We’re finally back from our break. Don’t ask what happened – it is better that you don’t know.
- 10 Essential Brand Rules for Social Media: With more companies dedicating specific departments within their greater marketing organization to social media, the medium is no longer something being casually experimented with. This article in Ad Age discusses 10 rules, some more obvious than others, for managing your social media. #1 – The 1% Rule: As is the case with offline customers, a very small percentage of users are actually “influential,” generating 20-50% of site traffic and converting. A large percentage of the rest of site traffic is bored or misdirected. All visitors are not created equal and marketers must recognize how to set apart, and reward, users who create the most value for the company. #2 – The 2-4X Rule: Visitors driven to a site by “influencers” are four times more likely to convert than visitors who clicked on the page from advertisements or paid search. Content must encourage SHARING among users. For marketers, this means more work up front in creating engaging content. However, after the content is published, consumers take over and content goes viral. While this can mean less work in certain aspects for marketing, one of the main issues with social continues to be the lack of control that companies have in controlling their content. As the role of marketers involve, consumers are also taking on a dual role engaging in both consumption and voluntary promotion. #4 – The Martha Stewart Rule is the most interesting and seemingly least talked about in terms of social media. This article encourages companies to “Throw your own party; don’t cater someone else’s.” If Brand X hosts a page on Facebook, users are there for Facebook first and Brand X second – distraction is inevitable. Even so, this model makes sense because brands piggyback off the success of social media sites and vice versa. Consumers choose to include social media in their daily lives and are less likely to see content from brands as intrusive. It’ll be interesting to see, as social media involves, whether companies take this advice and build more of their own fully functioning social media sites.
- From Print to Phone to Web. And a Sale? Consumers and marketers have been bored of print for a while now. One of the latest trends in print is to add a level of interactivity to this “flat medium” with mobile barcodes. With the increasing popularity of smartphones, more and more consumers have access to the Internet at their fingertips no matter where they go. Consumers are impatient; if they happen to read an interesting ad, they don’t want to wait until they go back to their laptops to visit the company website. Typing in a URL? Too much hassle. Mobile barcodes allow users to scan a barcode or image with their mobile device and send an email or MMS to the company to receive instant content. It sounds good but while barcodes have been common parts of everyday life in places like Japan for years, the U.S. is always substantially behind in terms of technology. Many users don’t recognize or understand these barcodes and they certainly don’t want to download special software to read the code. However, many vendors such as JAGTAG and SnapTag are shifting away from this model, requiring nothing but a camera phone to operate. Though mobile barcodes are mostly present in consumer magazines, B2B publications are also jumping on the bandwagon. Since marketers seem to have social media more or less figured out, mobile barcodes should be the next adventure in digital marketing.
