Traditional Marketing Tactics are Dying, (But the Future is Bright…)

Until few years ago, corporations could largely control their public corporate message. With the emergence and rapid high growth of social media, that control has been decentralized from corporations. Now most of us think that we are in an apocalypse with social media trying to take over just about everything in the world, from politics to corporations, media to shopping, and friends to personal life and we are losing control in just about in everything.

Here are a few examples of various corporate points-of-view about the downside of social media.

Marketers are watching customers shout out new product messages, advantages, disadvantages, capabilities and limitation over Twitter, messages boards, Facebook, Linkedin and other social sites without their consent or control.

Product Managers feel they are losing control and privacy of their product road maps. Customers are openly discussing potential enhancements, current limitations, new features sets, etc. Product managers are afraid customers are revealing their secret product road map to the benefit of their competitors.

Support Agents and Consultants fear customers not getting accurate information from the online community.

Analysts fear diminished credit as customers are now publicly writing competent reviews, for free!

Welcome to the age of Social Media & Web2.0 where those you can’t control have as much, or more, say about your organization and its offerings. Not unlike the way the print media was once considered the 4thbranch of the government, the public online masses are now, for better or worse, the new team in your marketing department.

Open-Source Marketing
Open your marketing department and welcome your customers to your open community. Customer’s comments, messages and promotion are more authentic and believable than those that come from within an organization. They’re based on their intimate knowledge of the product, not crafted in the often “too slick,” and sterile corporate fashion. They are not concerned with meeting corporate message structure or including the new messaging of the marketing team.

Open-Source Product Management
Most businesses spend a ton of time and money understanding how their customers are using the product, and what the right enhancements are to be made. With social media, your customers are openly discussing your product, giving you their ”wish list” for free . Indirectly, they are your product managers guiding you directly to what they like and what are the willing to pay for.

Open-Source Customer Support
The aim of consultants and customer support is to provide excellent service to their customers—to solve their problem and help them better understand how to take better advantage of the products. Today, customers are helping each other online, enabling customer support to focus on much larger problems and equip their community of product supporters with even better information to help other customers.

Apple is one of the few organizations who have gotten the social marketing strategy right. They have a massive network of customers standing by at all hours, ready like an Army of soldiers to jump into an argument or issues they consider to be unfair to Apple. Organizations crave to have fans like Apple’s, but they’re afraid to open the doors to welcome this new generation of customers out of fear of losing control.

Many Internet experts anticipate a day when social networking sites take over the search engines and become the preferred form of online advertisement, that day is not that far.

With this, the new challenge for organizations is to measure the effectiveness of social media efforts, brand monitoring, real time in-sight into customer communications, sentiments and actionable data for next steps. That will be the topic for my upcoming series of blog posts. To be continued…