The Cheap Revolution

The Anthropology of Social Media

Small businesses are being lured by the bright shiny object called Social Media Marketing. To be sure, this is an important development. One way to look at this phenomena is as a collection of tools that you can add to your SMB marketing toolkit.

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter-and getting smarter faster than most companies.

- the cluetrain manifesto (www.cluetrain.com)

In his article "Having the Right Tool is 90% of the Job" published in the HP Logoworks Small Business Newsletter, Skip Shuda from Team and a Dream explores the anthropology of social media, and how it has evolved.

In a recent Keynote address called “Andy Hunt on Pragmatic Thinking and Learning“, author Andy Hunt relays the story of a man who was trained to see using just his tongue attached to an electronic imaging device. The man became so adept he could navigate a car through a parking lot with only his tongue for vision.

This bizarre repurposing of the use of our tongue serves to illustrate something we humans have been doing for millions of years. We build stuff that enables us to dig deeper than with our bare hands, fight more lethally than kicking or punching, and travel farther and longer than running. Man, the tool-maker.

Person to person communication is one of the most vigorous areas of human tool-building. Starting with extenders like the written word, the trained courier-bird and smoke signals, our ambition to communicate faster farther with more people has driven innovation upon innovation. The printing press marked the advent of mass communication, extending our voice to thousands of ears. With electronic communications our voice-extending spree exploded across phone, radio, TV, satellite and so much more. From Gutenberg’s wonder to the Internet, mass communication has only been around for a handful of centuries.

And then it really got crazy…

Internet Marketing is the art of optimizing Internet-based conversations to promote a specific Point of View (POV) with a specific audience. After all, the internet (little i) is just the plumbing for a whole host of voice and conversation tools. Cyberspace is made up of a fleet of different modes of communication. “Markets are Conversations.” Is the first thesis of the 1999 manifesto that illuminates the future of a global, human conversation...

Continue reading this post on the HP Logoworks Small Business Newsletter.

Flying Blind: Metrics are #1 challenge blocking online-offline marketing groups

Flying blind just isn't as much fun as it used to be. 

Recently, eMarketer published results from a recent study (Q1, 2009) of marketing organizations.  The marketing organizations are having trouble collecting and correlating information from multiple channels, with diverse vendor-partners managing those channels.  

eMarketer writes:  

Unfortunately, the necessary data is currently scattered across organizations. Data formats are inconsistent and so is terminology. Until these problems are solved, marketers attempting to integrate traditional and digital advertising channels will continue flying blind.

I think the problem is bigger than that, though.  True... finding, collecting and integrating the data is difficult in most organizations today.

But that hides the real question.  

What should you be measuring? With multiple marketing channels, there could be hundreds (thousands?) of variables you could watch...  Which metrics are the right metrics?  Internet market and web analytics have led to an explosion of quantitative data that can be leveraged.  Offline analytics are getting better as well through improved survey techniques, in-store kiosks, video monitoring, etc.

Should you pay attention to num of widgets sold? avg sales price? num of clients? num of visitors? landing page bounce rates? ... 

which leads to:

that depends on your objectives. 

What are  your objectives? 

Do you seek to increase the number of customers or visitors?  Maybe you wish to emphasize a specific product mix?  Are you hoping to find customers who become loyal and longtime members of your community?

Your objectives depend further on your business Goals, Vision and Strategy. Do you hope capture new markets?  Deepen customer intimacy?  Improve brand recognition?  

Choosing the right metrics (or Key Performance Indicators, KPIs) based on your business strategy can help to both simplify the measurement process and improve the effectiveness of conversations around KPIs.

I imagine a lot of organizations don't spend time on metrics because when they do, they are overwhelming.  Instead,  a few, well-placed, well-segmented KPIs can go a long way towards streamlining the understanding of how well your marketing engines are running.  Good KPIs should be simple and easy to understand.   A one page dashboard that ties the KPIs into the specific business objectives can go a long way towards improving your marketing effectiveness. 

It means you can move with nimbleness.  You can react weekly... even daily to what is happening.  Yet all of those actions are aligned with your big picture strategy.

Strategy can take a lot of different forms.  What it really means is that you are taking a comprehensive and integral perspective on the challenge of marketing a product and company.

So... my question, which apparently was NOT on the survey, is:

How many of you employ a strategically-focused marketing approach - one driven by specific goals that are supported by measurable results?

Do you think such an approach is preferable?  Is it practical?  Why or why not? 

Climbing the Pyramid of Marketing Mastery

Team and a Dream's Skip Shuda provides a short introduction on the "Marketing Pyramid of Needs" in this five minute screencast.

This simple framework encourages you to follow the three simple marketing steps towards mastery of "See it, Say it and Be it".  By walking up each step of the pyramid, you can ensure that you have all the elements in place for a successful marketing effort. It can also help you to answer questions like, "When am I ready for a Blog?" or "Can Social Media really help my company?". If you haven't done the necessary preparatory work, then your premature marketing efforts can be wasted.

Furthermore, the framework sets the stage for the successful measurement of marketing efforts.  A marketing metrics dashboard is a key component to ensure that you stay on the path to Market Mastery once you've started your journey. The framework is discussed in more detail on a recent article at the HP Logoworks Blog article "See it. Say it. Be it. Multi-Channel Marketing in a Web 2.0 World" by Skip Shuda.

By: Skip Shuda