Social Marketing
Expand your reach through social communities
Social marketing is an art form in itself that relies less on brute-force advertising
and annoyance marketing which has become pervasive in every aspect of our life.
The core principle behind social marketing is the art of getting a friend to tell
a friend. This relationship is impossible to duplicate through other advertising
and marketing channels.
Generally, when a friend tells a friend through social marketing, both of them believe
more in the value of the referral and they are much more likely to purchase the
recommended product. Blogging, Tweeting, Facebooking, and Emailing all fit into
this method of the viral spread of demand for a product. In a more traditional era,
single individuals through the controlled media were able to dominate this "trusted
referral" position. While this is still dominant, the central power of celebrity
endorsements are falling away to clusters and groups of interconnected "relationship
webs" that spider throughout the blogosphere and the social networks.
Take an example where you get a friend to post a link for a cool product on their
Facebook page. Now every connected "friend" will see that message, whether they
are in the same state, of the same demographic, or in the same advertising area.
This highly targeted spread of your message through a "key influencer" leads us
to many strategies that we can employ including:
- Viral Marketing
- Twitter Monitoring
- Article Syndication
- Pingback Networks
- Social Engineering
- Referral Networks
Viral Marketing
Messages that go viral are like a fuse that lights. Once it's lit it's a challenge
to control it, but it will burn quickly. In similar fashion, it also burns out quickly
and then goes away. Making viral marketing a consistent draw is difficult, so we
just consistently put fuses out there... in the hopes that they light... because
when they do, it's powerful.
Take an example of a viral marketing campaign. While I worked at Football Fanatics on the Yahoo! Sports official online store project the upper
management decided to experiment with business reorganization where they wanted
everyone to be "equal"... managers and developers alike. While this was an admirable
test, I liked to take a tongue in cheek approach to it as they decided to put everyone
into identical cubicles.
My first question was, "can I decorate my cubicle"? With an affirmative response,
several of us engaged in a friendly design competition. Not to be outdone by the
tiki hut by Tony Turner, I decided to trick out my cubicle in red mahogany with
Brazilian rosewood hardwood floors, fluted columns, crown moldings and even wired-in
power and cat-5 ethernet. This extreme cubicle took shape and was a phenomenal success.
Leveraging the talents of some of the best copywriting talents of Dylan Murphy,
the current email copywriter and email manager at the time, we launched two identical
(I thought) announcements at
www.iReport.com, the CNN independent journalism portal. While both our articles
tended to the same content, his copy phrasing was distinctly different and his submitted
article lit on fire, capturing a feature article in the German Financial Times,
a full episode on CNN news, a cover story on
www.CNN.com and stories on blog syndicators like Wired Magazine, Mopo.ca, Boing Boing Gadgets, DVice and many others.
Twitter Monitoring
Social marketing allows us to keep our finger on the pulse of public opinion in
a way that has never before been available. The sheer ability to monitor the "chatter"
that goes on online is scary in it's own right but can also be utilized to capture
customers before they have even had a chance to
Google (in some circumstances). Take the example of our social marketing
monitoring service where we log the "tweets", texts, blog updates, and facebook
status updates that people transmit over the web. These XML formatted signals can
be monitored and harvested as we examine what they are chattering about. We helped
a podiatrist monitor the keyword "feet hurt" through our social marketing service
and found that 1 person per 5 minutes on average says that their feet hurt into
their Blackberry or through their computer:
Friday, October 09, 2009 15:59:47 Dunyeah MUN sucked, my feet hurt from standing
up so much. :-( MUN on saturday and sunday, too. >.<
Friday, October 09, 2009 15:58:43 cellguru Lazy day... At the mall feet hurt lol
Friday, October 09, 2009 15:54:58 ayOoBrOOkLyN my feet hurt
Friday, October 09, 2009 15:30:55 BOMBkid but now my feet hurt. these sneakers gotta
come off, NOW...
Friday, October 09, 2009 15:14:03 crazygirl17 my feet hurt because you've been running
thru my mind all day.
Friday, October 09, 2009 14:50:36 Emirch Feet hurt and I feel unwanted and unattractive.
By monitoring this through social networks, we can extend offers, engage in data
mining, geographic segmentation, and public relations intervention.
Article Syndication
Getting your message out used to be through the arcane method of publishing press
releases in a staid format through established press release circles. Now that has
all changed where we can add articles to our blogs, leverage online newspapers like
Topix.com and iReport.com, and many other vehicles for article syndication.
This type of social marketing establishes quality backlinks to our own web properties,
and engages with the readers of those portals in a more formal way.
Pingback Networks
This technique utilizes various website "feeds" that are designed to act as town
criers whenever something changes. You will find this used often in WordPress blogs where as soon as a blog entry is posted,
the pingback networks engage and notify all of the engines that are listening that
a new blog entry has entered the blogosphere and is ready for keyword harvesting.
In this manner, my extreme luxury cubicle was picked up by blogs trapping the keyword
"luxury" so my cubicle makeover was seen by sites that indexed blog articles relating
to Rolex watches and other luxury items. It is important to manage this organic
linking in a way that helps you accomplish your marketing objectives.
Social Engineering
This tactic requires more than just a few paragraphs to go into the necessary level
of detail but in summary it employs the RAID concept that I developed for engineering
a social network "emotion" or "feeling". Generally as stories emerge on the web
and in the blogosphere, people form collective opinions that span their own individual
ideas and conceptions. You can refer to this as the "mob mentality" or "groupthink"
but generally people in closer social circles will tend to adopt the feelings and
opinions of the other people closest to them. To engineer this you must inject your
own thoughts and opinions into that mindshare in order to engineer a different or
slightly altered outcome. Public relations consultants have frequently utilized
this tactic but online it takes on a whole new meaning and influence as the scope
can be global and the cost to do so is exponentially minimal.
The "RAID principle"™ refers to:
- React
- Adapt
- Intercept
- Dilute
Reacting involves taking a measure of the current mentality and engaging in actions
that counter forces that are going in a direction you don't want.
Adapting means evaluating the current status of the mindshare and attempting to
alter your own presentation to make your injection more palatable to the crowd.
Intercepting is the tactic where you can trap egregiously damaging injections by
others and stop them cold whether through legal or other means.
Diluting is the gradual art of identify a counterveiling opinion and then flooding
it with contrary or diversionary noise around their communication so the message
is lost in the noise and confusion.
Referral Networks
Developing referral networks is a key piece of social marketing that involves investing in key influencers that will refer their networks of friends and contacts to your own marketing efforts. This can be done through strategic partnerships (adopting or co-opting the email lists of other companies), list acquisitions, and sponsorships (sending out review goods for the sake of publicity).