As I mentioned in my last Weekly Content/Social Marketing Links post, I’ve asked the Powered marketing, business development and product teams to pick one news article, blog post or research report a week that “speaks” to them. With that article, they need to come to our weekly staff meeting prepared to give a 120 second update on what the article was about and why they found it useful.
DP Rabalais (marketing):
Topics included in the article are:
- Growth of Social Networks
- Demographics of Social Networking Site Users
- Implications of Social Networking Sites for Marketing
Key Objectives Companies had for integrating social media site into their marketing mix are:
- Improve Customer Understanding
- Promote Issues of Social Concern
- Promote Products and Services
- Facilitate Internal Knowledge Sharing
- Increase Brand Awareness
Note: this is from a PDF downloaded from the Marketing Leadership Council’s site. If you’re really interested in the article and don’t have a subscription, e-mail me and I might be able to send you a copy. [aaron DOT strout AT powered DOT com]
Of course, social media on third party sites is very different from social media on branded sites. I describe this a bit in the comments.
My post for this week from Mediapost is titled Critics Of Influencer Model are Missing The Boat . It’s an interesting look at the definition of market “influencers”. It does a good job of categorizing and defining the 5 different types of influencers. Because of the internet and the ability of everyday people to give their opinions, the masses have become the most important influencer category. While the traditional influencers are still important, companies no longer need to rely on them to get the word out. Word of mouth from the masses of everyday people have become the most important “influencer” category.
This certainly validates our Facebook connect integration with our platform. If used properly, this will serve as a major traffic driver to the communities we build in the future. It also validates our own marketing efforts. While it’s important to reach out to the major analyst influencers like Gartner and Forrester, we are doing a good job of reaching out our own group of influencers to get them talking, growing our webinar participation with everyday influencers exponentially, and focusing on getting involved with the smaller social media and marketing groups regionally. This will take time, but we’ve come a long way over the last several months.
Beth Lopez:
My submission this week is not a blog article but a Forrester report called Social Brand Strategy by Lisa Bradner. The premise of this report (will be available on Powered.com soon) revolves around how to create a successful brand-centric social media strategy and what companies and CMO’s must do to engage consumers with their brands. While the report discusses in context of social media, it does contain validating points that we talk of in sales situations:
- Think strategically about social media and social marketing
- Understand who your target is, how that target seeks to engage, and the role that distinct social media channels play in their brand experience.
- Turn off the reach and frequency blinders – marketers need to spend more time thinking about preference and loyalty than awareness.
- Give brand advocates tools to evangelize and reasons to get involved!
r purchases). It continues to discuss the challenge’s CMO face:
- Regardless of the fact that 59% of companies have a CEO driven customer centric culture, actions display a lack of execution
- Lack of accountability
- The difficulties associated with implementing the necessary lines of communication across all business units, partners, and channels
It paints a nice picture for our business:
- Affinity, brand perception, retention, and Net Promoter scopes are critical metrics for driving business objectives through word-of-mouth and brand loyalty
- It is difficult and expensive for brands to implement across all business units, partners, and channels
- We can impact these same metrics in a fraction of the time and cost
My post comes from ReadWriteWeb and is entitled Community Building 101 for the Bootstrapped Startup. The post focuses on a four month old financial news community called Tip’d that has risen to success in a very short period of time. The secret to their success… “There really isn’t any secret to our success. In fact, it’s community building 101 in the truest sense. Instead of focusing on ourselves, we’re focusing on what the financial blogosphere (i.e. the content creators) wants, and what the financial news readership (i.e. the content consumers) wants.”
To the Powered team – Thanks very much for including my post. Doug and I have had a good discussion on what is measurable and we don’t disagree on much. At any rate he’s right – there is a good discussion happening in the comments. This is a great post of useful links, not to mention a nice introduction (for me) to the broader Powered team. Thanks again for the inclusion.
Adam, I think we officially consider folks like you and Jim honorary members of the Powered team! 😉
I really appreciate you sharing how you keep modern on what’s going on in this gigantic swell of a wave. The links are fantastic too. Can’t wait to hear about the next weekly meeting!Alexis Faulkner CeuleOverland Park, KS
Thanks Alexis. Much appreciated. Next installment will be up later today.Best,Aaron | @aaronstrout