Bryan Person from LiveWorld had a great addition to today’s conversation, the Dos and Don’ts of Successful Communities:
Brand Equity is Effected by Online Presence
I’ve argued before about the importance of, at the very least, monitoring your brand image in online channels. I addressed the following in-depth:
I wonder how many of us directly correlate it to brand equity in the monetary sense, especially with clients. This is important, so let me repeat. New/social media and the Web 2.0 space have important effects on the monetary value of your company.
I also argued that:
Your brand image IS online right now, and it IS being affected. And that DOES and WILL matter when determining the value of your company. In some cases, it’s not even a matter of going where it’s hot (although that has its advantages!). Your brand is there, you should be there too. What’s more, the Web 2.0 world is completely visible to anyone who chooses to look, including potential funders or buyers of your company.
Branding Strategy Insider had a great post up last week on the topic of how perceived quality is a critical asset for brands. As part of the discussion
“Perceived quality is usually at the heart of what customers are buying, and in that sense, it is a bottom-line measure of the impact of a brand identity. More interesting, though, perceived quality reflects a measure of “goodness” that spreads over all elements of the brand like a thick syrup. Even when the brand identity is defined by functional benefits, most studies will show that perceptions about those benefits are closely related to perceived quality. When perceived quality improves, so generally do other elements of customers’ perception of the brand.”
This “measure of goodness” is now not only being determined by your own marketing efforts, but by customers who are talking about your product. And they’re talking online.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to, at the very least, be monitoring and managing your brands presence online. If a measure of your value as a company is based on the perception in the market place, you need to know what those perceptions are, and you need to have a plan in place to understand and hopefully influence how information from customers is affecting that parception.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Pricing, WOM, PR Efforts Get Recession Boost (marketingvox.com)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=723285ee-051a-4b37-8c39-046bce2831f3)
Defining Twitter when you need to
[Republished from the Other Side Group blog]
I was having a Twitter conversation late last week with Conner McCall about the definition of Twitter. Is it social networking? Is it a social network? I had asked:
“Twitter – Social Network? Still just microblogging? Somewhere in between?”
Conner wrote a follow-up post on the topic, in which he brought up some good points about why defining Twitter just shouldn’t happen.
Under most circumstances, I too shy away from defining and corralling social media tools into categories. Honestly, what’s the point sometimes?
However, I’m involved in some research through DigiActive concerning the use of digital tools in activism efforts around the world. When it came time to coding qualitative data on how people use their mobile phones for their advocacy work, I had separated out Twitter from all of the other social networks such as Facebook.
While going over the survey coding with the research team, someone suggested that several of the responses get combined in some way, and one of those ways was to lump Twitter in with the social networks. In fact, it was more like “Twitter is a social network so let’s put it in there.”
I really needed to push back on this because I see some key differences between the two, at least in terms of this project. Firstly though, some important similarities:
- One-to-many communication
- Everything is public within your “network”
- Information/data sharing
Aside from those major similarities, there are some differences that are too important to overlook for the purposes of trying to define how people use these tools to disseminate information and communicate with people.
In Conner’s thought process came one of the very reasons I needed to have a definition of Twitter. He said:
“It’s a free eco-system that allows you to talk about what you want, but by limiting you to 140 characters it keeps conversations clean and neat. E-mail, instant message, and social networks will all be around for a long time, but you get messages that take minutes to read where Twitter’s messages take seconds. This enforced brevity let’s you interact with a lot more people on a daily basis. Twitter just takes online communication and adds what events like Ignite add to presentations.”
It’s this quick, one-time communication aspect of Twitter that makes it very different than some of the longer-standing ways in which people interact on places like Facebook. You can have months-long campaigns on Facebook, where you gather fans and advocates for your cause. Or you can share photos or videos that can still be top-of-mind (read: in the first two pages of your friends’ Stream) the next day or several days. The interaction with information on a platform like Facebook is much more dynamic than it is on a platform like Twitter.
Twitter, on the other hand, is done-and-done. Information is disseminated real time, and often forgotten after that. This comes into play in any sort of activism effort because the length of time that Twitter is really useful is often much shorter than on social networks, and the reason that Twitter is used is usually much different than the reasons that Facebook is used.
Additionally, “this forced brevity [that] let’s you interact with a lot more people on a daily [or hourly] basis” is one of the reasons why people will use Twitter over social networks to mobilize efforts. Such was (sort of) the case in the Moldovan protests last month (note: the Twitter aspect of these protests was, in my opinion, overblown by much of the media).
The one tough thing about this question is that I’m not necessarily in disagreement with calling Twitter a social network. It is a network of people that you interact with socially, through social media (whatever that means), which is, at a high-level, what happens on Facebook and other “social networks.” I have a problem bunching them together when you get into the specifics of how those social networks work at a functional level.
In closing, while I like to also leave thing undefined a lot of the times and agree, for the most part, with Conner when he says that Twitter has no rules, there are times when the distinctions between these tools, like any set of tools, need to be highlighted. And usually these functional distinctions translate into at least small conceptual distinctions as well.
I would love to know your thoughts on how you might define social networks, or how you would make the distinction between Twitter and what everyone else considers social networks, or what you think about the whole definition thing in general!
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=72ae9fb2-b155-4bc1-ad82-b880476b6e39)
B2B Voices Post: Case Study on ShipServ
The social media program that this case study is based upon was a joint effort between ShipServ and Velocity Partners, a London-based B2B Marketing agency specializing in technology markets.
So what works for a B2B company? Let’s start by taking a look at a campaign that’s been pretty successful so far. This campaign was driven by John Watton, the VP of Marketing for ShipServ, an internet trading platform for the shipping industry. ShipServ has a global audience and a dispersed community of purchasers who are, believe it or not, quite eager to network.
Goals of the campaign:
- Raise the awareness of the ShipServ brand amongst our target audience
- Increase traffic to shipserv.com by 50% in three months
- Engage with the audience and start to build community
For the full case study, visit B2B Voices.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Marketo Lead Management Wins Demand Generation Program of the Year Award (seomashup.blogspot.com)
- Ron Strauss On Knowledge Sharing As A B2B Strategy (marketing.blogtanker.com)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=9aaf7d58-4fee-49a8-8150-5a0d7efe35fd)
Pop!Tech post: DigiActive and social tools for social change
A write up on digital activism and DigiActive as an organization.
In recent months, there’s been a marked increase in the mentions of how social media tools have been used around the world to enhance social activism either on a small scale, such as campaigning to free locally-jailed individuals, as was the case with “Free Jestina Mukoko” Facebook group or a larger scale, as was the case with the recent protests in Moldova. Press on the subject has varied from surface-level analysis to more well-informed accounts, but in each case, the use of digital tools was highlighted as playing an active and often pivotal role in the campaign.
Visit the Pop!Tech blog for the full post.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Another Real World Social Media Snub – and How to Get Past it (engagedlearning.net)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=cc800361-efcf-4861-b340-68cc2537736d)
B2B Voices Post: 4 Great Reasons to Start a Social Media Program as a B2B
A lot of B2B marketing professionals or departments have wondered what, if any, benefit they would get out of adding social media 
components to their marketing plans. Isn’t that for consumer-facing companies?
Visit the B2B Voices Blog for the full post on why you should use social media for your B2B.
Mass High Tech: Videoconferencing, web conferences improve in-person meetings
Quotation in Mass High Tech article on meeting technologies in today’s business setting.
It was just a few years ago that advocates of videoconferencing and web conferences were predicting the death of face-to-face meetings. While technology has helped the virtual meeting replace some in-person events, tech has had another unforeseen effect on the meetings business: It has enhanced in-person meetings and conference, enabling new forms of communications and even turning the annual meeting into a yearlong event, according to consultants and other experts in the meetings business.
From the simple staff meeting to the 20,000-attendee trade show, technology is having an impact as organizers experiment with new approaches to get-togethers………
Visit Mass High Tech for the full article.
Mass High Tech: New media has something to teach the area’s universities
I’ve recently graduated from business school and entered the field of new-media marketing, yet I’m continually surprised that many of the ideas I’m faced with professionally every day had not been a part of my MBA curriculum — not a mention of new-media strategies, ideas or tools in any of my courses. There was no mention of such things as collaborative gaming products, no discussion of free user platforms supported by advertising, or content management and thought leadership, or the software-as-a-service business model. And there was no discussion of new ways to communicate with customers or the great shifts in consumer behavior that have occurred and still are occurring……
Visit Mass High Tech for full Op-Ed
DigiActive Post: Effective use of Twitter and hashtags during Hurricane Gustav
Description:
As Hurricane Gustav threatened the New Orleans area last week, citizens found new ways to update the public on how things were developing on the ground. In an attempt to decrease some of the chaos that occurred during Hurricane Katrina, Twitter users from the region mobilized themselves to offer a way not only of quickly disseminating the information via tweets, but also to centralize the information via the use of hashtags.
Visit DigiActive for the full post.
Has New Media Left Strategy in the Dust?
[This was originally posted on the Other Side Group blog]
I’m exaggerating, but I do think the plunge that companies have taken into the new media space has largely ignored the importance of strategy in a way we haven’t quite seen before.
Why?
The field of new media “gained” on us very quickly, it changes every day, new tools pop up while others disappear, and one thing will work for one company while it’ll wreak havoc on another. The focus on tools lends itself to a focus on tactics. A company that “gets it” and becomes successful either gets those tools, or they’re lucky, but the success alone makes more people want to jump in and get a piece of the action.
One of the big factors in this field is exactly the speed at which it’s developing: It’s so hot right now that people feel like they should be in it or they’ll die, but at the same time, it’s a different field almost every day.
Coupled with that is the fact that the field is open and can be used by anyone. It’s not industry specific. It’s not like a few car companies with a new technology (which can certainly cause failures for some and huge successes for others). EVERYONE wants to be in the new media space and it can theoretically be used by ANY company or individual with access to the internet. Successes and failures start adding up a lot more at that level, and it becomes harder to identify best- or worse-practices.
The Problem
What I’m seeing more and more, however, is companies that both jump-in-blind and shoot-from-the-hip. Not only do they not really get some of the technologies or platforms, but they more often than not don’t think about an overall strategy for their entry, let alone incorporating their moves into overall company strategy.
I’ve seen the following trends (some of these are very general and not meant to be all-encompassing):
- Companies are going to PR agencies first, because PR agencies are the ones that tend to implement the tools. Companies aren’t consulting marketers or strategists, and often times they aren’t even consulting the marketing department inside their own companies as much as they should. Somehow they’ve decided that the two are separate functions.
- PR agencies tend to use tactics over strategy. They gather up the new media tools and develop a process behind one or a few, and focus on the implementation. Strategy is downplayed, if brought into the equation at all, and the campaign ends up being sporadic or misaligned with company strategy because it’s separated and made to be simply a process.
- Companies sometimes try and take new media involvement on themselves, and again, lose sight of strategy, and develop a very ad hoc system to play around with in the new media space, tool-by-tool.
What this leads to is a colossal waste of resources on a program that isn’t cohesive and doesn’t get the results one hopes for.
Fixing the Problem
Using a military example, any successful military commander that has ever lived will tell you that tactics are useless without a good strategy (or without a strategy period). You can’t patch things together into a successful fort seizure unless you have the entire plan laid out and the objective made clear.
Any great marketer or any basic Marketing 101 book will tell you the exact same thing. This was pulled from one such book, which stresses both the importance of top-level strategy to any strong marketing plan as well as the need to develop tactics and programs to support that strategy.
A few things companies can do when thinking about diving into this space:
- Internally align yourself with your own marketing department and make sure that everyone is clear on how this works into overall company strategy. There have to be reasons why you think it would benefit the company and clear ways in which it can remain cohesive. As Zach said last night in his talk on Corporate Blogging: “if you want to set up a corporate blog just to set up a corporate blog, you’re not doing it for the right reasons.” [disclaimer: his talk was far more interesting than that simple statement, for more check out his blog].
- If you choose to do the process internally, do not go tool by tool and use them separately. Develop a plan, do research on what others have found beneficial or detrimental, know how to use the tools and how they can work together. Then make sure that transfers into a clear strategy. Make the strategy detailed and focused, too general will lead to the shooting-from-the-belt syndrome.
- If you go to an external firm for help, I would suggest going with one that highlights strategy in their process. If they’re not asking you for overall goals, what you hope to gain, they may not know themselves.
Obviously I’m a little biased, since I work for a marketing strategy firm that deals in the new media space, but I would suggest going with a marketing firm first. Most of them have relationships with PR agencies that will then help you with the tactics and programs (although, for the record, we can help on the tactical level as well). For instance, we have a relationship with Spotlight Communications for some of our PR needs: we can develop the strategy and then pass it to the communications folks. Usually, since the project is split, the cost doesn’t end up being that much more, but you get a heck of a lot more in terms of taking the process from strategy straight through to program (which is what you should be doing anyway!).
You can also easily go with just a PR agency, but choose ones that are asking the right questions and identifying the right things concerning your strategy before they start talking about all the great tools out there that you can use.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=421cde58-c852-4ee1-ba67-13c96fcc8d1c)
