marketing – Page 17 – THE SOCIAL CMO Blog

Advocacy Drives “Social Sampling”

March 30, 2011 by TheSocialCMO

Kleenex made waves with its recent “Softness Worth Sharing campaign,” which encouraged people to have FREE Kleenex sample packs sent to friends and family. Earlier this month, a reported 1 million Kleenex packs had been sent on behalf of Kleenex consumers!

What made this innovative campaign so successful? Kleenex gave consumers the chance to not only interact with their product, but to also easily give their friends/family the same experience. In other words, Kleenex identified Advocates, who in turn sent more samples and encouraged their networks to do the same… they were energized and mobilized. Social sampling at its best!

One important part of this campaign was providing a way for people to track the campaign online – including their own “chain of sharing,” where a consumer can see if their sample-sending inspired someone else to send sample(s). When consumers can see the impact of their action, it can easily inspire them to act again and spread the word to their friends about this “cool thing you have to check out!” Again, it energizes and mobilizes Advocates.

We know how important it is to give our Brand Advocates the tools to market our products for us, and now Kleenex has taken this concept one step further by giving consumers the tools AND THE PRODUCT (samples) to share with their networks. They have made it easy and fun for Advocates to create a buzz around a specific product and to share theexperience of the product.

Successful social sampling campaigns rely on consumer-to-consumer connection, and your Advocates are the most powerful way to create those ties.

Ted Rubin

Originally posted at Zuberance

We need to ask the Moms!

March 28, 2011 by TheSocialCMO

The recent Yahoo study suggesting that Dads rule the grocery shopping cart is causing a stir in the marketing community with article headlines like “Time to Rethink Your Message: Now the Cart Belongs to Daddy.”

The study shows that out of 2,400 US men (ages 18-64), 51% of them report they are the primary grocery shoppers in their households. For Dads in particular, that number is slightly higher as 6 in 10 call themselves the primary decision makers on purchases of packaged goods, health, pet and clothing purchases.

We need to take this information with a grain of salt because, in my view, they asked the wrong people. Instead of Dads, they should be asking the Moms the questions about who has the primary grocery shopping role. Dads, recently a bit jealous of the attention Marketers are paying to Moms and not to them, are making inflated claims about their decision making power and influence on household purchases… sorry Dad. Many a Mom will jump in and make it clear that although more Dads are doing the shopping, it is the Moms who are making the list… at least in the majority of cases.

Long-term Advocacy Enhanced by Emotional Connection

March 26, 2011March 28, 2011 by TheSocialCMO

One of the most valuable returns of the social media proliferation is the renewed fervor around Brand Advocacy. The truly remarkable thing about Brand Advocates is that they proactively recommend brands and products without getting paid…but if they are not getting paid, then what is their motivator for advocacy?

The #1 reason Brand Advocates recommend brands and products is that they want to help others (source: “Engaging Advocates Through Search and Social Media,”comScore, Yahoo!, Dec. 2006). In other words, there is an emotional component to their advocacy. The emotional component is not just important for Brand Advocates and their social graph, it is also key to the marketer and brand relationship with their Brand Advocates. If you can make an emotional connection with your consumer, that will go far in building long-term advocacy.

Who owns your brand?

March 17, 2011 by TheSocialCMO

In the past, marketing owned the brand, using a tightly controlled set of messages piped through carefully selected channels to ensure brand “ownership” through control….but that’s no longer the case. The increasing integration of social media into our consumers’ lives has shifted brand ownership away from marketers and into the hands of the consumer.

We marketers like to think that social media is primarily a set of tools for our marketing purposes, but in reality, social media is also a strong set of tools our consumers use to share and influence opinion about our brand. Our consumers now have “the channel of me.” Consumers’ opinions now create the “reality” of the brand — if enough consumers say negative things about your brand, your brand loses its credibility, and (thankfully) vice versa.

There are two main ways we can react to this change: we can fight it or accept it. I highly recommend accepting it. If we fight to retain control of our brands, we are likely to hold on so tight that we suffocate the flexibility and outward-looking awareness our brand needs for survival.

Build Relationships, Not Billboards!

March 13, 2011March 13, 2011 by TheSocialCMO

The marketing paradigm is shifting with much greater “power to the people” facilitated by social media. If you want to continue to reach your market, it’s not about advertising any more, but about building relationships.

Consider the following differences:

Advertising

Building Relationships

1. Telling

2. Starts with “me” (the brand, the product, the service)

3. Focuses on “what can you give me?”

4. Goal: instant impact

5. Where’s the money?

1. Listening, hearing, empathizing, asking,

2. Starts with “you” (the customer’s needs, wants, interests and expectations)

3. Focuses on “how can I serve you?”

4. Goal: ongoing engagement

5. Who are the people?

1. Telling vs. Listening

It may sound counterintuitive, but if you truly want to be heard above the growing social media “noise,” you need to listen. Listen to what your consumers and potential consumers are saying before you even put one word out there: What are they saying, what are they feeling, what are their pain points, what solutions do they need? Then when you do “speak” (type), empathize with them and ask them questions.

Brand Advocates are People Too… Nurture that Relationship!

March 7, 2011March 7, 2011 by TheSocialCMO

It is true that Brand Advocates have value in part due to the reach of their relationships within and across their social networks. When they encourage their friends and colleagues to buy our products, our brand’s buying power increases exponentially, and it simply makes good business sense to leverage those opportunities.

The risk here is that we can become so focused on our Brand Advocates’ social reach that we see them only as a means to an end (sales) and stop seeing them as people. We might get greedy and start looking right past them to market directly to their networks, ignoring our Advocates themselves. While that marketing method can still be somewhat teffective, it costs more, it is more difficult to implement and maintain, and it is dangerous to our brand. We cannot de-value our Advocates and expect our brands to thrive!

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Be the Change Your Customers Want You to Be!

March 6, 2011 by TheSocialCMO

In today’s fast-paced, ever changing environment, most brands rank poorly when it comes to customer service. We might argue that it’s to be expected, since change is now more constant than ever… but the hard truth is that if we don’t excel in customer service, our brands will become just another nameless part of the noise out there.

Customers are no longer willing to wait around for us to get our act together, and even if they were willing, we can no longer afford extended timelines for change. Let’s put it into perspective – what if I told you not to expect to even be doing the same thing in 2 years that you are doing today?

Suddenly you can see that it is to our advantage to operate within the customers super-turbo-fast timeline now. But how to do that and still provide excellent customer service?? Those two goals are not as diametrically opposed as they might first seem.

Customer service is not just making sure returns are processed correctly, or customer frustrations are smoothed over. In this new social media era, customer service now carries the expectation of continually proving to your customers that you VALUE them in all stages of the sales cycle… from product conception to developing and honing brand personality and promises, to sale, to after-sale satisfaction, to the resulting repeat sales. All to start over again in the change cycle with a re-evaluation of the product and possible reconcepting.

The key is to involve your customers in meaningful ways through all aspects of the sales cycle. Online communities are one of the best ways to do this. Those communities set up an environment of trust among the brand, marketers, and community members, and provide the technical features required to allow the conversations to stay in the foreground and the technology in the background.

Ask your customers what they want from your brand, your products and services. Ask your customers how you’re doing, and what they want to see changed. Ask your customers to rate their satisfaction AND to tell you stories about their experience with your brand, products and services.

Then go do something about it. Make the changes. Step into the future as soon as your customers tell you what it looks like!

Seek out and embrace change – look to the future through your customers’ eyes and you just might get there before everyone else!

Ted Rubin

Ted Rubin Ted has a deep online background beginning in 1997 with Seth Godin, as CMO of e.l.f. Cosmetics, & recently as Chief Social Marketing Officer, Open Sky. Originally posted at SheSpeaks

Send Your Ego to the Back Seat and Bring Your Consumers to the Front.

February 28, 2011March 1, 2011 by TheSocialCMO

Thanks to the continual evolution of social media, we have a growing set of useful tools for gathering feedback about our brand reputation. Online branded communities, for example, are becoming increasingly valuable meeting spaces where community members and brand marketers can easily engage in meaningful conversation around specific products and services, and even the brands themselves.

This increase in brand–consumer conversation is beginning to change consumer expectations. They see that we marketers are part of their communities, and assume that we are listening, hearing, and planning product and service changes accordingly.

The problem here is that sometimes we marketers are so committed to our own brand experience that we may be resistant to change and have trouble actually hearing when our consumers are trying to ask us to change components of our brand. In order to work around our own (natural and understandable) resistance to change, we need to take a step back from our fierce attachment to what we believe makes our brand successful.

Customer Service “is” the New Marketing

February 20, 2011February 21, 2011 by TheSocialCMO

Remember the old small business customer service mentality? Where pleasing the customer came FIRST, and the need to delight them was “a given” not an option? Great news – it’s back (or at least on its way back)!

The democratizing nature of social media has returned power to the customer, making Brand Advocates one of our strongest marketing assets. If we want to share their power (not take it!), we need to adopt customer service as the new way of marketing – or “unmarketing,” a term mentioned by Brian Solis in the introduction to his book Engage, and Scott Stratten details extensively in his blog and book UnMarketing.

Considering this power shift, the #1 question we should be asking our Brand Advocates is “How may I serve you?” Ask early and ask often.