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Aaron Strout

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Samsung Encourages You to Join the Conversation

September 27, 2010 By Aaron Strout 3 Comments

Apologies to my colleague, Joseph Jaffe, for borrowing the title of his second book, Join the Conversation [LINK], but in this instance, I just couldn’t resist. The “conversation” I’m referring to is one that consumer electronics giant, Samsung, is their asking their customers to “join” at the bottom of their home page.


At first blush, you might laugh and remind me that many brands these days are asking their customers to “join THEIR conversation” on Facebook, Twitter and the like. However, not so fast. In Samsung’s case, they are taking a clever and unorthodox approach to engaging with their customers. Let’s call it “reverse influencer outreach” where instead of asking bloggers like myself to reach Samsung’s customers (and prospective customers) via my Twitter, Facebook, blogs and podcasts, they instead are asking their customers to reach out to folks like me, Brian Solis, Mario Sundar and others. And instead of talking about Samsung’s products, we’re talking about the lifestyles that wrap around those products. Or in my case, more conversational topics like, “If you could write a best-selling book, what would it be about?”

Wait a second? Why would a Fortune500 company like Samsung who enjoys millions of visits a day to its website waste valuable real estate on frivolous conversation? Rather than speculate about why, I asked Samsung’s Social Media Manager, Esteban Contreras (the person that invited me to participate in this program) a couple of questions about the program. Here are his verbatim responses:


[Aaron] What was the impetus for your innovative approach?

[Esteban] Samsung’s strategy going into this exciting project was focused on creating an online environment that further engages with our consumers. We wanted to develop a customer-centric and socially relevant site that enhanced the overall brand experience.

Our new site provides opportunities for people to engage with us and with each other. From social elements on the homepage and “like” buttons on product pages, to consumer comments, reviews and Q and As.

[Aaron] Some people might say this is a waste of valuable space on Samsung US’s home page (I think it’s brilliant). What would you say to those detractors?

[Esteban] We are living in a world where consumers expect and deserve more. Being customer-centric means offering an authentic and human experience. That’s why you see photos of real people on our site and an easier experience to find some of our employees and official accounts on Twitter. It’s also why we’ve provided an area for our visitors to engage not only with us, but also with others that have similar interests.

The web has become a social web and all we’ve done is bring a small part of it unto our site. We believe that giving some of our valuable digital space to our customers is important because they are the number one reason why we love doing what we do. Our customers mean everything to us.

While the “join the conversation” program is too new to measure impact, I can tell you anecdotally that I’ve received a couple of dozen responses (and anticipate receiving hundreds more). More importantly, I can’t help but think that Samsung’s customers will appreciate the fact that a big brand is taking a few minutes out of the day to get to know it’s customers better (all of the inquiries come through as hash-tagged tweets with #samsung in the “@” replies I receive so Samsung can measure the traffic). Even smarter, Samsung is outsourcing the responses to subject matter experts versus tackling them all themselves — okay, I may not be a SME in book writing but I have supported the marketing/social campaigns around three colleagues’ books to date (We Are Smarter than Me, Flip the Funnel and now microMarketing).


What do you think of Samsungs’ approach? Is it worth the real estate they are using on their home page? Should Samsung themselves be getting more involved in the conversation? Or are they just being a good host, handing conversations off to the “experts” and then keeping an eye on what transpires?

The Next Big Thing? Lot’s of Little Things.

September 20, 2010 By Aaron Strout 4 Comments

Cross-posted on The Engaged Conumer

If you haven’t met our VP of strategy here at Powered, Greg Verdino, you should try and remedy that soon. He’s a smart guy who brings a healthy dose of wit and snide to any channel you connect with him in. He’s also just written a book. A really good book I might add. One that is made better by NOT being about social media. Well, it includes many references to social media tools and examples… but the book itself is about marketing. MicroMarketing. If you’re wondering what that is, you came to the right place to find out.

microMarketing FTW!

Before I talk about what microMarketing is, I want to go back and provide a little context for this post. In helping my friend and colleague, Greg, get the word out about his new book, Mr. Verdino and I decided that rather than just send the book out to a bunch of influential folks and ask them to write about it, we’d ask them to cover a single chapter. I’m not in any way criticizing the traditional approach but in the spirit of “micro” we realized that shorter might be better. The roster of people that have agreed to speak is pretty awesome. I’ve included the names/dates/chapters they are covering and a link to their blogs below. As their write ups go live, I’ll swap out the generic blog links to those that point at the actual chapter posts:

Monday Sept. 20 – Chapter 1

  • Aaron Strout (yup, that’s me)

Tuesday Sept. 21 – Chapter 2

  • Lucretia Pruitt
  • Mitch Joel

Wednesday Sept. 22 – Chapter 3

  • Jason Falls
  • Toby Bloomberg

Thursday Sept. 23 – Chapter 4

  • Katya Andreson
  • Murray Newlands

Friday Sept. 24 – Chapter 5

  • Marc Meyer
  • Chris Abraham

Monday Sept. 27 – Chapter 6

  • Ari Herzog
  • TJ McCue

Tuesday Sept. 28 – Chapter 7

  • Danny Brown
  • Jay Baer
  • Adam Cohen
  • Becky Caroll

Wednesday Sept. 29 – Chapter 8

  • C.C. Chapman
  • Elmer Boutin

Thursday Sept. 30 – Chapter 9

  • John Moore
  • David Armano
  • Justin Levy
  • Beth Harte

Getting back to “what is microMarketing,” the title of the initial chapter of the book, “The Next Big Thing is Lots and Lots of Small Things,” does a nice job as summarizing the entire book. To that end, chapter one does a nice job setting the stage for the rest of the book by offering up examples of how the world is shifting from a mass to micro focus. With examples like “Sasquatch Dancing Man,” the Iranian election coverage by citizen journalists and Ashton Kutcher’s unlikely victory over CNN in a race to one million Twitter followers, the book demonstrates the loss of control by the mainstream media and in some cases, the government, over we, the consumer’s, time and attention.

If one were to summarize the entire book into it’s bare essence, this illustrative chart on page 21 pretty much says it all:

Chart: Seven Shifts from Mass to micro (p. 21 of microMarketing)

As a marketer or someone running a business big or small, it’s these types of prescriptive recommendations that make microMarketing so useful. When you take a quick look at the success of a site like Facebook with it’s 500 million members who share over 30 billion pieces of content each month, it’s not hard to understand that there is a new sheriff in town and his name is NOT “mainstream media”.

I promise that I won’t ruin the rest of the book for you. And while the reviews that you’ll get from my fellow bloggers over the next two weeks will be useful aids in understanding the new phenomena that Verdino writes about, it’s certainly no substitute for all of the useful examples and suggestions in the book itself. In fact, if you’re in the New York City area on September 27th, there’s a great seminar (I’ll be leading a panel with some of the folks mentioned in the book). You can also meet Greg and get your own signed copy of the book which comes with the price of admission.

If you’ve already read the book and have thoughts on Chapter 1 that I haven’t covered here (I’ve yadda yadda-ed over a lot), feel free to include them in the comments.

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