There was an interesting article last month in that staid publication “The Economist” about online social networks changing the way people communicate http://economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15351002. Maybe working in Silicon Valley has me in the proverbial “bubble” but it took them this long to figure it out / write about it? Any company that doesn’t “get” social networking from a business as well as societal perspective is missing out on one of the most inexpensive as well as important marketing mediums there is.
By combining website marketing, SEO, product focused blogs, corporate tweets (Twitter), face book followers (see Jet Blue http://facebook.com/JetBlue), LinkedIn, delicious etc., companies are communicating with their clients in a way that wasn’t conceivable a decade ago. They can push out content as well as receive feedback faster than ever before.
Savvy marketers are pulling out all the stops to ensure that their corporate brand is properly marketed in all the different social mediums and ensuring they are maximizing their online presence as well as gaining very useful market research. They’re also aware that bad press in this new world is a challenge and some of the more switehed on companies actually search for bad press to jump on customer problems before they go viral. For example, if a Comcast cable subscriber “tweets” or “yelps” that “Comcast Sucks” with an addressable issue their searching for it and have a customer service representative contacting them with the hope that their next tweet / yelp talks about them solving the problem / how responsive great they are.
The bottom line is that marketing is evolving at hyper speed and the companies that are switched on and embrace social networking will benefit to their bottom lines. I’m going to go out on a limb and bet they will be writing about this time period in the business schools and history books in the not too distant future as a transformational era that completely changed traditional marketing as we knew it, just five short years ago.
David Brown's Blog 