In the following white paper, the first in a monthly series, Steve Rubel, Edelman Digital’s SVP/Director of Insights, draws on members of the Edelman team, as well as research, to highlight five digital trends to watch for 2009.
That’s the first thing I said to myself when I first discovered the social media platform Twitter. I can easily recall thinking “Oh great, another social media site,” as I didn’t quite understand what Twitter was or what value it provided to me and my business. According to Wikipedia, “Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service, that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.” Even though I thought the cross between instant messaging and blogging as a communication tool was an interesting idea (and the fact the updates even show up on your phone), I still remained skeptical about using Twitter as I questioned “Why would anyone be interested in knowing what I’m doing every second of the day?” So for months I left Twitter untouched.
It wasn’t too long ago when marketing was about talking to customers, and corporations got their message across through repetition, repetition, repetition. But over the last couple years, the rise of Web 2.0 tools and social media has fundamentally changed the relationship between corporations and their customers. Consumers are now also producers, writing blogs and creating user-generated videos; they connect with each other through social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. And now, they want to connect with companies too.
We recently completed a study on Twitter in search of finding out what people are really using Twitter for. We also compared our research with other studies that were recently done to see how the data compared and if there were any obvious correlations.
The idea of “brand” is now synonymous with “experience.” A brand today is our cumulative experience with and perception of an entity. Not surprisingly, the single largest determinant of brand experience is an organization’s employees. Whether an airline flight or a hospital visit, grocery shopping or buying shoes, the way we perceive the employees we are interacting with has a far greater impact upon our brand perception than years of magazine or television advertisements.
Cision and Don Bates of George Washington University conducted an online survey of Print and Web journalists from September 1, 2009, to October 13, 2009, to measure use of, and attitudes toward, social media for researching and reporting stories. Social media is defined as blogs, social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, microblogging sites such as Twitter, photo/video sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr, and review sites or web discussion forums such as eopinions.com. Results are based on 371 responses.
Social media marketing (SMM) gets a lot of press these days – and companies are feeling pressure to jump on the band- wagon. But if you’re like many marketers, you may be unclear about the benefits of SMM and how, exactly, you should use it to your best advantage. Without a clear strategy and specific goals and objectives, SMM can be a low-ROI time sink and it may undermine your other marketing efforts – even email. While email marketing and SMM can be a dynamic duo, you need to ensure these two powerhouse marketing tactics are working together in order to achieve results that are greater than the sum of their parts.
Companies have often played catch-up in understanding how to harness new technologies without over-managing them. In the early years of the World Wide Web, in the mid- to-late 1990s, many organizations feared that employees would spend too much time idly surfing the Web, so they tried to control access. While some employees undoubtedly did waste time that way, many soon figured out how to unlock the power of the Internet to do their jobs better, and the Internet quickly became a tremendously valuable resource for conducting desktop research, tracking competitors and other corporate activities.
The emergence and increasing usage of social media and other Web 2.0 tools has dramatically altered the ways in which companies interact with their customers. For instance, buying advice, product information and technical help is increasingly being disseminated from consumers to other consumers, in some cases without involvement or oversight by the provider. Clearly, this shift presents both opportunities and risks to companies.
In the last 18 months, the social media phenomenon has delighted, confounded and concerned marketers and advertisers all around the globe. They have had to learn quickly that the different ways consumers access the internet across multiple time zones, networks and devices is forcing them to change the way they do business.
EACH YEAR BRINGS A NEW SET OF CHALLENGES TO LEADERS. Yet, one challenge that not only endures but also grows in importance is managing and protecting company reputation. Raising this challenge even further on the leadership agenda is the evolving online community. Here, the sound of splintered stakeholders, intensifying media scrutiny, escalating scandals, globalization, and demands for stronger economic governance and corporate responsibility has reached deafening proportions.