The more I read about Social Media, the more I think it needs it needs to be defined differently and apart from Web 2.0. If Web 2.0 is defined as a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users, social media describes the (mainly online) technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences and perspectives in a community setting. It is safe to say Web 2.0 is a subset of social media.
What most people in business don?t realize is how much social media has upended our conventional school of thought on marketing. In fact, persisting in the old ways of marketing becomes detriment to businesses in the social media arena.
I have to relate a conversation I had 6 years ago with an old friend of mine. We were chatting over drinks when our interaction took a strange turn at one point. My friend was beginning to talk with a different accent. Within a few minutes I knew what was going on and I was miffed. I asked him, ?Is that how you speak to your grandfather??
This strange accent my friend had projected is a ?salesy? one. He said he was just practicing ?sales talk? on me. Sure, there will always be an appropriate time and place for such a talk. In social media context however, the best form of selling is no selling at all, and you can bet it will beat consultative selling hands down.
As the days go by, this ?no selling? approach is looking less like an option and more like an imperative. To begin to understand how social media has arrived at our doorstep, let me describe some major changes to statistics that usher its arrival.
Consider these:
1) Fewer ads reached more people with undivided attention in the 1960s. Today, more ads reach fewer people paying less attention.
2) 30% of TV viewers can recall a brand they saw on TV in 1960s. Today, less than 10% can recall a brand seen on TV.
3) Product proliferation means more choices for the buyer. In the 1990s, the number of brands on grocery store shelves tripled from 15,000 to 45,000.
4) Media proliferation: Beyond established radio stations, TV stations and magazine titles, information density and quantity has exploded with Internet-based publications, citizen journalism and the ever-increasing billions of web pages online. The amount of information a man living in the 18th century could absorb in his lifetime is equivalent to the amount we can absorb in a week!
5) Access proliferation: Information access points have blossomed from the good old days of newspapers, radios and TVs to include e-mails, search engines, instant messaging, blogs, satellite channels, video-on-demand, 3G content on cell phones, podcasting, iPods, multi-purpose video game consoles etc. Yet more choices of gadgets for consumers.
Proliferation means the days of a highly consolidated mass market is over, and this critical mass is getting more dispersed. As an Internet Marketer, I spend more time online than reading the papers and watching TV combined, while my parents? habits and lifestyle would remain much the same. This means that while TV advertisers are losing out on me, I can still search for the same information as they advertise, through the Net. The stark reality today is even the TV station is advertising for TV advertisers to use its channels as a platform.
Will the days continue to get darker for TV advertisements? It seems likely. You see, the current younger generation grows up using the Internet for leisure, not watching TV. The Internet takes it further by pushing mass consumerism via participation and interactivity as opposed to passivity associated with watching TV ads, because interaction gives immediate power of access to people who know exactly what they want, and they will go all out enquiring to get it.
Think about the typical surfing habits of an Internet user.
S/he started the day with clearing e-mails, reading the news, discover who else approach them on social networks or check sport scores. S/he continues to follow up on a few more websites of specific interests and if s/he is web-savvy, publishes content on his/her own web space and sites. If there?s still time left in the day, s/he turns his/her attention to leisure pursuits like movies and music and check if there?s anything to purchase or chat up with online pals in forums.
Notice this one fact: all the websites mentioned in the diagram above have the basic technology to invite visitors to create an account. Having an account empowers subscribers to customize or filter specific news they want to receive regularly and also interact with other subscribers. By the act of account creation, part of the subscriber?s subconscious mind has given consent to the website creator to push some promotion to him/her until s/he says, ?Stop.?
You can?t say ?stop? to advertisers through the goggle box. You can switch it off but that defeats the purpose of television. Nobody buys televisions to watch 30-second product placements. It?s too brief; when people want more information about a product, they would still resort to the Internet. If you are social media-savvy, you?ll know the whereabouts of your subscribers and engage them where they are precisely at their usual meeting points.
I am not concluding that Internet advertisement is what makes people buy. Quite on the contrary, many marketers fail to recognize 2 common consumer reactions which cut across both the Internet and TV:
1) They don?t want to be bombarded at.
2) They don?t participate in an environment or activity (like buying a TV set) only to expect something else totally different or out of context (watching ads).
In this respect, SMM goes against the grain of what Internet Marketing stands for and is quite an antithesis. Internet Marketing channels are cutting-edge, but the approach is ?oh, so 60s?, especially e-mail marketing. On the other hand, SMM?s greatest emphasis is in social proof and what good and bad about a product consumers are talking after having experienced it. Effectively, the onus of advertising no longer lies with the seller, but it has shifted to the buyer.
Here?s the tough part: SMM requires the original advertisers to let go of their marketing machinery and let the word-of-mouth (both endorsements and criticisms alike) runs its course. In the initial phase, advertisers have to promote to build up awareness. The marketing campaign is controlled, coordinated and carefully executed. But once people start to buy things and talk about them, it becomes apparent advertisers do not plan for what to expect (chaos out of all that yakkety-yak) and how to handle negative remarks.
Because the online world is unbridled, surfers can be as malicious as they want under the cloak of anonymity. One of the best examples I can think of are the forums in China where the posters would lambaste their local stars for every action they take or incident they?re involved in. Have you suffered character attacks before? I do actually years ago, for the most baseless of reasons. I have no respect for such unconstructive behavior and would not bother to hit back or defend myself, but try my best to love my enemies if that?s what Jesus says so. Of course, if you think that for every person who likes you, you have 2 more haters, you?d better look into the mirror and check whether you resemble Hitler or not.
Fortune 500 companies will not get bogged down by a single complaint, but a few smart ones know how to turn that complaint into a marketing twist, thereby placing the onus of advertising on that unhappy customer (to his/her credit).
If a product is truly defective and is considered ?dead? to its function, there?s nothing to shout about. Warranty support will have to follow up. It is those products with ?disputable grey areas? that can be further marketed with a twist.
Take for example the computer game ?Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08? by Electronic Arts. A gamer discovered a glitch where Tiger Woods can walk on water. He made a YouTube video about it and got 600,000 views.
Not to be outdone, EA picked up the buzz and responded with a video of the real Tiger Woods walking on water, declaring he is really that good, not a glitch. The video received more than 2 million views now. I do not know whether EA did rectify the glitch in the end, but I wouldn?t believe more sales didn?t convert out of that 2 million views. It is at least clear to us that by engaging the gamer?s feedback, EA has found something to ride on to create a greater impact. And the company did it with a whole lot of fun.
Here?s a purely hypothetical example. Heard that dirty ?Tickle-Me-Elmo? joke? Skip the next 5 paragraphs if you don?t want to read. As it goes:
A women desperately looking for work goes into a toy factory.
The Personnel Manager goes over her resume and explains to her that he regrets he has nothing worthy for her. The woman answers that she really needs work and will take almost anything. The Personnel Manager hems and haws and finally says he does have a low-skill job on the Tickle-Me-Elmo line and nothing else. The woman happily accepts. He takes her down to the line and explains her duties and that she should come in at 8am the next day.
The next day at 8:45, there?s a knock at the Personnel Manager?s door. The Tickle-Me-Elmo line manager comes in and starts ranting about the woman just hired. After screaming for 15 minutes about how badly backed up the assembly line is, the Personnel Manager suggested he be shown the problem.
Together they head down to the line and sure enough Elmos are backed up from here to kingdom come. Right at the end of the line is the woman just hired. She has pulled over a roll of the material used for the Elmos and has a big bag of marbles. They both watch as she cuts a little piece of fabric and takes 2 marbles and starts sewing them between Elmo?s legs.
The Personnel Manager starts to kill himself laughing and finally after 20 minutes of rolling around, he pulls himself together and walks over to the new employee and says, ?I?m sorry, I guess you misunderstood me yesterday. What I wanted you to do was give Elmo two test tickles.?
Can you imagine what happened when the Sesame Street franchise caught sight of this joke? It immediately registered a site at ticklemeelmo.com and kick off a new line of ?Elmo with 2 marbles? toys and they were selling like hot cakes.
Well, dream on! This is not going to happen for as long as Sesame Street has a reputation to protect. However, fans of Quentin Tarantino?s Pulp Fiction will relish this wallet as the next best real thing.
Ever since the ?bonging? incident, Michael Phelps went back on track focusing on swimming again, and established himself as a winning legend in his final Olympics, but here is yet another example worthy of social hype. I had previously asked: can his agent design a marketing campaign that makes light of the incident with a funny twist and yet is also sincere and inspirational, so that he can win back the favors of more people and Kelloggs (his commercial sponsor) as quickly as possible? Because at that point Michael was not completely ?defective?, and I suggested that he could surely find a way to redeem himself by renouncing past mistakes and possibly take up an anti-drugs abuse cause, and he did pick himself up alright.
Thus it is within the advertisers? immense responsibility to be able to track the chatter of consumers online (do a simple search of the names of yourself, your company, your products and brands and see where they ended up in the blogosphere or memesphere) and respond in a ?social media? manner which is akin to ?taking part in the fray?. Most business people would think, ?Who would want to take on such a risky endeavor??
The truth is you can learn how to respond, what/when not to respond and how to get customers to respond on their own as you like them to be. In Internet Marketing, communication with your subscribers and customers can be boiled down to these few types of interactions:
1) As always, you begin with promoting a product.
2) If the product is yours, you welcome your readers to send in a testimonial, feedback, questions so you can assist them with squeezing the maximum value out of the product.
3) You invite them to join in the affiliate program so they can promote the product and earn a commission for every sale. But did you notice without the affiliate program, they will not be as motivated to spread the word about your product on their own accord?
4) You run a survey to solicit feedback on what kind of product they haven?t seen before, but would help them solve their problems, and then go to work to produce a new thing. You go back to point 1).
In all these 4 points, did you notice the Internet Marketer is doing his/her best to project him/herself as the ?know-it-all expert? and centrally and fundamentally useful to the conversations? Something is greatly amiss and it is the community setting. Without it, the marketer fails to leverage on social media.
In theory, SMM would go like this:
1) You create an online community and invite people to talk about their businesses and how one particular methodology has helped enhance their financial bottomline if they had deployed it. Encourage those who don?t use the methodology to get involved in the discussion and introduce their businesses so that other members can pitch in their helpful suggestions.
2) Meanwhile, you, as the moderator, also ?join in the fray? and help out as much and as best as possible while getting to know the members better in the process. Perhaps in the course of help, you come to a point whereby commercial information cannot be divulged and so begin to match a product to a member?s needs. When you don?t know any better, refer the member to another for better advice.
3) Anyway, since you are the community creator, you have total control over the database. Even if you don?t own the network, other members can witness your pro-activeness and conduct and judge for themselves.
You can be sure there?s a strong air of goodwill going on in this environment and you are a winner (with affiliate commissions to boot), but the biggest winner of them all is the recommended product?s creator since s/he got the word-of-mouth. S/he did not sell a single word.
According to Neilsen Global Trust In Advertising Survey, 2007, we have reached a point where 14% of people trust ads and 78% trust consumer recommendations. This is as good as saying ? of an economy is working healthily on recommendations, not from salaried jobs!
Mitch Matthews, Head of Marketing at Microsoft, said, ?We?re shifting significant ad dollars to digital media. This is the era of customer participation. The old model was ?informing, persuading and reminding?. The new model is ?demonstrating, involving and empowering?.?
Does that mean Internet Marketers will jump on the SMM bandwagon pronto? Unfortunately, that?s not going to happen. I?ve already written that IM and SMM are polar opposites. There will be a bit of struggle in shuttling between these 2 cultures. SMM will require better EQ and some getting used to of new habits, the first of which is to stop promoting at the first instance.
Take a look at this screenshot of a discussion thread about SEO from the ?What?s This Web Thing? Ning network. Out of respect, you can see I?ve given 2 ?culprits? black faces (simply to protect their identities). Out of the blue, one promotes ?get 1 million visitors free? and the other promotes DirectMatches. Nothing relevant to SEO. How do you feel when you see these ads? It really puts me off especially when the million-visitor ad just sounds too good to be true. It will never, ever do any good for both the readers and the content publisher. If a thread has a dominant subject, please stick to it. Whenever someone ask a question for help, attack the question immediately, show that you?re a competent authority in your expertise and gain a new friend in the process. If you work as a coach or trainer, SMM will be very useful as a marketing vehicle.
There are 3 powerful words you can derive from The Cluetrain Manifesto: Markets are conversations. Yessiree, conversations are truly the currency of social media. The sad reality is in our daily effort to make a living through marketing and selling, we often do not realize we stop short of listening and instead use every possible tactic to win (a sale). It doesn?t matter whether it?s win-win or I-win-and-you-lose as long as I win FIRST. This kind of conversation in which one party is always thinking of a way to go one-up for him/herself is only urging us to approach our world and the people in it with an adversarial and competitive frame of mind.
Have we lost our natural ability to start an innocent and honest conversation? Has everyone started to talk like a salesman, like my friend 6 years ago? How do you break the ice then? If you haven?t done so, download Dale Carnegie?s How To Win Friends And Influence People and read this classic. In short, if you want to engage the other party in a conversation, you must unconditionally hand the power of talking over to them, and let them talk about themselves, their lives, their passion in business, their reasons for doing it and their long-term goals.
Understand this: by handing over the power of talking, you are receiving an even greater power?of LISTENING.
In marketing context, the statement goes: Every chance you are giving up to promote something, you gain an opportunity to engage a new business acquaintance as a friend in a conversation.
Every moment you?re not doing point 1) of IM, you stand an opportunity to do point 1) of SMM. Once you can get past this struggle, you can be cool about this SMM thing and go all out to be helpful and constructive without expecting short-term returns.
If I can?t listen to you properly, how can I help you as accurately as possible and get paid for it? Perhaps if I did succeed in helping you to the fullest, you may experience a feeling of gratitude deep enough to tell the world about my service without having to register with my affiliate program.
This is Chapter 3 of your special Web 2.0 report ?Monetizing Secrets Of Going Web-Social?.
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