Our philosophy is pretty simple, Right Here - Right Now!!! The world is changing at warp speeds and Captain Kirk is on the bridge stating, "Scotty we need more power..."
Media in fragments? Users in Charge? Changes happening daily?
Good.
We’re right in our element.
With so many choices, there is only one sensible approach to a digital era: Partner with a company that understands how all of the elements combine.
TV streaming to your phone. Newspapers deliver stories to your desktop. Encyclopedias want you to be their editor. Players in the analog market are starting to behave a little strangely online. And one thing is undeniable: Customers are in Control.
That is a good thing.
Now, customers and brands can engage each other directly, leaving everyone fulfilled. But for businesses to do this, they need big ideas and elegant solutions working in harmony.
Our goal is to be the rain that replenishes, sooths, rejuvenates, and feeds the creativity to take your brand and make it come through loud and clear – anyhow, anywhere, anytime.
Marketing 101 – A look into the not so obvious
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Marketing is much more than just advertising; it is the sum total of all your communications with the marketplace. This includes your vendors, lender, investors as well as your customers and the community at large. It is what I call a “reluctant reality” that your marketing will be a bigger factor in your success than the quality of your offering.
By “reluctant reality”, I mean that most business owners would rather it not be so… but it is. We’ve all been brainwashed to believe in the old saw, “build a better mouse-trap and the world will beat a path to your door.” Trust me; it just isn’t so.
Savvy entrepreneurs know (even if they don’t like it) that a B product with A marketing will always beat the pants off an A product with B marketing. Obviously, the best combination is to couple an A product with A marketing – and that’s exactly what you should strive towards.
The first step in creating an A marketing plan is to differentiate yourself. This is the most important thing you can do. And, of course, you already know all the ways you are… but you’ve got to be different in the eyes of your customer. This is much more difficult thing to achieve. It is basic human nature to group things together as “alike” or “not alike”, with emphasis leaning strongly towards “alike”.
It takes a concerted effort to get out of this trap; but it is the most important thing you can do with regards to your marketing. For instance, think about how many Colas there are. The barriers to successful entry in the soft drink business are huge and mostly built of money. Since the dawn of time there have been two juggernauts; Coke and Pepsi. But there was only one “Un-Cola”. Even though they are all sweet fizzy drinks, most of them are brown but one was clear. Decades ago, that one small difference was enough to catapult 7-Up to the status of a mainstay competitor against the two giants while other “colas” launched with great fanfare and quickly died quietly, very expensive deaths.
Then there was Snapple, it wasn’t exactly “pop”; it was iced tea with weird flavor combinations. It wasn’t as sweet, for a while there was even some attempt at passing it off as a “healthier” alternative to regular soft drinks. By not trying to be just another pop, Snapple was able to grab significant market share and gain some staying power.
Today we’ve seen the same sort of thing with Red Bull. In essence it’s another soft drink, but instead it’s been branded as an “Energy Drink” (whatever that means). The company took great pains to differentiate it, even down to the size of the can. Now, instead of competing head-to-head with Coke or other regular pop, Red Bull is perceived as so individual that no comparison is possible. In fact, it has spawned an entire sub-industry of related “Energy Drinks”, which, as far as I can tell, are pops with some miniscule amounts of vitamins and which don’t taste as good.
These are examples of how the “little guy” can compete successfully against giants. Both Snapple and Red Bull started out as small specialty companies that were able to grow through being positioned entirely different from other mainstream soft drinks. You can do this too.
But you’ve got to have the time and energy to focus on being different… not just better. I have a mantra that goes like this; “Being Different is Better Than Being Better”. Unfortunately, being different is tougher than being better.
This means that you absolutely cannot be so consumed by your “trade” (doing the labor of your business) that you have no time or energy to focus on the frankly more important things going on in your business. Things like excellent marketing. This is the biggest trap that I consistently see businesses fall into. You need to start thinking outside of the norm and find creative ways to differentiate yourself. Make time or find help in creating a vision that causes an influx in you potential customer base.
The Gen Y Guide to Web 2.0 at Work
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This is the Greatest example of the Next Marketing Generation.
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.How to Cultivate Social Media Success
Sponsored by JenKaneCo, well known social media evangelist Brian Solis recently gave a presentation to an enthusiastic group of marketers in downtown Minneapolis to introduce the concepts behind his new book: Engage! The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate and Measure Success in the New Web. The following is an overview of his presentation:
Relations vs. Relationships
There’s something interesting that’s happening right now on the web: relations are starting to matter more than relationships. The key lesson for marketers, and what the rest of this overview discusses, is that people will engage around content that compels them in networks where that content spreads.
We are all going to have to shift from relationships to relations: having more thinner (but still relevant) connections is starting to matter more. As a marketer, this shifts the power balance. People are connecting around psychographics rather than demographics, and this means four degrees is the new six degrees of separation. In plain English: we’re all becoming better connected and users are vitally important to the equation of how information spreads.
A way for your marketing to succeed is to take the approach of a sociologist, an anthropologist and a philosopher rather than a traditional marketer. That’s because it is people who are in control of the ideas that spread. The web has changed things and marketing and PR have changed along with it.
Context Becoming as Valuable as Content
The challenges go deeper than marketing approaches. When you join a company, you’re not given a Facebook page and Twitter account like you are an email account. You already have those things. And companies aren’t sure what to do or how they can leverage their own team members to increase their digital presence. Your team members are vitally important because “content being king” is evolving into an era where context is king (yet, content still remains quite the powerful queen). Context is proven to show who you are connected to and why around every conversation. Your team members are a key ingredient to providing context, their actions equating to a type of social currency for your brand.
Speaking of content, how people react to your company’s content (something now public) equates to the stature of your community. Reputation, trust and relationships are earned through these reactions and how you connect contextually is the experience prospects seek.
Content and context define the future of successful marketing. You’re no longer marketing to individuals, you’re now marketing to “an audience with an audience.” And every time they react to something you do, it shows the power of relations vs. relationships. But without remarkable content and relevant context, you can never reach “an audience with an audience” effectively because you’re missing part of the equation of why people share ideas.
Getting Started
One of the easiest things to do is see what’s happening right now. An approach that can be used is a “30 day window” to see a snapshot in time of what’s happening around a brand. For a brand unsure about how much conversation was happening around their products – a sample search can reveal a staggering amount of messages across social platforms. In many cases it’s a shock and can result in disbelief from management teams. A social media monitoring service should be required for every brand to monitor the situation in an ongoing fashion.
Getting at least a snapshot is a good first step, and ongoing monitoring is even better, but equally important is to consider the data in perspective. Or to put it simply: share of voice vs. share of conversation. Share of voice only gives you a partial view as it assumes everyone is talking about companies in a given industry. A more relevant approach is to look at share of conversation. As an example, consider Old Spice – in the discussions on the social web regarding “body spray,” how well did they do? While the overall conversations and reactions generated, putting it into context truly provides meaning of share of conversation.
Share of conversation matters more than most consider. People are actively using the social web as part of the decision making cycle, and so this is the socialization of more than just marketing, but business as a whole.
Conclusion
How are you adapting to the socialization of business to help move these things in the right direction? You need to extend divisions so that they are responding to consumers at the right point to become trusted and a part of the community.
All companies need to realize the fact that they are now in the media business, and that every company is now a media company. This strategy is potent enough several companies embracing it have developed brands of media so popular they’re putting out best-selling books. The influence they have over their markets is that big.
Influence is the ability to inspire desirability and measurable action and outcomes. It is more than a click or more than a view. As marketers, creating content and context to ultimately form influence is how to achieve long term, sustainable social media success.
For more on getting started in social media, consider creating a social media roadmap to plan your social media strategy.
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