Category Archives: Online Marketing

Is your organization ready for social media?

April 9, 2009 – 9:29 pm

If you work in marketing or communications, you probably have little doubt that your organization should start utilizing social media, but are you ready?From my experience, C-level executives often worry about what could go wrong. They worry people will say bad things and even worse that no one will do anything about it. The reality is that if you have company, people are already out there talking you. And if you don’t know about what they are saying, chances are you are already doing nothing about it.I put together a series of questions that might help you decide whether your department or organization is ready to join the conversation on social media.

  • Do you have a marketing or communications department?
  • Does your marketing or communications department produce news articles, press releases, videos, photos and/or events?
  • Do you know who your target audience?
  • Is your target audience on social media platforms?
  • Do you have key messages?
  • Can your social media administrator answer common questions posed on social media?
  • Do you have the ability to call on experts within your business to help with complex questions and situations?
  • Does someone in your department have experience utilizing social media platforms?
  • Have you contacted a lawyer or your legal department to see if there are any subject areas or statements you might want to avoid?

If you answered yes to all these questions, chances are you organization is ready. If not, your problems may be bigger than deciding if your organization is ready for social media.

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Why are Marketers so obsessed with Twitter?

March 31, 2009 – 9:48 pm

[digg=http://digg.com/business_finance/Why_are_marketers_so_obsessed_with_Twitter]“Twitter asks ‘What are you doing?’ You can tell Twitter what you are doing on twitter.com or you can text from your cell phone.” says one person who doesn’t understand twitter trying to explain it another person who knows less about it. This conversation is usually followed by a “Hills” like awkward silence and a few shrugs of the shoulders.I’ll be the first to admit I was absolutely lost the first couple of days I started using Twitter. I didn’t follow anyone I cared about, none of my friends were on it and I didn’t understand what to say or what to doLooking back, as much as I hate to admit it, it wasn’t until a weird owl named “Mr. Tweet” gave me a few suggestions of who I should follow before I began to find some interesting people on Twitter. From there I was able to branch out, finding a few more people who were conversing with the people I was newly following.Before I knew it I had a nice little network of people to follow and talk to. Most of them weren’t too weird. For the most part they were interested in some of the same things I was: Minnesota, healthcare marketing, the internet, celebrities and sports.So why are marketers so obsessed with Twitter? Because they care what you are doing and thinking, especially as it relates to products and services they have to offer.A quick search and you can find that there are people actually interested in everything from Anoop Dogg on American Idol to polar ice caps. Marketers find this invaluable because they can have real conversations with people thinking about products and services they have to offer.Take for example this scenario layed out by Peter Hershberg in Advertising Age:

“A young woman in Chapel Hill, N.C., wakes up sweating. Her air conditioner has died. She knows she wants a new one, but she wants one that will be energy-efficient, easy to install on her own, reliable and not too expensive.She hops online and types, “I need a new A/C today; I have $250 to spend — help!” into Twitter, which in turn feeds automatically into her Facebook status. She immediately begins to receive replies in both channels from friends with advice on retail outlets, air-conditioner brands and how to stay cool with no A/C. She also sees an @ reply on Twitter from a national big-box retailer letting her know its Chapel Hill location has new air conditioners in stock, as well as a link to the section of its website that shows air conditioners for under $250.”

This is a great example of how social media can be used be marketers. Consumers don’t even need to walk into a store to be helped. All they have to do is say what they are thinking about something and someone should be there to help them. Zappos.com has over 430 employees actively mining Twitter and it is part of their customer services. Do you?Follow me at twitter.com/allanwoodstrom.

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Social Media Marketers should take note of NDSU and March Madness

March 18, 2009 – 8:21 pm

North Dakota State president, Joseph A. Chapman wanted his university to become a major research university. As an article this week in the New York Times points out, Chapman saw athletics as a way to broaden NDSU’s exposure on a national level and boy was he right. Did I mention the university located in Fargo, ND had an article about it in the New York Times?Moving on, Chapman might have never imagined wins in football and basketball over teams from major conferences. He may have also never dreamt that the basketball team would make the NCAA tournament in its first year eligible. But that’s exactly what has happened and the university in all of its departments will become better because of it.Chapman told the New York Times that since the university moved to division one athletics, “freshman enrollment was up 23 percent, research expenditures had more than doubled, and that the number of Ph.D.’s awarded this year would top 100, a five-fold increase from 10 years ago.”Social Media ApplicationThis same theory can be applied to social media. If you want to help a company grow though social media, chances are you’ll have to focus content and social utilities on a subject that appeals to a broader audience, not necessarily where the core competencies of the business lie. Much like NDSU used sports to generate awareness and support for other areas of the University.Take for example one of the largest shoe companies in the world. If all Nike ever talked about was new technologies in shoe making, only some serious runners and engineers might care. On the contrary, they have broadened their reach and audience on social networks by focusing content and online tools on things that the general running public cares about.NikePlus.com, a running social network, built by Nike allows runners to log their miles run, share their stories, look up local races, get running tips and connect with other runners. Best of all, Nike has made it very simple for runners. As an article in BusinessWeek points out, all runners have to do is plug in the mini ipod that hides in their shoe and everything they did is immediately tracked and uploaded to the Nike website.The article also points out that since the launch of Nikeplus.com, Nike has increased its running shoe market share from 48% in 2006 to 61% today. To reiterate the point of this article, if companies want to bypass advertising with dying newspapers and radio stations and dive into social media marketing, they have to research what their audience is interested in and deliver. The rest of the business goals will work itself out with added exposure.

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