The Flip Side of Socially Inspired Marketing

It's not a usual Friday in office today. It started with casual chit chats and moved on to some serious discussions. You must be thinking that since India lost to Australia yesterday in the 2015 cricket world cup, we have a lot of free time now, to talk about other things in life. Well, so true. The discussion today led to a point that encouraged me to pen down this flip side of socially inspired marketing.


I don't need to emphasize that we all have learned about business ethics during our educational or employment tenure. The same ethics apply to all business functions, including marketing. But, why do marketers forget about ethics when they roll out marketing campaigns?


In the recent past, we all witnessed the emergence of 'online and social marketing. With the emergence came the ability to identify the customers, their digital journey, their buying behaviors, and their most-likely next purchase. Because of this knowledge today, the marketers have become more powerful in their organizations. But, just because they know so much about their customers, including all of us, is it ethical to just identify them and bombard them with further emails and phone calls?


One of my colleagues told me that once he visited a banking site and was intrigued by their offers. My colleague got engaged enough to allow them to drop their spy (cookies etc). The next day onwards he started receiving so many marketing calls that made him block numbers and file for complaints. This example just added to my point which I raised on ethics. I think, this is the biggest flip side of Socially Inspired Marketing.


Why do we forget about ethics when we become the in-charge of MQLs? I am still thinking...

Have You Created Your Social News Magazine Yet?

If you haven’t, try Flipboard, Paper.li, Zite, Currents or NewzSocial. These publishers allow you to create your own Social News Magazines in minutes. Your Social News Magazines help you discover, subscribe / curate and share content of your interest with your social network. A quick look at the frequently asked questions on this topic.

Does it help? Assume you are a financial analyst who loves travelling and Football. To keep yourself updated, you have downloaded various apps such as WSJ online, Fox Traveler, Ten Sports, Discovery, among others. For day-to-day news, you also follow TV and radio channels. Just try and calculate the time you must be spending to keep yourself updated. Didn’t think that way, right?

What if you could create your own social news magazine that helps you discover and curate content from various publishers on the topics of your interest? What if the magazine could allow you to post interesting content to various social networking sites? With these Social News Magazine publishers you can do it all.

What all topics do they cover? The social news magazines curate content on a wide range of subjects such as travel, politics, business, jazz, animal love, etc. Collectively, they are curating content from over 100,000 publishers. You can discover, curate, and share information channels based on your interest areas.

Which one should you choose? Try any of the ones mentioned above. Since they are all trying to establish themselves in this area, they all do more or less of the same thing with some unique variants. For example, NewzSocial allows you to create your own channels whereas others ask you to subscribe to topics. Through Flipboard you can share the content with your friends on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook whereas NewzSocial provides options to share content with your Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin connections. Besides, Flipboard offers another interesting feature such as “Flip it” that permits you to add any content that you like from the web into your magazine. Isn’t that cool! I have used NewzSocial in the past, and I liked it. One of my friends who happened to be a marketing automation guy is an advocate of Paper.li.

What should you do next? Try it if you are a knowledge buff. Or, take your time to evaluate these tools for you business or personal purposes before you sign up for one.

The 5 Habits Of All Effective Online Communicators: Secrets Worth Sharing

For all these years, I have been observing some of the most effective online communicators. They are popular. They are highly admired. They always get good responses. They have something common in them; they have mastered the 5 habits of all effective online communicators. Learn how to develop and master those habits.

The 1st Habit Of All Effective Online Communicators: Prepare Yourself.
Before you start writing, ask yourself the three magic questions: Why are you writing? Who are you writing for? Why should they read your write-up?
If you are absolutely clear about the objective, target audiences and message, then start writing now! What are you waiting for?


The 2nd Habit Of All Effective Online Communicators: Be Topical.
Be an avid reader and a keen listener if you want to be an effective online communicator. Keep yourself posted on the industry trends and market updates.
However, the job doesn’t end there! You need to develop a habit of finding relationships between the trends / incidents and your readers. For example, wouldn’t you want to write about “the top 10 tips and tricks of discount marketing for this Thanksgiving?”   


The 3nd Habit Of Effective Online Communicators: Talk to Individuals.
While writing for social media, why we forget that we are communicating to individual people; we are talking to the community of humans. This is a habit that needs to be adopted and then nurtured. Whether you are writing for your own blog or for your employer, do not forget that the readers are individuals. They can behave in the most amazing ways you can ever imagine. Paint dreams for your readers. Focus on emotions-driven writing. It always works. Beware! Remember, your readers are individuals and therefore, they can be crazy too. So, be mindful of what you are writing.


The 4th Habit Of All Effective Online Communicators: Give Call to Action.
It’s very simple. To get a response, you need to ask for it. Your readers don’t have time to assume or think about what you are looking for. So, please do pay attention to what you want from your readers. Do you want them to read further? So call it out. Maybe, you want them to buy. So, make it explicit. Or, you want them to write back. Then don’t shy away. Just ask.


The 5th Habit Of All Effective Online Communicators: Acknowledge Your Readers.
To learn how it works, do this exercise. I am sure you will find it interesting. Observe your favorite online communicator for the next few days. Respond to their write ups, blog posts, tweets and updates. You will observe that they all will reply to you back. Believe it or not, acknowledging your readers can do magic to your online write-ups. Try it and do share your experiences.

The Social Faux Pas: How smartly do you escape paid content on Web?

Social Media users are much smarter now. They can differentiate between promoted and non-promoted content. They do read your campaign content, but only when they need it or see any personal satisfaction. They might see ONLY one or NONE of the 1,000s of promotions running on the Web on various Social Media channels. But, can that ad promo be yours, it is indeed a difficult situation to be in. What to do then? Do write in, or leave a comment, and let others know how smartly you position and present your ads on Web to get maximum response.

Learn from others' mistakes: Become a Social Media Expert

They say, life is too short to make mistakes. So learn from others’.

Since Social Media Marketing is new and yielding results for some, all B2C and B2B marketers want to try it out. To get it right at the first shot, marketers must focus on messaging. Messing up with content and messaging may cost you a lot. You might face a ban on your campaign.

Most recently, BSkyB succeeded in getting a Virgin Media direct mail campaign banned for tricking consumers into thinking it was an official offer of a TV upgrade from its pay-TV rival – but lost a bid to stop Virgin being able to claim it offered a "better TV experience". The satellite broadcaster lodged a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority over a campaign from Virgin Media that arrived in an official-looking jiffy bag promising a "satellite TV upgrade pack" to households.

Messaging is the key everywhere, especially in the B2B marketing world. Here are some examples that may sound familier to you:

1) When you get a poor open rate / response to your e-mail campaign, there is a big chance that it is because of the drab subject line, which you forgot to focus on. Though poor open rate is not just restricted to catchy subject line.

2) When you witness a challenge in building audiences for webinar, it could be majorly because of the HTML invitations that you sent out without a clear & catcy message.

3) When you get poor form fills through whitepaper hosted on a Website, for example, it could be because of the wrong / misleading / boring banner text copy that could have been better with a little more attention.

and so on.

Digital marketing campaigns revolve around content. Right messaging, correct keywords, good presentation among others can actually create business opportunities too, if managed well.

Tip of the day: If you are running a digital campaign, keep some money aside to run a follow-up campaign. It gives results. This is valid for both traditional as well as Next Gen Social Marketers.  

The New ROI Factory: Meet the PPC Outsourcers

What are the key sources of measuring the success of any digital marketing campaign? Is there any business opportunity that has been opened up because of any online marketing programs? If you are a B2B marketer, you would know how difficult it is to answer such questions. For such marketer, here are some useful insights.

Using Social Media for lead generation has been proven effective despite its slow adoption among B2B marketers, according to a recently published research report titled 2011 State of Digital Marketing conducted by Webmarketing123, a digital marketing agency that helps clients convert online visibility into measurable results.

The research report is based on the responses to the digital survey conducted online between August and September 2011. Over 500 U.S. participants completed the survey – all individuals who responded to an email invitation sent to a registered list of marketing professionals.  It reveals that 68.4% of marketers surveyed say, they have generated leads from Social Media sites, with over 55% of them having closed deals from Social Media leads. Because of this success, 60% of respondents plan to increase Social Media marketing budget in 2012, compared to 53.1% for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and 40.2% for Pay Per Click (PPC).

Not surprisingly, more companies outsource PPC than SEO, and a whopping 84.8% keep Social Media Marketing in-house. And speaking of Social Media, Facebook is the leading Social network by far, with Twitter slightly surpassing LinkedIn. According to the research 75.3% of B2C companies are the most active on Facebook, followed by 8.4% on Twitter and 6.2% on LinkedIn whereas B2B companies are active more evenly across all three leading networks: 34.6% Facebook, 25.6% Twitter, and 25.3% LinkedIn. Moreover, 46.4% B2B marketers who responded to the survey said that generating leads is the most important objective of their digital marketing programs whereas 39.9% B2C marketers give importance to generating sales. Website traffic is the key source of measuring the success of digital marketing programs.

The Re-incarnated CMOs = The Social CMOs

Traditionally, enterprises and individuals used to seek peers’ advice to make buying decisions. It’s changing fast. They explore the solution or product providers’ Websites first and understand their service capabilities by participating in online communities to make buying decisions. Buyers are no longer skeptical of solution providers who now understand the importance of the depth and quality of thought leadership and accordingly host content on their Websites and online communities. Websites represent enterprises. And, thus Website development and maintenance is the marketers’ first preferred functional activity. These are considered as the number 1 source of information, especially during the early stages of the buying process.

Social enterprises expect the already confused and tired-of-not-being-able-to-measure-the-performance CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) to try Social and drive business. If you look at the marketing functions and the key marketing strategies, Social Media is one of the key marketing programs. Everyone wants to get into that. The dilemma is that traditional marketers don't know how to do this whereas the ones who know hardly understand the purpose of running it as a marketing function. Experts say that in future, Social Media expertise will be the key requirement for all the marketers. Is this really true? What about brand managers? In the era of Social, every employee would be the brand ambassador and every employee on Social Media would be the brand manager. The companies will have to be very transparent as well as alert to sense negative noise.

Today, the world’s fastest growing companies are on the rise without any promotions, especially true in the case of recently established Social businesses. For example, Facebook’s user base turned 1 billion members without any promotions. It was all through the word of mouth on the Web. The Social networking site never used the traditional marketing tools, such as advertisements. Does this mean we don’t need to invest in marketing? Not necessarily.

Having said that the challenge comes in when you know that you need to invest in marketing but you don’t know in what, when and why. If you go by the latest trend in the market, you would try every bit of paid Social promotions as part of your overall marketing strategies. And, the Social CMOs would need establish "The New ROI Factory".