How to do Social Media Marketing without access to the internet.
February 18, 2009
Social Media Marketing is an an interesting mix of marketing, PR, sales and customer service, and is about engaging with communities. Famously, Dell now does this well, and are no longer in Hell. My friend Mr Whatley does a great job of this for SpinVox, IMHO. To do this, of course you need access to the internet.
But there is another way. It just takes doing something brilliant, like making your store front completely kick ass.
So you make something that rocks, ahem. Then you add the extra piece of genius, which is to make the dials go all the way to 11.
The design and the comic flourish disrupts expectations and connects with a shared passion.
You have created a piece of Social Media without access to the internet.
Then someone takes a photo and puts it on Flickr. And you have yourself a piece of awesome internet marketing without even turning your computer on.
Job done.
we are living in an analog world
January 24, 2009
People often pigeonhole what my team does as Digital Marketing. It’s a term that seems to cover all PC and mobile-based web marketing. In contrast, there is an ATL team, a BTL team, a retail team etc etc.
My team mates have started to refer to all these “non-digital” practices as Analog Marketing. It sounds ludicrous (which is the point) and obviously paints a picture of outdated thoughts and technologies, which suits us.
But a few days ago it dawned on me that, actually, we live in an Analog world, and that as good marketers we should remember this.
Analog data is continuous. Good marketing is now aware of the continous conversations that exist on the internet, and activities should be born to live, not born to die.
Analog has unwanted noise. With as many as 5000 advertising messages per day, good marketers have to accept noise too. In such a noisy environment, shouting louder won’t work. Instead, we have to draw people in with something of genuine value, and get people to voluntarily block out the noise and give you their undivided attention.
Also, no good marketing stays digital for long. For example, ESPN showed this great Youtube clip on TV, then did their own great remix/response, which of course ended up back on Youtube: Digital to Analog back to Digital.
Also, it’s easy to forget that 4 million unique users of Twitter in December means less than 0.1% global penetration rate. Similarly for all the talk of online buzz, 93% of word of mouth happens offline (although people who research online are more likely to have these offline discussions)
So, as much as we tend to think everything is becoming digital, it might be a good idea to remember that Life will always, actually, be lived in Analog.
