Tag Archives: Digital

How Do Social Media Change Client Interactions? Six Ways

Situation: A company wants to upgrade its presence in social media to improve client interactions. Before engaging in this exercise, they are curious as to how others are successfully using social media as part of their overall marketing and client service strategies. From your experience, how do social media change client interactions?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The Web and the emergence of social media have enabled a much broader range of communication and collaboration options with clients, vendors, and others in any marketplace. In contrast to classic “push marketing” the Web and social media enable interactive marketing tailored to the individual needs, likes and dislikes of individual customers.
  • One of the most important changes is the opportunity for customers to post feedback and opinions about a company’s products and services. In the new reality, if you don’t have a place where customers can post feedback – both positive and negative – they’ll find somewhere else to post it.
  • Web 2.0 is generally defined as interactive, dynamic web sites that get updated frequently. From a consumer standpoint we think of eBay and Amazon.com. However, this also includes web-enabled collaborations between company members or company and client, for example collaborative project management.
  • Using cameras and built-in microphones that now usually come built-in with new monitors and laptops you can communicate less expensively and with higher quality than with traditional telecommunications. Web-enabled team meetings are virtually the same as being in the same room.
  • Through your web site you can provide digital video content at different levels of sophistication to potential and, with password protection, verified customers.
  • An underutilized resource which is truly win-win is available through local colleges and universities that can provide state-of-the-art expertise in web enabled communications through student projects in internships.
  • Special thanks to Dean Lane of the Office of the CIO (http://www.oocio.com) for his insight and input to this discussion.

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How Do You Aggregate an Audience? Three Strategies

Interview with John Hollar, President & CEO, Computer History Museum

Situation: Traditional media for reaching audiences – television, newspapers – have broken down. Audiences are atomized and increasingly “what you want when you want it.” How do you aggregate an audience in this environment?

Advice:

  • Develop partnerships that align with you both in terms of audience and purpose.
    • We just finished a $20 million expansion. With 1.5 million technology workers in Silicon Valley, how do we spread the word?
    • We work with corporations in the tech sector, corporate alumni groups, tech retailers, convention centers, hotel concierges, and schools.
    • Our new campaign – Silicon Valley Starts Here – encourages Silicon Valley visitors to start their Silicon Valley journey with us.
    • School field trips are booked through the end of the year. Local foundations support transportation costs.
  •  Leverage the digital world to expand your presence.
    • Everything physically present in the museum is also available digitally to a global audience.
    • We use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to generate viral networking.
    • Live events are captured in HD and broadcast through our YouTube channel to 2 million viewers.
    • We update our Facebook page and tweet daily. Facebook is fun and playful with “Today in Computer History” and Friday YouTube films.
    • Tweets include a quiz – “Who Am I?” – of famous figures in computer history with prizes.
  • What are the implications for companies and institutions?
    • We must embrace the notion of living in parallel worlds – having both a physical presence and a broader digital presence.
    • Expert knowledge is here, but we must be able to access an increasingly digital audience that is global.
    • Digital capabilities can’t just be bolted on to an old structure. This must be a marriage that connects our knowledge and expertise organically to our audience, their needs, and the knowledge and expertise that is happening in the world.

You can contact John Hollar at [email protected]

Key Words: Media, Audience, Partnership, Purpose, Awareness, Campaign, Digital, Presence, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Inflection Point, Digital Lifestyle

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What is the Future of Digital Marketing?

Interview with Vikas Sharan, CEO, Regalix, Inc.

Situation: In traditional marketing, many marketers are more focused on activity than results. In the digital environment, top marketing organizations must become better at listening to their customers, watching them, and tracking their purchase decision behavior. What does this mean for the marketer?

Advice:

  • The digital world has changed marketing.
    • The traditional marketing campaign was led by creative. Through the early 90’s marketing was directed by media players and large publishers. Once a campaign was developed the pitch was “buy lots of impressions and customers will come.”
    • During the dot.com boom and into the 2000s there was a shift to ROI – spend $x with Google, get y clicks that will yield z buying customers. This was very transactional and could be expressed relatively simply.
    • Behavior is now changing, and the model is becoming more collaborative:
      • A potential customer expresses interest and a need.
      • A supplier offers a solution.
      • The potential customer verifies and validates the offer through online communities, Twitter, Facebook or other resources, and eventually may make a buying decision based on what they find along the way.
      • The buying decision today is very different from the traditional offer-driven process.
      • All of this can happen in minutes.
  • For the marketer, this means moving far beyond the simple advertisement.
    • The marketer needs a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and many more sites, in addition to their website, to woo potential customers.
    • For marketers this is expensive and requires a different level of resource commitment. It is, therefore, important for them to attribute the appropriate value to each online presence that the customer engages as they evaluate their buying choices.
    • Only through developing complex metrics, which change real time as customer behavior changes, can the marketer track and understand customer behavior and adapt the offer to the needs of the customer.
    • As individual consumers increasingly engage employ new forms of digital technology the challenge to marketers only increases.
  • The digital marketer who will thrive will develop a sophisticated, metric-driven understanding of the multiple touchpoints and social interaction of a given transaction.

You can contact Vikas Sharan at [email protected]

Key Words: Digital, Marketing, Customer, Behavior, Conversation, Online Communities, Facebook, Twitter, Touchpoint, Measurement, Metrics

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