A few days ago I had the pleasure of sitting with the VP Marketing of a well known, established technology company in Seattle that everyone would know. The firm is a leader in their field and is backed by some of the wealthiest individuals on the planet. She was interested in how we marketed Imagekind, gained traction with users, artists and press. She had been telling me how the company was working on a variety of email campaigns, direct mail pieces and other traditional marketing components. This particular marketing executive was high energy, experienced and a master of the craft.
But there was something interesting about this particular conversation…
What seemed like a “natural” marketing strategy in at least one respect for Imagekind wasn’t at all an area of active participation for this established company.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
With all new start-ups, you have a limited budget, limited staff and a myriad of other constraints. In our case, there was not going to be any direct mail pieces or large PR budgets until we mastered the art of social media marketing. It is necessary for several reasons. First, it is important to figure out how to get others to understand why they should have a vested interest in your success. Additionally, it is most helpful to have your customers and partners develop a vested interest in your success. Finally, it is your network of users that are your most efficient QA and testing resource.
In a nutshell, social media marketing should be the most important marketing priority for start-ups before moving into other areas. Even big companies are now realizing that they need to staff up for these kinds of positions. So, start-ups need to insure that they are present and accounted for when it comes to the free-flowing discussions moving around the web.
Ben Wills did a decent job of trying to encapsulate what Social Media Marketing was all about with his so-called “5 Pillars“. All to often though, and unfortunately, is that buzzy nomenclature is used to describe otherwise common sense concepts. He calls the pillars:
1. Declaration of Identity
2. Identity through Association
3. User-initiated Conversation
4. Provider-initiated Conversation
5. In-Person Interaction
I tend to like to say things plainly. Social media marketing allows you to:
1. Better tell the world who you are and what your purpose and intent is
2. Provides a basis for those with your interests to associate themselves with you
3. Assumes you accept that business is about a two-way conversation with your customers
4. Expand your ability to initiate your own conversations with customers
5. Provides a great platform to get face to face with your customers at events
And herein lies the mystery for me. Why would a marketing veteran NOT place this kind of marketing at the top of their priority list in all cases? Why is a direct mail campaign more interesting than engaging online dialog with your customers and prospects? The answer is simply that things are perhaps not as intuitive as they may seem. Most VP’s of Marketing still aren’t blogging and the ones that do probably weren’t doing it 2 years ago. Thus, traditional marketers are still trying to fully embrace what it is all about. Before allocating your marketing budget, hiring a PR firm, sending out any direct mail, paying designers to develop slick brochures, engaging in product give-aways and hiring celebrities to endorse your product, these are the questions that should be answered first:
“Where on the internet do my constituents congregate”?
“Am I regularly involved in the conversations with them at these sites”?
“Do I understand what my online reputation is”?
“Do I have an online reputation”?
“Do I know how to alter my reputation to better reflect what we want it to be”?
“Do I know how search engines are treating me”?
“Do I have an army of invested customers helping us row the boat towards our goals”?
“Do customers understand what is in it for them if they embrace our vision work help us communicate it”?
“Do we have sufficient resources and budget to maintain timely conversations online”?
“Do you ‘own the airwaves’ in your sector vis a vis your competitors”?
“Have we identified the key influentials out there that can help us get more traction”?
“Do we accept that a stay-at-home-soccermom can be far more powerful than a celebrity for our company”?
“Do we realize that a blog is not a toy? It is our customer sounding board and we must take it seriously”?
“Do we accept that PR firms do not define our identity”? Customers words do that
Social media marketing is a slightly fancy way of saying that we accept that modern day marketing is first and foremost about the importance of two-way communication.
Forget fancy brochures. They don’t talk back. Instead, prepare to get dirty. Spend more time online talking and less time putting stamps on direct mail. When it is all going really well, a lot of people will write about you and say nice things. A lot of people will even link to you from their websites. Then journalists will take note of this movement and will write about you too. All of this behavior should then correspond to increasing interest and that will correspond to sales. Knowing how to adjust the levers of online reputation, knowing how to track it and knowing how those actions influence revenue is essentially the cornerstone of online marketing in this day and age. Even for established companies.
