Andreas Weigend: Sniffing the Digital Exhaust
I had the great opportunity to meet and hear Andreas at the World Innovation Forum in New City last month and really enjoyed his insights into the New Consumer Data Revolution. I especially liked his view of social media marketing and the four Cs. Andreas was Amazon's former Chief Scientist and he developed a number of innovative data mining and session based marketing techniques integrated with cross selling and customer network and lifecycle analysis. Now it's time that us in marketing begin to think about the new era of marketing that we have entered and how we manage and enhance existing customers and most importantly the social customer. We know that we no longer own our brand and in many cases we don't own our customers, this is challenging almost all traditional marketing strategy and tactics.
Marketing and Web 2.0
Most of us "old world marketers" were trained around the four Ps of marketing, product, place, position and price. Last year I suggested in my blog that there are now five Ps of marketing, the fifth being people. Now we are in a totally different world when it comes to marketing and influence, in a sense everyone is an influencer, as my colleague Don Bulmer would say "every company is in itself is a media company." Andreas went on to talk about the three new paradigms that customers participate in and how we are challenged to manage the data that is emerging from these paradigms:
- Customer 2 Business
- Customer 2 Customer
- Customer 2 World
Content
Content is king. Content about you, your companies brand and service now flies at Internet speed around the globe and you can't control it, nor can you hide from it. Managing Web 2.0 content is a major challenge facing all marketers today. Many companies have swat teams of reactionary marketers and communications people that are conducting brand protection efforts, but that is hard to do in some communities. Earlier this year I posted a blog about Rick Short's three Cs of social media marketing Content-Contact-Cash and how he is leveraging blogging content to create lead generation and command thought leadership in his space. In our Web 2.0 world content is exploding globally and in visual ways through YouTube now the second largest search engine in the world. Content management is an incredible challenge now facing all modern marketers, how do we manage it across or company?
Connection
Now here is where the real challenge is, how do you manage connection to your customers, partners, suppliers and prospects in the wild west of Web 2.0? As a social customer I write reviews, but few companies I have done business with have actually interacted with me on my review sites. Starwood and Sheraton has, and after 43 restaurant reviews this year only one restaurant has responded to my comments about their wine selection, Ocean Prime in Orlando. Almost every company now is flying a Facebook and Twitter flag and they see this is a main platform for connection and interaction. I don't think that this is enough. When I want to find a service on the road I use the IPhone application Aroundme, it is another connection point to your business. Content maybe king but the future is mobile applications on smart devices that deliver the instant (content) gratification the Internet has always promised.
Communications
This is the area of greatest disruption in the world of marketing. If you can launch a Harry Potter theme park without a press release and 20 million people know about it through their favorite bloggers in two weeks, this is massive disruption. How do you manage communications and identify the influencers in the Web 2.0 world? Again the power of the pen has never been more powerful, companies with the right stuff will be full of writers who can tell stories and after all that is the power of blogging. Companies that don't have the talent will lose their ability to demonstrate thought leadership in the market and that is what everyone wants. We know from our research at SNCR, the communications in communities is building trust. And people want to go where they can find viable accurate and trustworthy information from their peers. The ultimate question is how do we manage communications in the community aside from simple measurement of tonality of voice?
Community
As a social customer my interaction with businesses has changed dramatically, if I leave a restaurant or hotel now unsatisfied I tell management you can read about it on Yelp or Tripadvisor. And I am interacting with smart companies that get social media marketing in some of my worlds, including Yelp.com and Tripadvisor.com and Airbnb.com. These are places that I interact with your potential customers and I can have immediate worldwide impact on your brand. The hotel restaurant and services industry is being completely disrupted by social media peer groups like Airbnb for example; their tag line is travel like a human. I call it traveling with humans. If you haven't heard about Airbnb.com check it out they have developed a community of people who rent rooms and/or houses globally and very inexpensively. I just stayed at a studio in Seattle for two nights in Ballard for $134 USD. I also rent a spare room on this site and everyone is required to review their stay from both sides. This is a great example of how a social media community is disrupting an industry and taking revenue. So Andrea's point about community is king here.
Suggested Reading:
Great information this month on the social media front can be found in Harvard Business Review's July/August issue pages 32-33: Mapping the Social Internet. This research piece is indeed fascinating as it shows a survey of 50,000 social platform users and classifies what they call broadcast behaviors.
Trendstream Global Web Index Broadcast Behaviors
- Blogging
- Managing a social network profile
- Sharing photos
- Sharing videos
- Microblogging
Some key findings are that Asian users are more engaged with the social web than Westerners this is surprising. But what is even more surprising is that China, India and Brazil are ahead of the US, EMEA and other English speaking countries when it comes to blogging. Less than 15% of Americans say they've written a blog. What I really enjoy about this article is the presentation and representation of the data created by Tommy McCall a data visualization engineer. In my view we desperately need new and innovative ways of visualizing data than the antiquated and traditional graphs and charts. Until next time great selling and marketing in the millennium.