Archive for March, 2009

Marketers are all jumping into Social Marketing. Yes of course there are lots of great benefits associated with it: customer advocacy, brand recognition, social acceptance and we can’t forget the relative low cost. What some marketers don’t consider upfront, is that there can be a potential downside.

While no company wants bad press, smaller companies can often be seriously hurt if they don’t deal with bad buzz appropriately. Blogs have gone a long way to help give these mid-size companies a leg up, but a brand must remember to always stay active in their brand image. By opening up lines of communication between you and your customers, you may start to hear things you wish were not so public. It’s a critical part of your brand’s image to actively engage these customers to find out how they feel, keep interactions positive, and resolve any issues.

So what do you do if your brand’s buzz goes bust? A company’s response to negative buzz can have a bigger impact on the brand image then the initial bad review. Here are some simple things to keep in mind:

Don’t think about it too long.
Address negative buzz quickly and efficiently. Accept responsibility for mistakes and take action to correct them right away. This helps to slow down or stop the flow of negative buzz, and can turn it into a positive conversation about your brand’s integrity.

Stay active on public message boards.
Message boards are the most common venue that people use to complain about companies or brands they are unhappy with. Other members of the group then join in until the entire forum has a hostile view of the brand. Stay active on message boards related to your industry so you can help to offer resolutions quickly.

Say what you’ll deliver, deliver what you say.
Pete Blackshaw, a founding member of www.WOMMA.com said that “negative word of mouth is often created when a product’s advertising is not in sync with the consumer’s experience”. Simply put, stay true to your own marketing.

Being prepared is half the battle.
You can get in front of a problem by paying attention to customer feedback and responding quickly. If you’re repeatedly hearing the same issues, then by quickly dealing with the root cause and rectifying the problem will become the new conversation.

Fight buzz with buzz.
Use the same tools to turn negative comments back into a positive buzz. In addition to responding on blogs and monitoring message boards and forums, marketers can also look to websites such as Getsatisfaction to keep up with what the public is saying about them. Marketers can also listen in on Twitter conversations related to their brands so they can react quickly.

The basic elements of every effective social marketing campaign is the same: engage your customers and respond to their needs to help improve brand loyalty and customer satisfaction.

Rena Bernstein is Creative Director at Elektrik Ink, LLC, a full-service advertising and strategic design agency that specializes in the convergence of traditional advertising and digital marketing. Read more about Advertising, Social Marketing and Brand Identity at www.elektrik.com or call 212-675-1568.

Tweet This Post

Since electronic media is such a cost effective method to keep your brand message “pulling” customers in, do we still to need to “push” with traditional advertising?

These days, when consumers are looking for specific information, they often go online. That’s when pulling your audience in to your site through SEO, PPC, and Social Marketing shine. It’s a perfect opportunity to find a self-described interested audience that’s ready and willing to listen with an open mind to a message tailored just for them.

While customers are mentally prepared to absorb the details of your offerings, they may also be prepared to compare them mercilessly to your competition or be distracted by checking email, downloading other some other multi-tasking effort. Basically, many online consumers go on “information-gathering expeditions”. For that reason online information must always be easily accessible, quick and to the point.

So is there still a need for traditional advertising? Much of the public still has a love for magazines. First, there’s the portability and leisurely aspect traditionally associated with periodicals. Readers expect longer, more detailed articles then they usually find online so they can delve deeply into a subject. Folks read magazines because they’re interested in the subject and they have time to relax a bit. It gives them a chance to discover things they weren’t specifically looking for. Television, Radio and Out-of-Home marketing have a similar logic. Consumers exposed to traditional push advertising have a very different mindset than consumers online where research is usually the goal. Reading a magazine or watching TV is less about searching for specific information, brands or products and more about discovery.

Since the mental state of a viewer is different from online to print, it’s necessary to maintain a presence in both mediums. Whether you call it “Convergence Marketing” or “Integrated Marketing”, building a joint online and offline marketing campaign is not just a matter of adapting the message to the medium. It also requires adapting the message to the mindset. And while the specifics of the content change, the basic strategy, positioning and overall image should remain consistent to compliment and support one another. A well executed integrated push-pull marketing campaign is ultimately more effective than the sum of it’s parts.

Tweet This Post

Many companies thought they were proactive by moving their advertising budgets away from traditional marketing to online. While we all know that there are many advantages to online marketing, it has several short falls as well.

In the last few years, while technology and the online commercial environment have been moving at hyper speed, there has been a shift in the way businesses interact with their market. Not only have the number of marketing channels expanded at a record pace, but the ways that companies use these channels to interact with their customers has changed as well.

Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Youtube and blogs are just some of the places companies go to interact with their audience. The cost is low and the reach is great, but the content and recall are both highly limited and unpredictable.

While the internet allows for a more customized, interactive, targeted and measurable marketing approach, it does not offer the concise brand building experience consumers have stated they relate to. The convenience of having a well thought out message delivered in 30 seconds, complete with a tag line to sum it all up, does not exist in the online world. The nature of internet usage requires far more of the users’ time and patience to understand and absorb the marketer’s message.

Most consumers live in both the online and offline worlds, switching back and forth for their own convenience. Having a separate and well-coordinated presence in each marketing environment will reinforce the message, address the interests of the consumer at that moment, and still provide lots of metrics to measure.

Tweet This Post