 |
Brian WienerCEO360i |
Marketing used to be a lot easier – and I’m talking about the late 1990s, not the 1950s. You worked with your agency to develop a big idea that would translate into a wonderful uni-directional creative execution that would be pushed in front of your target audience courtesy of a mass media buy. Even in the age of proliferation of cable channels, media planning wasn’t that hard. But now, the rules have completely changed.
TV advertising, while still very powerful, is becoming less effective and efficient by the minute. Advertising dollars are concentrated where consumers are spending less than 25% of their time. Within online budgets, consumer-generated media represents almost 20% of time spent but less than 3% of the dollars. More significantly, the Internet has altered the rules of customer engagement forever.
Social media is a prime example of this shift, sitting at the nexus of consumer-generated content, conversations and interactions. Before user-generated content became so pervasive, consumers learned about brands and products from (a) one-to-one word of mouth (b) press reviews or (c) advertising. Social marketing has elements of all of these, making it a bit more complex, but also creating fantastic opportunities for establishing stronger ties with consumers.
Where We’re Going
As we look to 2010, there are few trends we see gaining more prominence in the industry, most notably:
1. Social Media is Mobile: Increasingly, the future of social is mobile, and the future of mobile is social. Facebook and MySpace are seeing some of their greatest usage growth from mobile devices. New mobile-specific networks like Mocospace are finding fan bases of millions of users and mobile applications like Foursquare have turned “going out” into a game.
2. Earned and Paid Come Together: The norm right now is for earned media (any content created or publicity gained through non-advertising or paid promotions) and paid media (including display ads, video ads, paid virtual gifts, etc) to be planned separately, sometimes by entirely different departments that don’t communicate with each other. While it’s a little naïve to expect a radical overhaul of marketers’ organizations, expect key stakeholders to sit at the table more often with respective agencies to plan these programs more holistically.
3. Measurement is Critical: Expect new metrics and models, from planning media on a cost per-social-action basis to measuring Key Conversation Indicators (KCIsSM) that are better suited to earned media. 2010 will also bring more progress with technologies that can automatically measure sentiment; mass market tools today are generally not accurate enough to rely on for thorough campaign measurement. Enhanced dashboards will make it easier for marketers to view the effects of social marketing on a real-time basis.
4. Transparency is Not Optional: Marketers, bloggers and agencies will adopt stricter standards about disclosing when money has exchanged hands, and the FTC will continue to provide regulatory guidelines and oversight in this area. And finally, the one trend that continues to stick around and will most surely impact us all in 2010 is…
5. Change is Inevitable: "If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less,” said General Eric Shinseki, former U.S. Army Chief of Staff. The influx of new platforms and marketing opportunities will continue to grow. The nature of our industry is one of change and the Internet only continues to accelerate the pace of this change. Those marketers who have a strong foundation for assessing new platforms and 46 opportunities and a framework for determining which are best for their brands will be best equipped for survival.
There’s a seemingly endless stream of interesting and groundbreaking ways marketers can reach and engage core audiences across the social landscape. Innovation, creativity and out-of-the-box thinking often lend themselves to successful interactions in social marketing. But, beware of “bright shiny object syndrome,” where marketing objectives are ignored and innovative ideas are religiously pursued in the name of developing something sexy. Awards don’t pay the bills; results do.
The best opportunities do not arise from ambitiously surging into a broad range of social platforms with the assumption that, by casting a large net, the brand will be bound to meet its audience. Likewise, just because a social platform grows rapidly and/or gains a lot of media attention, this does not mean marketers must develop a strategy for their brand on that platform. So how do you prepare for the onslaught of changes that are sure to come in the social landscape in 2010?
