experience matters

Post 2 of 3. The Present, The Future, and How do We Get There? This part of my OMMA Social experience links trends that were talked about at the conference to my opinion and, in come cases criticism.

The Future: As a whole, there’s a whole lot of talk and not a lot of real action. What a shame. Lots of testing without calculated risk in 2008. For the record, I’m not angry at those early adopter efforts. I, for one, wish our own agency did more testing last year. As the industry eases their way into influential marketing, which is a combination of both earned and paid media; we’ll stumble over things like planning and measurement. Once we evolve those pieces, I think we’ll begin to see changes in 2 areas of our digital marketing approach:

#1. Lead with CRM, not basic marketing strategies around product awareness. We currently talk about finding evangelists and getting them to bring more people into the fold –influence their consideration set and purchases. But, in the future, (when most brands realize that they are chasing their tails) we’ll look at our current databases of consumers and crawl the web to see where they’re at. If we truly care about what they like and dislike, why don’t we put the people we truly care about at the top of our priority list, vs. sending them spam once a week? I think companies like Unbound Technologies do a great job of social mapping based on people, but miss the mark on finding contextual adjacency and relevance.

#2. Automate. Automate. Automate. What does the community manager of tomorrow look like? It’s nearly impossible to a) find someone who is authentic, b) we trust and c) we can scale to go out and engage in communities. Pushing out updates on twitter is easy, and companies like Dell, Zappos and Starbucks have been successful, but we’re faced with a real challenge when it comes to 1-to-1 interaction that scales.
While automation and authenticity aren’t synonymous, I do know that we need to create some efficiency. Let’s be honest with ourselves. If we dynamically populate the personalized salutation in email deploys, then I think we can one-up that approach in social media. Everyone gets warm and fuzzy when it comes to human to human community-based marketing, but we’ll evolve it and master social monitoring tools to automate, and optimize our responses based on groundswell growth rates and interactions. Eventually, we’ll need to prioritize those that want to actively dialogue with us when they are ready to buy a car, beer, or diapers and we’ll need to respond accordingly. Before you think I’m too cold-hearted, know that I’m not saying this without my applied understanding of search. Consumers are dependant on search, whether that’s through an engine or within a community. Part of our automation will be properly responding to those queries, because consumers are constantly and increasingly asking for it in community environments.

Now the bigger question… How do we get there? The final post in this series will come early next week. I’ll share some of our tactical approach, and am happy to include some of yours if you’d like to share.

Last 5 posts by Heidi Skinner

• @criticalmass checks in @SxSW Interactive 2010 – March 18th, 2010
• Trusting Edelman Buzz? – February 23rd, 2010
• Someone Stole My Bike… An Extraordinary Experience. – September 1st, 2009
• Twitterific SEO Checklist – August 5th, 2009
• Best Wishes, David Armano – April 9th, 2009

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