Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much!
In the Battle for the Hearts & Minds of
Social Media Addicts…
VERSUS 
There can be only one Social Media Blockbuster — You decide!
Glen Gilmore
@Trendtracker
* Photo credits: Flickr: Zuckerberg by Carlo Nicora; Dorsey by David Shankbone
English being the de facto standard of today’s communication, building a multilingual presence is quite challenging, particularly in the social media landscape. It takes time, resources and budget to ensure excellent quality.
Traditionally, a company is able to control its online presence by driving its customers and prospects to its corporate website. For over 15 years, companies have been able to host a website, build a community in the form of a message board and customize the online experience for visitors to the max. Personalization actually has become quite sophisticated. Content can be adjusted to a particular audience and language preference is a given – language is determined from the visitor’s browser or selected by users and saved in cookies for future access. Visitors tend to expect the same behaviour on these new platforms.
If you haven’t followed the Old Spice phenomenon from this week, you’ve missed out. It’s a great example of a really strong performing viral campaign that harkens back to some of the classics like Subservient Chicken, Shave Everywhere, and Tea Partay.
It started on on television earlier this year with the following Old Spice commercial, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” (link for those of you in RSS readers):
(If you’d like to see how this was accomplished, Leo Laporte has a great interview with the agency.)
That commercial, first aired during the Super Bowl in early February, as of this week has garnered over 14 million views. And then the next commercial, “Old Spice: Questions“, went up on YouTube:
Those ads are pretty funny to begin with and were passed around a good deal. But this week, Wieden + Kennedy, creators of the campaign for Procter & Gamble, took it to the next level.
I believe many are looking at this in too narrow a fashion. Everyone is trying to assign a dollar value to a Facebook fan or Twitter follower instead of addressing the fact that it is the engagement and interaction that takes place in these mediums that is incredibly important to a brand.
Building a relationship with existing and future customers is the true value and strength of social media/marketing. ROI is certainly incredibly important whenever investing, but companies have to start looking at ROR, Return on Relationship, when planning, strategizing and most importantly evaluating social marketing.
A new study shows that those who are fans or followers of a brand on Facebook or Twitter, respectively, are significantly more likely to buy products and services or recommend the brand to a friend.
Specifically, the study by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies found that consumers are 67% more likely to buy from the brands they follow on Twitter, and 51% more likely to buy from a brand they follow on Facebook. Moreover, they’re 79% more likely to recommend their Twitter follows to a friend, and 60% more likely to do the same on Facebook.
Welcome to the “Age of Influence,” where anyone can build an audience and effect change, advocate brands, build relationships and make a difference.
Ted Rubin
Social media is radically changing the way we relate with our environment, at large. People, brands, companies all want to communicate with their ecosystems. Amongst social media platforms, Facebook is the heavyweight, whether for individuals, brands and companies.
Facebook has been initially developed for individuals and business pages were first intoduced in 2008. Now that brands and companies are flocking onto the social network, they must adapt the platform to their business needs if they want to remain relevant.
A recent article from Jeffrey Cohen detailing why Facebook is doing it wrong for B2B businesses makes me want to extend the thought and say that they are doing it wrong for all businesses.