Why I love Social Media…

Many people are hopping on the Twitter train to Facebook-ville simply because it’s the cool and shiny thing to do right now in marketing. It’s cheap and has shown to be effective, but why do we really love it? I recently gave a presentation about my definition of social media and why I think it’s so important to marketing which got me to really take a step back and think about why I love this space we call social media.

It all started with reading “The Experience Economy” in graduate school. With the continuous rising expectations of consumers and the increase of communication needed to fulfill these needs, we, as marketers, have been through many stages (commodity, goods, services, now experiences). The thing that I remember most about this book is the feeling of obscurity at the end. These expectations and communication levels will continue to rise… so what’s next after the Experience Economy?

After many hours of research and consulting with small business clients, I looked at what happens in my own life while using products/services in my own life. I realized that the products that I have the most affinity for fit into my own personal lifestyle, no matter where I go. These products/services/brands actually began defining me as an individual. It was an amazing epiphany… one that I will never forget. After that, I realized that the next stage on the marketing spectrum is “Lifestyle Marketing,” with the brand purpose being to become malleable enough to allow the consumer to integrate the brand into their own personal lifestyle.  But how do we do this?

After that, I realized that the next stage on the marketing spectrum is “Lifestyle Marketing,” with the brand purpose being to become malleable enough to allow the consumer to integrate the brand into their own personal lifestyle.

This is where social media strategies come into play and why I love this space so much. Social media allows the increased communication needed to move to that next level in the marketing continuum. It provides a two way communication between individuals and other individuals, groups, affinity organizations, products, services, brands, etc that creates stronger relationships and bonds; stronger than ever thought possible. As marketers, we can now use social media to provide valuable information and entertainment to allow our users to gather, share, or reciprocate. It provides the foundation for the malleable brand needed to empower the users to integrate into their own lifestyle.

Social media is a major step in the right direction to begin integrating our brands into the lifestyle of our customers. Social media is not about the platforms, but about what these platforms are doing. It’s an amazing transition, one that will prove to be extremely beneficial to both the consumer and marketer.

Why do you love social media?

Lifestyle Design

Yesterday, Alex Bogusky and John Winsor held a live video chat about their upcoming book Baked In (which you can read my review here). Being a huge fan of the book, I had take part. Basically, the theory behind the book is that companies need to create a product/marketing development process with the understanding the marketing will be baked into every aspect of the product, brand, and company. It’s an amazing thought and one that actually has some similarities to thoughts that I’ve had over the past year or so.

My basic thought is that with the power transitioning from the marketer to the consumer, the consumer is now looking for products/services/brands that can be integrated into their own personal lifestyle. The influx of social communications and tactics like crowdsourcing and mass customization, the consumer is now able to design their lifestyle with the brands that define them, as a foundation.

During the video chat, I asked the question “It seems like marketing is moving more towards ‘lifestyle design’ for consumers, what are your thoughts on this idea?” The guys had some great points, but needed some clarification about what “lifestyle design” is (which is hard to do in 140 characters or less). My response was [Lifestyle design is] the marketing’s role in integrating a product or brand into the lifestyle of the customer… becoming a part of the [individual] customer’s life. Not bad, but I wanted to take this time to elaborate on my definition and get your feedback on what you think.

Lifestyle design is really a collaborative effort between customers and the products they use to create and maintain the best life for each individual customer.

Lifestyle design is really a collaborative effort between customers and the products they use to create and maintain the best life for each individual customer. We all use brands and are loyal to brands for many reasons, including the seldom talked about, personality definition. Some of us choose brands because of the way it makes us feel or the way we are presented to the outside world with the brand. This psychological choice, coupled with the increase in personalized communications with brands, creates the shift toward lifestyle design.

What are your thoughts? How are you trying to integrate your brand into your customer’s lifestyle?

Social CRM – Link it to customer data

There’s a lot of talk right now about SalesForce.com’s Twitter integration allowing the user to monitor what is being said about the company/brand/product/etc. Jeremiah Owyang discusses it in detail in his recent post “Salesforce Pushes Social CRM Technology –But Don’t Expect Companies To Be Successful With Tools Alone” so I won’t get into all the nooks and crannies of the story, but wanted to raise a question.

How can we truly continue a conversation and grow a relationship with our prospects, customers and stakeholders with the mere monitoring of what is being said?

I’m not saying this isn’t a great tool for CRM users to be able to see what is actually being said out on the social sphere, my only thought is this; “How can we truly continue a conversation and grow a relationship with our prospects, customers and stakeholders with the mere monitoring of what is being said?” If we truly want Social CRM, we need a platform to not only capture these conversations, but be able to append these conversations to the CRM to the correct individual to allow our company and social personalities to continue the conversations that are happening. Then, and only then, will we be able to truly say we are a social company building individual relationships and integrating into the lifestyles of our customers.

Then, and only then, will we be able to truly say we are a social company building individual relationships and integrating into the lifestyles of our customers.

What are your thoughts?

Marketing…An Ecosystem

I wanted to start this series out with a little brief background information about some business practices that will be tied in with my brain meanderings over the next few months. First off, I want to define what a use case scenario is and how they are currently utilized in today’s business environment. Next, I want to outline what needs to happen (requirements) to achieve a use case scenario. Finally, I have put together a brief outline of what we will be discussing over the coming months. Let’s get moving.

what is use case?

As I’ve said in the past, if someone has a  great definition of what you’re trying to say, use that definition. With that said, below is the summarized Wikipedia definition of what a use case is and how it’s used:

“…description of a system’s behavior as it responds to a request that originates from outside of that system. In other words, a use case describes “who” can do “what” with the system in question.

… Use cases describe the interaction between a primary actor (the initiator of the interaction) and the system itself, represented as a sequence of simple steps. Actors are something or someone which exists outside the system under study, and that take part in a sequence of activities in a dialogue with the system to achieve some goal. Actors may be end users, other systems, or hardware devices. Each use case is a complete series of events, described from the point of view of the actor.”

I want to re-summarize a sentence for you to put it in better context for this blog series…

“…a use case describes “who” [customers] can do “what” [engagement] with the system [marketing strategy] in question…”

We need to start looking at our marketing strategies as an ecosystem that all works in concert to achieve certain goals and objectives.

As previously mentioned, use cases have been utilized for many years for the development of software, website, game, engineering, etc. Why not try it in marketing?

requirements to get to use case?

Requirements are basically the needs of the users, technologies, systems, processes, etc. to deliver the outlined goals or objectives. These requirements have to all be identified and fulfilled to define the various use case scenarios, which will give us the overall understanding of the marketing “system” and the different communication paths users can take to achieve the marketing goals.

Different stakeholders and systems will fall under different requirements groups. These groups are identified and defined by the IIBA which include:

• Business Requirements are higher-level statements of the goals, objectives, or needs of the enterprise. They describe such things the reasons why a project is initiated, the things that the project will achieve, and the metrics which will be used to measure its success.
• User Requirements are statements of the needs of a particular stakeholder or class of stakeholders. They describe the needs that a given stakeholder has and how that stakeholder will interact with a solution. User Requirements serve as a bridge between Business Requirements and the various classes of solution requirements.
• Functional Requirements describe the behavior and information that the solution will manage. They describe capabilities the system will be able to perform in terms of behaviors or operations – a specific system action or response.
• Quality of Service Requirements capture conditions that do not directly relate to the behavior or functionality of the solution, but rather describe environmental conditions under which the solution must remain effective or qualities that the systems must have. They are also known as non-functional or supplementary requirements.
• Assumptions and constraints identify aspects of the problem domain that are not functional requirements of a solution, and will limit or impact the design of the solution.
• Implementation requirements describe capabilities that the solution must have in order to facilitate transition from the current state of the enterprise to the desired future state, but that will not be needed once that transition is complete.

During the next few weeks we will discuss requirements in more detail and begin to identify how they fit into the marketing ecosystem and communication strategy. I just wanted to give you a basic understanding so we can drill down further in future posts.

what will we talk about?

During the course of this discussion, we are going to walk through how to get from Point A (communication confusion) to Point B (integrated customer lifestyle engagement). We will achieve this through a systematic approach treating marketing like an ecosystem and ensuring our “game,” not only is fun to play, but works. Here are the topics we will be covering:

• Research and Identification
• Planning
• Documentation
• Implementation
• Execution
• End Results
• Evaluation/Reporting/Analytics

questions.

As always, please ask questions, elaborate on any ideas, challenge my ideas, etc. Thanks for playing, see you next time. Also to get a global overview of this discussion, simply search for #usecase on the right side of this page. This will be the hot tag for the discussion.

Part 4 – How to Build a Brand: Engagement

Welcome back…The past few days we’ve been going step by step to build a brand in today’s business environment. Part 1 discussed segmenting the population to highly targeted, highly defined individuals. In Part 2 we described how to create “segment stories” with the core brand message being communicated effectively to each niche segment. Yesterday, in Part 3 we began building awareness using a strategic combination of traditional and non-traditional tactics. So, basically we left off with our segment individuals raising their hand to engage with our new brand. Now what? Conversation.

This is the really scary part for most marketers today. In the past we have been “pushing” messages until the consumer purchased. Easy. Now, the goal of marketing is to create and maintain customers by building a brand that is malleable and will fit into the lifestyle of the consumer based on their personal wants and needs of our products/services. The only way to create this type of brand is to have an open, two way conversation with each consumer who raises their hand. Conversing with a consumer is a scary beast. What if we mess up? What if we say the wrong thing?

Marketing a Brand is like Building a Personal Relationship

We all have personal relationships. That’s the reason we are engaged so much in the social media realm; to maintain old and create new personal relationships. So why would we be afraid to do this for our brand? The basis of any relationship is communication. Think about how you met your best friend, your spouse, your business partner…It didn’t just happen. It was a series of communications that lead to self disclosure, identifying commonalities, and living experiences together. That’s how marketing should be handled today. Like a new relationship of a best friend, spouse, or business partner.

It’s not brain surgery on how to figure this out. Listen and give. Listen and give. Grow on what has happened in the past. Laugh, joke, cry, experience things together… That’s how you create a malleable brand that will become part of an individual consumer’s lifestyle. Think about your life without your best friend, spouse or business partner…scary, huh? Imagine having our customers feeling that way about our brand… What a great feeling that would be!

Use Technology

With the technologies that we are currently using as marketing silos (database or CRM marketing, social media, email, texting, personalized direct mail, personalized urls, etc), we are fully capable of creating a system that would be able to build these types of relationships. Once the consumer raises his/her hand to begin a conversation, we append it in a database. Then each and every conversation or communication point with that individual needs to be appended to the same database. With this information, we can listen to their wants and needs from our brand and give it to them. We can customize marketing communications, converse in the public social sphere; suggest customized product offerings, etc… Basically we would be able to create a brand that would fit perfectly into their individual, personal lifestyle. We grow with the consumer.

Conclusion

Don’t stop the conversation when the consumer actually raises their hand to learn more about your brand. Dive in and converse back. Learn about them and disclose information about you and your brand. Participate in consumer relationship building like our own personal relationship building. Engage. Relationships like this take time, consistency, dedication, and action. Don’t be afraid of your customers… Engage with them.

Your thoughts

What are your thoughts? Is it possible to create a relationship system utilizing technology? Leave a comment and let me know. Check back tomorrow for the conclusion of the series…Part 5.