Monthly Archives: September 2008
Over the past few months, I’ve had some great opportunities to meet folks from a variety of companies and I’ve detected a bit of a pattern. Organizations are genuinely challenged with what to make of the changes on the Web, both from an external marketing perspective as well as the internal enterprise.
For example, many companies are eager to take advantage of “social media” efforts, meaning non-traditional marketing initiatives that involve either unpaid media or interacting directly with consumers/customers/users and communities. BUT, there is risk involved and the most often asked question which is inevitably asked becomes “what’s the ROI”?
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Branding is thought of as “the process of creating a unique, positive and recognizable identity for a product or service” and has traditionally been achieved by companies through mono-directional interactions with their customers. Social marketing requires companies to let go of their death grip over their brand and put faith into the hands of users and customers. Branding 2.0 has nothing to do with product shots, tag lines or carefully crafted copy created by marketers. Branding 2.0 is about letting customers define your brand for you.
That G.U.T. Feeling
The catch with social marketing is that it doesn’t really matter how pleased the company is with the effort – if customers aren’t feeling it then it will fail. Try to make a piece of brand-friendly social media that doesn’t allow customers to interact with it the way they want to and you will end up with nothing more than a web based black hole that sucks in money and resources and never gives anything back. So what makes one social marketing effort a success and another a dud? The G.U.T. – Genuineness, Usefulness and Thoughtfulness.
Quick Hits
- Ten Aspects of Web 2.0 Strategy That Every CTO and CIO Should Know
- Ideas vs Ideology and the “Strategy Table”
- The Future of the Desktop
- My First 8 Steps As A New CMO
- How Great Design Makes People Love Your Company
- How to Captivate an Audience
- Eight Rules for Choosing Web Analytics Key Performance Indicators
- When Did We Start Trusting Strangers?
- From Making a List of Questions to Crafting the Interview Experience
Sites of the Week
Photo uploaded by Laughing Squid
I’m both attending and speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City (this is a first for the city). Web 2.0 is a large event, with over 6,000 attendees over the course of 4 days and the focus of the NY venue is slightly geared toward not only a tech crowd but marketing, design and business as well. I had the opportunity to attend 3 very interesting sessions yesterday morning. Here’s a few take-aways.
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Quick Hits
- Re-Rethinking the User Experience
- Exploring the Relationship Between UX and Account Planning: The Middle Child and Mid-life Crisis
- UX is the New Account Planning
- A List of Social Media Marketing Examples
- How Pixar Foster Collective Creativity
- CNN Twitters Its Way To Direct Audience Engagement
Sites of the Week
