Community And Content

Although the next generation of marketing is in its infancy, the social web is already having an effect. More to the point, you’re going to be caught up in it, no matter what kind of business you’re in. Marketing’s goals will remain the same as they’ve always been — to attract and retain customers. However, marketing’s role has changed, and the social web is promoting that change.

The goal of marketing has always been and will continue to be building and leveraging relationships between your organization and various customers — current and prospective consumers of your products and services plus employees, partners, shareholders, government, the media, analysts, and all the rest. Obviously, strong relationships are crucial to establishing and extending brand value, strengthening and protecting corporate and product reputation, and boosting demand. But you have to do all this while under constant pressure to improve marketing’s return on investment in a highly competitive global economy.

Marketing’s traditional tools for getting the word out are growing rusty. Not only are fewer Americans watching broadcast television in both absolute and relative terms, they’re avoiding the commercials with the remote, TiVO, and 30-second skip function on their videocassette recorders. They’re avoiding telemarketers through the National Do Not Call Registry, avoiding Internet pop-up and banner ads through software programs, avoiding radio commercials through the iPod and other digital music devices, and avoiding print ads the way they always did — by turning the page.

Today, the computer, the Internet, and broadband access allow consumers to find what they want when they want it. You’re not in control any more.

The techniques du jour are viral marketing, buzz marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, or stealth marketing — the idea that a company can hire people to pretend to be consumers to recommend a product or service. A liquor company might hire attractive young women to visit crowded bars, order the advertiser’s product, then turn to the next person and say, “This is really delicious; you ought to try one of these.”

Marketers have two daunting challenges. First, you have to justify your spending and your budgets through better performance measurement. The pressure is on from senior management to be much more transparent about marketing investments and the return on those investments. Second, you must connect with customers and prospects who are increasingly harder to reach. How do you deliver a message that resonates with customers and induces them to buy what you’re selling?

The objective is to have customers invite you to deliver the message to them. You just can’t force it on them any more.

Marketing’s Role Has Changed

The explosive growth of the social web has changed the marketer’s role from a broadcaster pushing out messages and materials to an aggregator who brings together content, enables collaboration, and builds and participates in communities.

Most stories about the social web focus on the “cool” aspects, such as YouTube.com (everyone can be a movie actor, director, or producer), MySpace.com (talk to friends, meet people, network with coworkers), or SecondLife.com (a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its more than 1.1 million residents). Despite all the chatter, there is a strong business case for integrating the social web into your marketing toolkit. The social web provides numerous opportunities for strengthening and expanding relationships with all your customers. These opportunities include:

• Targeted brand building. Depending on the size and breadth of a company’s customer base, communities can be organized by vertical market (e.g., high tech, energy, consumer packaged goods, retail, automotive) or by horizontal topics that cut across multiple sectors (e.g., finance, manufacturing, the environment). To build your organization’s brand, consider hosting a podcast — an online audio that users can download to a device such as an iPod — on a hot topic such as change management, outsourcing, risk management, corporate governance, innovation or talent management. Senior executive blogs and microsites (Web sites developed with a particular focus for a specific target audience) can help establish industry thought leadership.

• Lead generation. At launch time, you can introduce the new product or service both in the online and offline worlds. Using the Web, you can reach more people — and reach highly targeted markets — more quickly and more cost-effectively than through traditional broadcast and print media. You can stimulate lead generation by, say, offering a white paper in return for having people register on your site and give you some basic information. You can encourage product trials through online demonstrations. You can attract prospective customers to online contests.

• Partnerships. In addition to customers and prospects, the social web is a great tool for staying connected with distributors, technology vendors, manufacturers, and other business partners. Often companies announce these partnerships with great fanfare but they fade away over time because it requires a significant effort to maintain them. An e-community or social network can help your company’s distributors, store managers, sales representatives, and others stay in touch and consult with one another. A community is a flexible platform for your partners to receive the latest company updates, news from the head office, and stories from the field.

• Research and development. Isolation is the greatest obstacle to product and service innovation. Conversely, collaboration stimulates new ideas and new approaches that can lead to breakthrough solutions to complex problems. Blogs, wikis (websites that allow users to add, remove, or edit content easily), online communities, and social networks can be used to bring product developers together in real time. Scientists can get immediate feedback on their research, make corrections and move on to the next challenge. Some businesses have built private online communities to obtain consumer input on new products during development. All of these strategies incorporate significant enterprise-generated content. In the social media world, material that traditionally has appeared in published form — ads, press releases, brochures, articles, white papers, and the like — is generated to facilitate participation and interaction.

Opportunities to achieve community

Bear in mind that the social media world is very different from a traditional communications environment. In the traditional communications model, your organization controls content creation and distribution. In the social media world, you have little to no control over content and distribution. Individuals communicate with other individuals and with groups, and groups communicate with individuals and groups — everyone with everyone. It’s highly democratic: Everyone has access and everyone can participate. As a marketer, you go to other people’s “parties” as well as create your own destinations for other people to come to you.

There are new rules for measuring marketing success in a social web context. The new success measures include share of voice, level of engagement, tone of discourse, evidence/quality of community, and cost of market share. How often is your organization being discussed in the blogosphere? Who’s doing the talking and how influential are the participants? What are they saying? Are there recurring themes? Is the tone positive, negative, or neutral? Who’s listened to the podcast? Who’s downloaded the white paper? Are they asking for more information? How many people participated in the online contest and who are they? What was the impact on leads and sales? Some of these measures are quantifiable and others are qualitative.

Finally, how does the social web fit with your company’s digital vision? Digital vision is the long-term strategy for the company’s entire online presence. How will you use the website (or websites) to support customer relationship management and online service and support — and how will the social web fit into that framework?

Communities can serve as referral networks: an opinion leader in the community “endorses” a new product and in a flash other members are downloading the free trial and asking for more information.

In fact, the social web can play a valuable role throughout the entire life cycle of product development, market introduction, and market adoption. During the development phase, you might use blogs, wikis, communities, or all three to get feedback on various product features. During market introduction, you can use podcasts and webinars to engage and educate potential customers about the new product’s benefits and applications

As the product begins to sell, you can use the social web for troubleshooting, problem solving, and customer service and support — plus all-important word-of-mouth to build that buzz.

By now, the benefits of marketing to the social web should be apparent — and viewed as essential to an overall marketing strategy. The social web allows you to engage and influence prospects and customers and build trusted relationships over time. It helps you learn what employees, clients, and partners really think about new products, programs, or other initiatives. And all of this is in near real-time and for a fraction of the cost of traditional media.

Larry Weber has spent the past three decades building global communications companies, including Weber Shandwick Worldwide and the W2 Group. He is also the founder and chairman of the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange, an interactive advocacy association.