7 Comments

  1. Laurel – here ya go – I totally agree with you. I tend to be a bit pedantic on my blog and “snacky” – heck it’s a blog!

    I hate the word campaign because it is OLD skool and I try to get marketers to understand that this is NOT about telling and selling but about being in the fray and MOST importantly in it for the long haul. Anyone who tries to sell wikis and blogs toa company is MISSING the point – this is NOT about technology but about a cultural shift in thinking about what kind of communication and connection you are attempting to create for the long haul with your customers – not just throwing up an ‘interactive ad’ or a starting a wiki and not feeding it.

    I say – yes – start small – but the social web is SO much more than a viral video. Companies dont yet have the skill sets or job functions internally to really feed the beast – but they are indeed learning and I say “here here” fail forward.

    [and i like the pink]

  2. Hi Debs, I do understand that you and Paul are talking about not treating the audience as eyeballs to be manipulated, I just want to be careful with how we position things.

    And I use as many old-media words as possible. For example collaborative knowledge management (wiki), or customer communities (social networks). They feel more comfortable then – and after all, nothing is new, just mashuped a little πŸ™‚

    I wanted a pink blog but got talked out of it *goes off to think about it again* πŸ˜€

  3. I think the first step is to divorce ourselves from the notion that the customer is not part of the product development process.

    The second step is to rid ourselves of the notion that the product development process is separate from the sales process.

    When we do these things, and see everything as part of an overall wish fulfillment process – social media transforms.

    It’s all communication – internal and external to a company. Blogs, wiki, video, voting and all that is just talking. Just communicating.

    Now … how to we get something said by a user in Bangalore in a forum quickly back to the dev team in Berlin? How quickly can the dev team respond, both in terms of words and in deeds?

    How much of the development cycle can we shortcut here, still have a coherent product, but constantly be refactoring and keeping customers not just happy, but freakishly happy?

    This is what I would call a social media strategy.

  4. Aye Jim, that’s a strategy. But it doesn’t mean you can’t have a campaign.

    I don’t believe that everything around social media needs to be a strategy. Nor does it need to be directly linked to sales.

    For example (and the one I gave on Paul’s site) Oh it works for B2B too. I was also thinking of 6-9month campaigns – a Telco blogging to educate/prepare resellers for a change in the telecomms act. It wasn’t really plugging into their longterm strategy but they suddenly had a message and needed to get companies on side, up to speed, and vocal about an issue. Particularly as the press backlash was going to be great. Ads wouldn’t have done the job. But nor would waiting to develop a “long term strategy of engagement and conversation”. Sometimes just doing a campaign leads to a strategy that really works.

    For some companies, they need an “in case of emergency, break glass” blog. Is it as effective as ongoing engagement in the blogosphere? No of course not. But if it means that or nothing, then a not-oft used blog is better than nothing. Eventually they wake up to needing ongoing commitment.

    Strategy comes when we have a vision of the future, and we can’t have a vision from reading a few books and seeing what a competitor did. A campaign can give the company babysteps into the future and they will wake up and say “omg we need to do this more, in an organised way”.

    Incidentally this is what we did with Web 1.0. Stealth tactics πŸ™‚

  5. Laurel

    Thanks for the comments and the advice for comments on my blog.
    I went ahead and turned moderation off and captcha on

  6. Oh goody, Paul. If you do pick up a bad guy, you can always turn moderation back on temporarily : they will usually give up for a while.

    Just don’t come after me with a sharp implement if someone says bad words in comments πŸ™‚

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