How social media transformed marketing
Written by Francois Gossieaux on June 19, 2008 – 5:34 pm -
In a post on my own blog yesterday, I wrote about how companies should not think about how to leverage social media as a new channel for doing marketing, but instead realize how social media has transformed the marketing game. I promised to expand on the topic and decided it made more sense to move the conversation to the marketing 2.0 community so we can continue this discussion until way after this post will have disappeared below the fold.
In yesterday’s post I said:
Social media is what transformed the rules of marketing. By providing a platform of participation to your employees, customers and prospects, social media has changed the fundamental pillars of the marketing game. Not only have the rules of game changed, so have the players, the scope, the tactics and the added values - to use the game theory elements of the game.
I further said that the end goal of marketing - creating a customer - had not changed.
Let’s take a quick look at the different elements of the marketing game and how they changed.
The New Rules
- People do not want to hear from companies anymore
- People want to hear from other people
Some people will argue that this has always been like that, and they are right. The problem is that prior to this platform of massive participation called social media becoming commonplace, you could not hear from other people in a scalable way - and so you had to listen to what companies were telling you.
The New Players
- Customers
- Employees
- Prospects
Except for competitors not being on the list, it sounds like the old players - doesn’t it?
The difference is what Clay Shirky calls “here comes everyone” in his latest book - which is a must read if you are in marketing. It is not just the employees that are in your direct line of command who are playing key roles in your decision making processes, it is all employees. And it is not just your largest customers, or those you pay to advise you, who will participate in your decisions - it is all of them, including people who have not yet bought from you.
The New Scope
The scope of marketing for many old school marketers was everything pre-sales. Many corporate marketing executives are not even in charge of product innovation - where you bring the voice of the customer back into the process of defining your next offer.
The new scope of marketing is everything pre-sales all the way to post sales customer support and new product innovation. And that for global tribes of people who talk to one another instead of just those who bought from you.
The New Tactics
- Business communities
- Social media & social networks
- People-speak and authenticity
- Speed of response
Those are big changes in how marketing departments will have to think and work in order to create new customers. No more corporate-speak, no more interrupt-based marketing programs, and no more targeting. It is now all about attracting customers, building relationships and trust by helping them and letting them help one another, and leveraging the tribal nature of people.
Is this how the marketing tactics should have been all along? Absolutely! But how many companies were doing that when they did not have to? Almost none.
Now they will have no choice if they are to survive.
The New Added Values.
- People’s attention
- People’s trust
- Talent in employees and customer champions
- Externalized business process that include employees, customers and prospects
- Retell-able stories to market with you customers instead of at them
So out are the switching costs, the better mousetraps, the big advertising budgets, marketshare and other added values that determined your marketing competitive value in the marketplace before social media shifted the power away from companies and into individual’s hands.
Summary
So while the end goal of marketing has not changed, the game you play to get to that end goal has forever been transformed. You can argue that whatever marketing 2.0 becomes is what marketing should have been all along, as I did before, but the reality is that for most companies it never was like that because they did not have to.
And the changes that need to happen are so fundamental that many will not make it.
Tags: decisions, fundamental pillars, game theory, marketing game, massive participation, prospects, scope, theory elements
Posted in marketing 2.0, marketing strategy |
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June 19th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Great post Francois! I couldn’t agree with you more — people want to hear from other people. From CEOs to sales associates, everyone has a personality and although 1-way advertising has great potential for reach, the frequency just isn’t there. It takes a personality to build a brand and what better way than to roll up one’s sleeves (Zappos, Radian6, Sun Microsystems and many other companies) and join the conversation in SN’s as they prove they’re relevant in the space where their targets live.
June 19th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Ok, I’ll bite. I was with you until you got to “creating a customer”. That puts you back in ‘marketeze’ mode. Customers aren’t created — they just are. What you have to create is a relationship — and even then I’d rather not use the word create, because the relationship should just happen.
Sure, there are things you have to do to ‘attract’ the right relationships (cruisin’ the bars is optional). But you can’t ‘force’ relationships, so you can’t really ‘make’ them. You can welcome, facilitate and nurture relationships.
There you go again. “Attention” is old school. That’s a control model, that’s the ‘create’ model. The right “A”-word is “attraction”.
This isn’t rocket science people. Just think about what works in your own personal relationships. It’s the same darned model (unless you’re failing at relationships, and then maybe you shouldn’t be in charge of ‘getting’ new relationships — sad reality the proverbial ‘you’ might need to face).
The end game of marketing has changed. It’s been flawed for years. We’re not marketing ‘to’ people we’re engaging in relationships…and aha, that’s where the conversations come in (remember those long nights on the phone?).
June 20th, 2008 at 7:22 am
Hi Paula,
I used the term the same way as Peter Drucker used it just to emphasize the fact that the end has not changed in the last century. His quote was “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”
I am not sure that is “marketeze” - if you do not believe that a company and the people who work have the ability to influence the creation of a new customer - whether through influence or by building a WOW experience - then we should all go home
I also see attention and attraction as two distinct concepts. I own my own attention and it is a new scarcity. It is increasingly hard for you as a company to get that attention - either with a message or with an offer. Attraction is what replaced interruption in the marketing game.
And I agree with you that this is not rocket science. It is so common sense that I continue to be flabbergasted at the number of marketers who don’t get it.
Francois
June 20th, 2008 at 7:28 am
Hi Francois,
This is more of a question for you (been reeding your posts, and came to appreciate your knowledge and vision in the field), but it has certain relation to the article too. So here it goes.
The small recently started company I work for has been invited to take part in an online contest which promises promotion for the company in the event of successful participation. Well the idea of it might be good (found here http://www.subjectstime.com), and we decided to give it a try. Do you think this way of promotion is marketing 2.0?
June 20th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Hi Francois,
Agree with everything you say. However, there’s also a paradox with embracing openness. It’s actually very difficult to interpret what your customers and prospects say and what they really mean. Or if what they really mean will lead to any innovation, or if they won’t sidetrack innovative development underway. Moreover, the greatest innovations often don’t come from listening to your customers and embracing them, but through intuition or leapfrog thinking. You know the old Henry Ford saying, “If I’d listened to my customers, I would’ve built a faster horse.” Sure closed thinking and customer disrespect is out. Openness and customer communities are in — in a big way. But the new openness also requires a new discipline — a balance — so as not to thwart from new, breakthrough ideas that don’t necessarily originate from what a customer says. Again, the job interpretation is very difficult when it comes to customer listening and applied innovation.
June 20th, 2008 at 10:18 am
Max,
I could not agree with you more. It’s not just that customers would make you build a faster horse, it’s also the fact that sometimes, especially in a case like yours, the majority of your future revenues has to come from non customers. How many times have you seen companies overbuild/over-feature a product for existing customers when they know that 90% of all future revenues will come from non customers