourcing, open sourcing, Klout, Squidoo, Posterous, Google Analytics, Biznik, and on and on and on. Not to worry. This blog should begin to make sense of it all soon enough. And you’ll be able to pick and choose what you need to know.
The place we want to start is to relate social media to what we already know: traditional marketing, word-of-mouth and testimonial marketing, and relationship marketing. There is a separate Page on traditional marketing: Marketing 101. If you have never taken a course in marketing, read Marketing 101. It’s very basic, and if you’ve been successfully marketing your business (which means you get bang from your marketing buck and you know how much bang) you may already be familiar with the Marketing 1o1 Page. If not, your knowledge and understanding of those concepts will be critical to understanding how to best use social media to market your business.
Word-of-Mouth
In the beginning there was word-of-mouth, and everyone understood that nothing, expensive commercials, sales, nothing, could have as strong an impact on a decision to purchase as word-of-mouth. If you know me at all, or can relate to me in someway, my opinion on a product or service is likely to matter to you. In your community, multiply that opinion by as few as two or three. It counts for a lot. Now multiply those opinions by 10, 20, 100, 1000, 10,000. Welcome to social media.
Testimonial Marketing
Not a whole lot different from word-of-mouth. We see testimonials, by people we don’t know, all the time in print ads, radio and tv commercials. Sometimes it’s someone we do know like the elderly actor Wilford Brimley (was in Cocoon) or John Tavolta wearing a Tag Heurer watch or Tiger for Nike (maybe not so much now). Social media is very much about testimonials, but in social media its not the celebrity or “guy next door” that influences us, its the Influencer/Raving Fan (more about Influencers/Raving Fans in a later post).
Relationship Marketing
I’ve long been a fan of Martha Rogers and Don Peppers, who wrote the NY Times bestseller The 1:1 Future. Martha spoke at a conference I attended and equally impressed the other 400 retailers and manufacturers in the audience. One quote, among many, stands out in the book: “It takes 5 times more resources to create a new customer than it does to keep a current customer.” Everything Martha and Don wrote about 12 years ago is what social media marketing is all about: engaging with your customers and building relationships. Today we call it CRM: Customer Relationship Management. One of the best examples is Comcast, and how it has aggressively used social media to build strong relations with customers. Customer loyalty may not necessarily be a thing of the past. Social media allows us to do it on a larger scale and in meaningful ways.
So, as a means to begin to wrap your brain around this social media phenomena, think (1) it has much in common with the marketing that we know (2) there is a strong word-of-mouth element to it, as there is a serious element of (3) testimonial marketing, and (4) relationship marketing. You may see other anchors as a way to help grasp the whole concept, and your input and comments will be valued.
Tags: CRM, relationship marketing, testimonials, The 1:1 Future, traditional marketing, Word-of-Mouth
