DreamGrow Social Media

Social Media Weekend: Baby Boomers, Automotive, Social CRM, The Economist

Free Social Media Marketing Kit. Expert guidance on setting social media strategy and how-to articles on social media tools and tactics in the Social Media Marketing Kit. New marketing articles and social media content published daily.

Baby Boomers and Seniors Are Flocking to Facebook [STATS]. A new eMarketer report shows that the number of Baby Boomers embracing social media, especially Facebook, jumped drastically between 2008 and 2009.

Social CRM: The New Frontier of Marketing, Sales and Service (PDF). The emergence and increasing usage of social media and other Web 2.0 tools has dramatically altered the ways in which companies interact with their customers. For instance, buying advice, product information and technical help is increasingly being disseminated from consumers to other consumers, in some cases without involvement or oversight by the provider.

The Economist: A special report on social networking (PDF). Online social networks are changing the way people communicate, work and play, and mostly for the better.

Study: Consumers Are Not Annoyed by Ads on Facebook. Good news for Facebook: It turns out users find ads on social networks no more annoying than any other ads on the web.

Using Facebook fans to improve automotive marketing. Facebook Fan Pages have become the most recent in a long line of social media “must-haves” for automotive marketers –- but what do they really tell you? And are they even helpful?

All together now. Diageo, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft and Procter & Gamble are among 10 companies taking part in an ambitious project that invites brands to work together on developing new brand and product ideas and new avenues for research through in-depth analysis of existing data.

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Image credit Cris Watk

Customer interaction becomes social

In our post about social media trends for 2010 we suggested that more and more customer interaction will take place on social networks. Here’s why.

You are endlessly transferred from a robot to automatic response to answering machine. Push 1 for billing, push 2 for tech support… This may ruin your day even if you started out quite OK.

Personal touch makes business sense. If you feel that the person that you are communicating with is someone live, who understands your needs, then you are much more forgiving and open to compromise. Personal touch can fix a potentially explosive situation.

This means that bringing the support staff out from behind the anonymous company logo will give you more satisfied customers and sh*t will hit the fan a lot less often. This does not mean that you have to give in every time there’s a complaint. By simply listening and showing a human face will get you a result that answering machine never could.

When creating our clients’ strategies we usually interview their customers. This has given us invaluable insight how to improve the communication of fix a web site. But one of the most important things I have learned from those sessions is how grateful people are when they see that you are there just for them and you really try to understand them.

Social media will help to scale that personal touch. When a brand is answering somebody else’s problem in a human and authentic way then this act will improve my opinion of that brand. Every touchpoint and channel should be personal and open, increasing the brand value. Social media is the tool that helps you do that.

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Image credit Sanja Gjenero

22 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2010

I have collected some of the ideas that seem to be growing fast and make real business sense. Here we go in no particular order:

Some people have problems with opening the original Open Office presentation format when downloading from Slideshare. Here is the PowerPoint version of the presentation.

Great! Got featured on Slideshare:

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We thank you for this terrific presentation, that has been chosen from amongst the thousands that are uploaded to SlideShare everday. – the SlideShare team

Slideshare went down shortly after. Coincidence? Hmmm… )

And here’s the list:

1. The fact that audience has the control starts to sink in. (Control is an illusion)
2. Social media will get real budgets. (Most of these budgets will be inhouse)
3. Social media will be integrated to overall marketing activities.
4. Social media ROI will become important. Measure how much do we get out of social media.
5. Brands start to use listening platforms to monitor the conversations.
6. Social media will reach behind corporate firewalls. (Read more)
7. Customer service and interaction with businesses becomes social. (Personaly touch pays)
8. Measuring online activities and their effect on offline sales will become increasingly important.
9. Media will fragment even more and smaller communities can be hyper-targeted.
10. Social networks chatter will be incorporated into CRM systems.
11. More sales will originate from social media contacts (B2B and B2C).
12. Marketing will hit mobiles big time.
13. All search will be real-time. Web, blogs, social networks.
14. Real-time will be the right time. Delays will cost customers.
15. People will use more social networks’ messaging instead of regular email and IM. (Webmail providers should be worried.)
16. First large scale successful augmented reality applications.
17. Campaigns will get more dynamic, spanning from offline to actionable social channels.
18. Social networks will become more commercial.
19. Ads will be more interactive and connected to social networks.
20. The home page for internet users will be social network’s profile page.
21. Facebook will grow to 700 million? (Let’s look at some numbers).
22. Shopping will be integrated into social networking sites.

B2B Business Case for Social Media

Almost all business buyers use social media. On the other hand the same people are not convinced that they should use social media for B2B communication. The problem is in the lack of knowledge and experience. Christina Kerley has put together a presentation that helps to fill in some blanks and pave the road for the social media adoption in B2B. The 10 key benefits from the presentation are:

1. Social media extends branding
2. You can expand your reach
3. Tap into relevant communities
4. Influence the influencers and get positive word-of-mouth
5. Boost your thought leadership position
6. Cut marketing costs
7. Get faster sales by sharing more information and having two way communication with the buyer
8. Stand out! Be the first!
9. Decrease complexity of decisions by helping and guiding
10. Strengthen CRM efforts