We’re battling against serious content clutter (source of image)
Every day, companies generate tonnes of content on social media channels like blogs, forums, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube and more.
Ranging from text, photos, videos, podcasts, to games and apps, the sea of social media content is scary. In fact, we marketers are constantly battling for attention in an endless content battlefield.
Marketing is broken. At least in the traditional sense.
Focused on customer acquisition, promotions and sales volumes, traditional marketing views customers as “targets” to be arrowed.
Bigger, bolder and flashier campaigns are launched to attract their rapidly diminishing attention while carrots like discounts, freebies and lucky draws are dangled to coax them to open their wallets.
A picture often paints a thousand words. A great comic or cartoon, on the other hand, paints tens of thousands.
“Marketoonist” Tom Fishburne recently created a wonderful graphical depiction of 5 different types of social media strategies as depicted below:
Courtesy of Tom Fishburne
Richard Branson’s personal brand is synonymous with that of Virgin.
Was reading Steve Rubel’s post about The Golden Age of Individualism which pointed to this decade old gem by management guru Tom Peters. In Tom’s article on the “Brand Called You”, he wrote about the need to establish oneself as an authority on the matters which one is passionate about, the importance of influence and visibility, and the need to have BOTH style and substance.
In the age of social media and the democratisation of information, all of us become more important than ever before. I am sure everybody would have read or heard about Time Magazine’s Person of the Year : You. Everybody’s vote now counts more strongly than ever before in the world of business and commerce.
Planning versus execution. There is an age-old debate about which is more important in marketing. Should strategy take precedence over implementation? Similarly, which is of greater significance – the general’s plans or the warriors tactics?
I believe that increasingly, ivory towers “strategic marketing” ain’t gonna cut the ice. Poring over numerous analytical reports and market research alone will not do. AC Nielsen may have the best coverage of traditional marketing channels but have you read what people are talking about you on hardwarezone’s forums? How about what the taxi drivers are saying behind your backs?
Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba has created the 4 Fs of citizen marketers. This is an elegant idea which distills some of the types of bloggers and new media activists you find in the blogosphere.
The 4 Fs are:
1) Filters