More Indian companies are joining the social media bandwagon and engaging the consumer like never before. Kingfisher for one, has launched "Be the next official Kingfisher Ad Director". All you have to do is create your Good Times Commercial, upload it to any video sharing site and share the link on the Kingfisher site.

This is a fantastic attempt at consumer engagement & content co-creation through crowd sourcing (2 birds or rather kingfishers with one stone). The winning ad will be the official ad of Kingfisher and will be aired on TV with due credits to the creator, but no great moolah to attract the really creative guys. The hype they manage to create around this concept will be a key determinant for success.

Do you think that this can succeed without the moolah? Would you enter without a monetary gain at the end of it?

Dell Idea Storm was created to interact with passionate consumers and one look at the number of people on these sites will tell you how involved consumers can get.

The objective is to get worthy ideas from users and worthy ideas surface because other consumers promote or demote the ideas, very similar to a digg methodology. Post - Promote - Discuss. The step added to this is "See" - See the company respond to worthy ideas & what they are doing to implement them.

The herd effect necessary to promote the ideas might result in no trend setting futuristic idea actually making it to the top. Consumers are after all never great crystal ball gazers but you do get to hear their views on simple things like Dell's excessive use of plastic. What might have been thought of as a necessary packaging element might come under the scanner thanks to this idea.

Dumb mistakes of someone in the organization also surface like the printing of the logo upside down.

An open conversation with your consumers can scare the wits of most companies, and it can expose many of your silly practices as is evident from these posts, but aren't companies much better off with consumers revealing their frustrations with the product.

The problem with this approach is that the marketing team alone cannot engage the consumer in conversation. They have to get the other departments within the organization ready to change according to popular consumer appeal. (actually this is market research for free)

For eg: the movement towards Open Office got a whopping 138479 votes. Most companies would give anything to have so many engaged consumers and what does Dell do - Nothing!! A very highly debated topic and difficult to give one company stance, but you have to take one when so many people are waiting to hear it.

These are progressive steps taken by Dell to join the conversation and in fact control it at some level by bringing it under their wing. They still need to sustain this initiative by adding it to the DNA of the company. This can no longer be just a good initiative, it has to be a way of business.

P.S - If you think the engaged consumer only exists in the case of high involvement goods like electronics, Starbucks created My Starbucks Idea with a similar objective. Check out what happens when you get some coffee fanatics together in one place.

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Its the Conversation economy dude!!
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The reason everything is wrong with traditional marketing is that it talks down to the consumer. It tells you what is right for you and not necessarily engages you and lets you decide for yourself.

Why should I waste my time trying to explain it, when this video does all that and more

 

 

There is a reason why this blog is called Marketing Amnesia. The reason is, if I talked to my wife like I chose to in a traditional advertisement, she would stand up, punch me in the face, kick me in the b%$#s and walk away.

Now that could be a wee bit painful...

Instead of being forced to forget traditional marketing, why not choose to do so.

P.S - Marketing Sucks when its not done right. If you would like to stay updated with the best techniques, do subscribe

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Its the Conversation economy dude!!,
Consumers are talking !! Are brands listening?,
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The eternal debate between Finance and Marketing teams in every organization is the calculation of a return on investment for the marketing spend.

This has led to many marketers focusing on Conversion - wherein every ad is measured in terms of either a lead generated or sales. The concept is that, if you have got the consumer to buy now, then the ad must be truly engaging.

The problem with this approach is that marketers try to give the consumer a hook to purchase now and that hook is very often a promotion / freebie.

Conversion as the basis of marketing spend justification is a very narrow approach. You are targeting the one consumer who has seen your advertising and no one else and he buys your brand partly because it has an offer attached.

Nothing earth shattering about the fact that great brands are built when people talk positively.

A new measurement has to be used to track marketing spends. Social Media has allowed conversation to spread rapidly on the internet and at the same time allow companies to track it. Conversation tracking could well be the measure we are looking for.

Once tracked, Should you control it is another question and another post.

Conversation tracking does seem like the way forward to measure marketing spend. How do you attach a value to the conversation generated is the question?

P.S Just wondering if Conversation Economy is an original term that I can claim as my own. Have you read about this anywhere else?

Update: I am not a genius after all :)

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Concept of Conversion vs Conversation derived from The 3 philosophies of Word of Mouth Marketing

Every now and then I like to dish out some basic stuff. Today is one of those "Now and Then" moments

While discussing Marketing 2.0 with a fellow brand manager, I was dishing out some of the regular stuff on Web 2.0, the conversation age, how to get consumers to talk and more importantly why you should encourage conversation with the consumer.

A simple question asked goes like this - Till a few years ago, the marketing team of any organization controlled any mass communication on the product, why will the brand manager encourage consumers to talk when he is unsure of what they will say.

How can control be established over the brand communication. How can one message be communicated to all.

It is not as easy as it was in a non interactive media world. TV, Radio and Press lent themselves to consistent messaging. The internet is more complex, banner advertising can have a single message but how can conversation which is supposed to be breed further conversation also be controlled?

Initial thoughts suggest that marketers have no choice but to track conversations using a number of tools. The most obvious tool is google alerts followed by technorati for tracking blog conversation. Another useful tool for tracking conversations especially on twitter is Summize. Tracking is insufficient, you need to participate too.


What would you suggest? How do you track conversation on the net and what would you do to control it? Would you control it at all?

Update: Get Satisfaction allows you to express your love and hate for a company and even encourages companies to get involved with their consumers. A tool which every company should use.

Well I seem to be in the mood to pit competing thought processes against one another. The last post on Technology vs Story was on startups who build technology thats superior, instead of focusing on positioning their brand such that it becomes easy for a consumer to tell a story about them.

This one is on social media and how to build a brand which uses them. The internet has always been about interactivity and relevance. An ad doesn't get your attention because they slapped it bang in the middle of an interesting article or while you were watching a really funny video.

Correction, attention is certainly got, in fact the company has probably just incurred your wrath!!

Facebook, Myspace and the likes know that companies love the easy way out. So they sell highly targeted ad space to companies. Undoubtedly companies see value since they have never been able to target their communication as precisely as this with traditional media .

But, we are just extrapolating traditional advertising meant for non interactive medium in a medium which is all about interactivity and engagement.

This calls for new thinking and different content  that engages you, provides value, makes you laugh or is just cool, and in turn begs to be forwarded using social media. The medium could be social networks or social bookmarks.

Content could be anything from articles, one liners, jokes, digs at competition, pictures, audio, video, applications or games.

Do you as a company want to buy eyeballs or earn them. One costs you money, the other makes you think creatively on how you would like to engage the consumer.

Surely brand engagement is what everyone dreams about. If you have done something on Social Media to benefit your company, startup or brand, do let us know

Just happened to be listening to "Kryptonite" by "3 Doors Down" and who knew that I could borrow the song for a post.

Superman was created on Krypton and can only be destroyed by a substance from the same planet - kryptonite.

Though that just sounds ironical, the question to ponder on is - Do marketers and companies have a kryptonite of their own? The answer seems simple - loyal consumers create a great company.

On the other hand, dissatisfied consumers now possess the power to bring these large organizations down. Blogs, review sites and the all too obvious networking phenomenon enable dissatisfied consumers to reach thousands of eager listeners.

Apple worked hard at creating an iconic status through the years. They launch innovative products with ease and then they screw it up.

Consumers love the company for the product, but they slip in something underhanded like a tie up with AT&T or a price drop in less than 2 months of the iphone launch. In fact following widespread crticism, Apple was forced to offer $100 credit for a purchase at an Apple store.

This results in the loyal fan, early adopter and advocate suddenly thinking twice before recommending the product. In fact it is suddenly cooler to say "I hate Apple" compared to "I love Apple"

That sounds very dangerous to me. Apple - The larger you become, the harder will be the backlash. Beware of your Kryptonite.

Traditional Marketing represented as Marketing 1.0 was about hitting the consumer with 360 degree communication, so that the consumer finally succumbs to buying your brand.

Marketing 2.0 is about engaging the consumer in a conversation, hence building trust and authenticity in a low trust world. The conversation could be a query on a brand, honest feedback on a product or co creation of communication content. The opportunities are immense, but the effort required is enormous.

* Image derived and adapted from - Creating Digital Dialogs - A Social media Overview