Saturday, October 25, 2008

Social media and marketing

Paul Chaney shared his keynote "Conversations Create Clients: Using conversation marketing to turn strangers into friends and friends into customers" from the Real Estate Barcamp Houston conference.

Though the presentation is 82 slides long, it is worth the time to glance through it. 

Here are notables from the presentation:

Five consumer trends:

1. There is consumer skepticism and resistance to advertising.

67% of consumer good sales are based on word of mouth

2. Media fragmentation is out of control.

Daily advertising messages: 274 to 3000.

3. Increasingly, the consumer is in control.

4. The pressure is on to improve targeting--to achieve relevance and minimize waste.

5. Companies are held to new levels of accountability.

Other points:

Conversational media is about people, not technology.

"Markets are conversations" and "participation is marketing" The Cluetrain Manifesto.

No longer target audiences; we participate in communities.

"Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information. And that's good." Dave Winer

Conversation marketing strategy is to: listen, respond, engage. (See slide 48).

My conclusion: Use the online tools to

  • Listen to customers, potential customers, and trends.
  • Respond to the customers (listening and not responding is like you are not listening).
  • Engage in the conversations.

1 comment:

Floyd Davenport said...

Anne,

Thanks for the post. I think engagement strategies are becoming a critical issue for online presence development.