WSJ: The Secrets of Marketing In a Web 2.0 World
Great article in Monday’s Wall Street Journal (12/6/08) on social media by Salvatore Parise, Patricia J. Guinan, and Bruce D. Weinberg. The authors are academics rather than practitioners, but do a very nice job summarizing a lot of the benefits of using social media in your marketing efforts. While some of the comments on the article and posts in the WSJ forum state that this is old information, from our perspective it is still relevant for marketers to read and understand.
References to the use of Second Life’s virtual world not withstanding, the article is strongly rooted in many of the best practices needed to succeed in social media. This includes the correct structure for your team as well as the need for a ‘marketing technopologist‘ who brings the necessary marketing, technology, and social media skills together to drive the project.
We’ve been helping large organizations like Cisco, SAP, AARP, NetApp with their online community (now called social media) efforts and measurements for five years now. Prior to that we ran a company in Web 1.0 that grew to be the largest outsourced provider of community management services when community was usually greeted with a “what’s that?” look…
The evolution of online marketing using user-generated content and conversations has been nothing short of amazing to us. In the business-to-business world, we conducted surveys of our client’s community members and found that over the past nine years one client’s members’ customer satisfaction rates, intention to recommend the company’s products, and the influence of other members’ content in influencing purchase decisions all rose significantly. From our standpoint, this evolution as tracked by our data proves that marketers in the B2B world must move towards online engagement. Yet many fear the potential attacks on their brands so much that they cannot see a way to move forward.
That’s where the article is absolutely correct in recommending a professional moderator and team. Our firm, Impact Interactions provides these services in addition to our consulting practice. We know that without a well trained team and executive sponsorship within the company that most social media efforts fail to deliver results. We have managed communities for companies that realized over 100% return on investment ratios. We have also seen many dead offerings that whithered on the vine due to poor management. Key finding is that if you build it, they won’t come.
The idea of moderators is really one of facilitators. When someone (or a team) takes an interest in helping members with their experience online, the community flourishes. It’s not about being defensive and removing content. That doesn’t take any skill. The skill is in handling member requests, criticisms, needs, and ideas in a professional way that reflects the brand being discussed. This applies to blogs, communities, twitter, wikis, social networks, and virtual worlds.
The movement towards marketing using social media will only grow larger, especially as budgets are reduced since online marketing is so much less expensive than traditional marketing tactics. Developing a core set of processes for using social media that includes professionally trained facilitators will help increase the probability of success while maximizing the ROI for the effort.
If would like to learn more about communities, we have a large amount of free presentations covering many different aspects of social media that you can download from our site.
If you have questions about how to structure, manage, or measure your social media marketing efforts please contact us for a free consultation.
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 12:19 pm and is filed under Social Media Trends. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
2 Responses to “WSJ: The Secrets of Marketing In a Web 2.0 World”
Impact Interactions says: You are welcome Bruce. Good article, I hope that many folks looking at social media for their companies read it and understand it.
Regards,
Mike Rowland
President
Hi Impact Interactions (I wanted to be more personal but I could not find anyone’s name at your site),
Thanks for your kind words about our WSJ article.