Address

Brainstorm Principal Bart Caylor will be making a presentation on Web 2.0—how the Internet has evolved and what it means to business leaders now and for the future—at the Main Street Institute’s 2007 Web Marketing event on August 24th.

The Main Street Institute, a partnership of the Greater Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce and Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, is a year-round series of educational programs focused on the latest developments in sales, marketing, customer relations and growth management.

This Friday’s program at the IUPUI School of Informatics also includes presentations on:

• Integrating technology into current marketing plans
• Search engine optimization
• Converting web traffic to customers
• Industry trending

To register contact Alane Summers at 317.464.2213 or go to indychamber.com.

Be Heard Among the Herd

Digitally propagated word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing initiatives can reach your target audience in ways traditional means can’t. WOM can also be a far more trusted means of amplifying your messages and driving results in vertical lifestyle markets and niche communities.

Viral seeds, chat room seeding, key blog commentary, message boards, forum contributions, and even SMS (Short Message Service) are just a few of the ways products and services are promoted or demoted on an ongoing basis.

Be Results Oriented

Enter online social spaces liberally and vocally but with a plan of action and an eye to nascent communication protocols—think long-term behavioral loyalty over short-term sale.

WOM works best with easily explained products and value propositions founded upon messaging that establishes future loyalty with new customers and encourages natural WOM among current customers.

A WOM campaign can:

1. Generate Buzz: Advance your brand and accelerate distribution of your message via properly tagged media assets forwarded virally.
2. Enable Proaction: Promote, mitigate, or preempt the effect of breaking news, and/or seed news of your own by engaging in online social dialogs.
3. Enhance Augmentation: Support your existing promotions, draw web traffic and gather consumer input.

Not for Everyone

Interactive engagements with your online target audience within their social networks is smart business. But WOM marketing strategies can negate value if improperly deployed. Push an agenda and social networks tend to roar right back (or bite) if they sense they’re being sold.

Finally, it’s always important to consider the current quality of your brand’s deliverable when developing a WOM strategy. Ultimately, as a marketer, you can’t control what customers say about you online.

Image: bullish1974

Miss Irresistible (Nice Teeth)

Meet Miss Irresistible, the new spokesperson/avatar for P&G’s Crest product line. A self-proclaimed “irresistible babe,” she’s helping brand giant P&G enter the realms of Social Media.

P&G’s Social Media Exploration

Miss Irresistible invites visitors to send a naughty—or nice—personalized e-card from her MySpace site—very “You.”

However, 80% of the real estate on the MySpace page seems designed for a Parent’s magazine print ad—predictable and less “social” than you’d expect.

Although the effort still needs some work, P&G is making the right move. Adopting a Social Media plan, sidestepping potential legal department concerns and institutional resistance to change is a critical move forward for the corporate behemoth.

As quoted on the Cincinnati Enquirer’s website, P&G global marketing officer James Stengel said:

“Consumers are right now very dynamic in their media habits. If you stay in touch with that and you want to be relevant in their lives, obviously, a lot of things change … It’s the same reason we got into television 60 years ago.”

New Media, New Lessons

Some large, less nimble corporations stumble a bit as they grapple with how to enter the Social Media market space.

In a move that drew fire from new media experts, Sears Canada recently launched a so-called Consumer Generated Media (CGM) site—a glossy Flash for Flash’s-sake basic voting booth where visitors could choose one of four catalog covers.

The fear of reprisal isn’t limited to corporate legal and marketing departments. The Internet is rife with examples of traditional corporate Public Relations (PR) handling and mishandling of Social Media events.

Something to Smile About

None of these companies has been ruined by its Social Media experiences. In fact, if embraced and acted upon, each Social Media corporate headline event presents an opportunity to learn and change.

Traditional approaches to marketing, public relations and legal issues can be disconnected in the Social Media marketing space.

Taking time to affirm that the people and firms with whom you’ve aligned have a demonstrated understanding and breadth of experience in the Social Media arena is a proactive step toward making your brand irresistible in a sea of free-flowing Social Media dialog.

A Protest

Tom Wayne, owner of Prospero’s Books in Kansas City, Missouri, loves books. Recently looking to reduce his used book inventory, he found he couldn’t even give them away. So he got a permit and burned them in protest (see the Yahoo article).

Read a Book? LOL!!!

Apparently the 18-34, web 2.0, GenMe, millennials just don’t read books much anymore.

According to a recently released study on The Arts and Civic Engagement by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 18-34-year-olds have the lowest literary reading rate among all adults at 45.2%. In 1982, the rate for the same age group was 61.1%, the highest among all adults at the time.

Burning Issues

The Internet is one likely cause in this behavioral swing. With the web’s seemingly infinite supply of information and the finite number of hours in a day, books are becoming arcane, expensive, and volumetric. Committing to more than a 2-minute video, a podcast sound bite, or a short blog entry is increasingly impractical if GenMe individuals hope to keep up.

Relevancy, Transparency and Brevity

Trying to reach GenMe and other market segments flooding into online social environments is a long-term, long tail play. Consider words like transparency and participation over terms like selling—and above all, keep it brief.

In fact, if you’re still reading this, you may be over 35.

*Download the complete NEA report here:
Civic Engagement pdf | 136 kb

Image source: n8ive

Minding the Crowd

The backbone of any social network is participation, and comments and conversations are the vertebrae. But efficiently tracking the data trails of ever-shifting collective opinion has been an elusive exercise.

coComment.com now provides a single resource for accessing and tracking all the latest online conversations–yours as well as others you’re following. You can track top commenters, articles and posts as well as who’s commenting on the same conversations you are–coComment subscribers and non-subscribers alike.

Anticipating Critical Mass

Imagine a repository of social media conversations reflecting current collective attitudes and views, accessed by topic. On-demand data parsed to reflect the pulse of socially networked opinion is invaluable market intelligence for any business looking to establish, advance or protect their brand.

According to coComment.com CEO Matt Colebourne in an interview with MediaPost’s Behavioral Insider:

“If I am Coke and I want to know I am being talked about, that is an easy measure in a database. But how do I find out if I am being talked about positively? That is exactly where we can offer something that at the moment we don’t believe anyone else can. You need to have all of those stored conversations.”

Beware the Backlash

Social networks are leery of being measured, tracked or marketed to. Their sting can be swift, severe and unexpected, their lauding and accolades, equally surprising. The behavioral analysis and insight provided by coComment.com can help businesses anticipate shifts in market preferences, buying habits, trends and public opinion, thus mitigating the downsides and maximizing the upsides of fickle-willed social media realms.

The Future is Now

Few brand marketers are taking the time to thoroughly understand the Web 2.0 nuances of Social Media Marketing (SMM). Any institution could benefit from the type of information coComment.com purports to offer.

That is if “You” and “GenMe” allow it.