Building trust even when you don’t need it: Social Media Marketing

Seth Godin, godfather of good quotes, recently wrote this:

The best time to look for a job next year is right now. The best time to plan for a sale in three years is right now. The mistake so many marketers make is that they conjoin the urgency of making another sale with the timing to earn the right to make that sale. In other words, you must build trust before you need it. Building trust right when you want to make a sale is just too late.

Publishing your ideas… in books, or on a blog, or in little twits on Twitter… and doing it with patience, over time, is the best way I can think of to lay a foundation for whatever it is you hope to do next.

This is why, in my opinion, Social Media Marketing cannot simply be viewed as another tactical discipline within marketing – or even advertising, as many companies might currently think about it. You shouldn’t just do Social Media Marketing as a one-off, as part of a campaign („we’ll have som TV commercials, some online banners, and, let’s see, some social media activities“).

It needs to be a strategic, long term goal to engage in Social Media activities, to build relations with the target audience, and to build trust for those moments, when you (urgently) need to activate your greatest brand/product fans…

Quantitative and qualitative influence in marketing

Over at the Online Spin blog, there is an interesting article about „peers vs influencers„. The question is, of course: who is your ideal target group. It’s the debate of Gladwells Tipping Point theory vs Duncan Watts argument, that there aren’t any network nodes more influential than others.

Joe Marchese says, there are indeed people who are more influential than others. But only in three dimensions – and they can vary according to topic, point in time and other variables for the same person:

–People have a quantity of influence: the maximum number of other people they can reach with a message.

–People have a quality of influence: the amount of influence they exert over those that they reach.

–People have types of influence: categories of “expertise” that other people assign to an individual.

If this is the case (if it is that easy), you can quickly deduct your target audience according to the marketing objective. Is it widespread awareness? Is it consideration? Is it increased sales?

Not sure if it is that easy. But it does sound nice to put these target groups against the typical marketing funnel. Only question remaining: can you always clearly distinguish one from the other these days? (I doubt that.)

Linktip: the worst social media campaigns of 2007

Over at the One Degree blog, there is a coverage of a panel from the SXSW interactive festival, during which the panelists were asked to vote on the worst social media campaigns in 2007. Amongst the panelists were bloggers like Jeff Jarvis and Steve Hall. I have to admit, I didn’t hear about all of these campaigns, but some of the bigger blunders (Walmart, Coke/Mentos and Sony) I did hear about, of course. I wonder what will be next for this year? You would assume, that (we) marketers learn…

Average user clickfarms

There is a standard joke around online advertising managers about the fear of those „chinese villages“ taking over one of your ad campaigns so that you receive the clicks you paid for, only all of them come from one and the same family (in China or India, or Eastern Europe or Antigua, etc. it doesn’t really matter).

But you don’t need to go very far away. Your next door neighbor might be part of a „click farm“. Even though he most likely never realised what he got himself into.

Just the other day I took a look at a site called OnlineTVRecorder.com (don’t want to give them any link credit). On that site you can record TV programms of any German TV Channel – most of which I wouldn’t even be able to access in this area of the country. You first record them, and then download and decode them. But you can only decode those that you „recorded“ in advance. This makes it similar to any VCR/DVD recorder and hence (I guess) a legal way of recording shows via the web.

So far so good. However, the system only works for you, when you pay per download with so called „good will points“. If you haven’t got enough points, you can’t download or decode any files.

And how do you get these points? There are two ways. Either you donate money, or you click on some of their ads. Yes, that’s right: you can click on the ads to receive good will points! You get points for clicks that advertisers pay a lot of money for (on aggregate).

I guess most users on this site aren’t fully aware of the fact that each of their clicks contributes to ripping of advertisers. Note: I am not saying „poor advertisers“ here! I am just saying that advertisers don’t get what they pay for when they signed the contract with these mediasites: intentional attention.

Clickworking is an interesting and positive trend, since it uses the minimal individual productivity of large crowds to achieve a large complex goal.

Clickfarming seems to be a dark side equivalent. Utilize the small contributions of a large crowd’s individuals who might not even (want to) realize that their few clicks are contributing to a large system of fraud.

I wonder how many other sites of this kind are out there? How much dubious content is paid for in this way? How many advertising campaigns bought on a pay-per-click basis have been corrupted by clickfarms like these?

If I was an advertiser and I saw one of my banners on one of those sites, I would ask my media agency or the publisher for my money back. And may be sue them.

Don’t fall for any „basic tips of how-to“

I usually try not to write negative about things, because unless it’s constructive criticism for the creator of the content, nobody gains much. But since there is no possibility to comment on things at marketingvox, I will do it here.

I am referring to the post with the title „How-to: 9 Basic SEO Tips„. It caught my attention, because just the other day, I had a discussion with colleagues at the agency about how creative agencies rarely know how to properly search engine optimize the websites they build.

However, with the 9 basic tips, we won’t get very far either. Let me quote some of them:

Find out how well you rank online. […] It may be helpful to download the Google Toolbar, which gives you the „PageRank“ score for websites. Pages are scored on a scale of 1 to 10. The goal will be to make this number higher on your website.

Ok – and how? (It doesn’t say). Another great tip:

Submit your site to search engines. Do it personally; avoid „submission services“ or software. You only need to do it once.

I won’t continue with other tips like „place relevant keywords in the title tag“ or „use alt tags on images“ that they also featured.

Was any of this new to anyone? Please ? If so, just leave this blog immediately. In fact – please leave the internet and switch off your computer completely.

Gheez – we’re in 2008 by now, it’s not 1998 any more!

Not sure about the target audience of marketingvox, but for this article, it sure isn’t your average webmarketer!