This is the evolution of marketing...from mass communication towards conversational engagement
Marketing is fundamentally changing... People are demanding to participate in, control and even to create their own entertainment. Everything is getting more social and interactive. We can help navigate the path forward...
7 Ways to Community
A guide to the most successful strategies for connecting with passionate groups of digital evangalists.
Developing Applications
How do you navigate the opportunities to innovate with digital media: web apps, social networks, widgets and mobile.
Interactive Marketing
Actionable insight into the most effective opportunities in digital media. PR/widgets/content/ applications and even e-mail.
Get your guide to
Success in Interactive
Marketing
click here
SEO Report
Contact us for a FREE detailed report, includes: Link popularity, search engine saturation, effective search terms, keyword suggestions, links analysis, rankings and site analysis.
Conversations
How do you engage in a conversation with your customers? Discover if your brand is Loved, Admired or just Tolerated and what can be done about it.
Strategy & Positioning
Insights into effective integrated marketing: strategies for combining branding with PR, direct marketing and digital media .
New thinking about how to develop interactive conversational marketing for your organization
There is a lot of talk about Social Media changing the world. The current model for advertising and marketing is certainly quite broken, and technology tends to fix these things. But when do you start making changes? How long before the smart money moves towards the new models? We have developed an approach that is gradual, modular and which intelligently phases in with stages of adoption that are relevent to your business and markets.
Download the e-book to get the full story, or better yet send us an e-mail to start a conversation. There is the very real possibility that we could help you with a new perspective.
Managing Conversational Relationships
Developing conversational relationships with customers is somewhat pointless unless there are systems in place to effectively interact with those customers. We have an approach that directs traffic towards zones in your website and within your organization. This methodology starts with the idea that the most important information is not demographic or transactional data, but that which defines the state of the relationship. The objective is to move customers up towards the top of the chart on the left.
So what's your Big Idea?
One of the most important elements of effectively driving conversations is to have a theme - a position, a reason.
The conversations and opinions can sweep broadly, but in the end, everything people are talking about should circle the Big Idea. Everything (meaning your brand) must have real integrity with this central theme. The nature of this will determine your success. A weak, diluted idea will net weak results. An idea that has little integrity, may undermine your own brand.
This needs to be a big, big idea. Your organizing principal. The thing that makes you better or different.
The big idea needs to be sustainably differentiated and needs a huge element of
human emotion attached to it.
It’s what everyone else ISN’T. It’s what the competition NEVER
DOES, its the opposite of what everyone ALWAYS DOES. Your Big idea is central. If you don’t have it,
practically everything is a waste of time....
- Communication Messaging within communities and networks has driven virality for companies like Skype, Facebook, MySpace, and even Fax machines. Since you can’t communicate with others who have the tool until you get it, communication works to drive virality where the medium requires some sort of membership.
- Invitations Make it easy for users to invite all their friends. Give the membership reasons to send messages to friends for something other than invitations to join. Possibly even make it hard for them not to. Email, IM, VM and community apps.
- Widgets Reid Hoffman (founder of Linked-In) refers to this as “invading a community”. Rockyou, Slide, Photobucket and a host of others have done a great job here. Increased penetration in an existing community makes it more likely that a new user will see one of your widgets and want to get something similar. Increasing returns to scale means that the big get bigger faster. The challenge here is in effectively seeding distribution of widgets amongst opinion leaders and early adopters etc.
- Platforms Consider Ebay: perhaps the best example of a strong franchise where use of a platform drives further adoption in a virtuous cycle. Get your users to do something that involves others in a way that engages them to use the platform. Then get them involved in building the community.
- User Generated Content When you give people an opportunity to contribute content, the result can be high levels of traffic. This sort of traffic uniquely drives results in organic search. YouTube, Wikipedia and Yelp are probably the best examples of this.
- Emotional Connections Countless Facebook and OpenSocial applications have taken advantage of surveys, comparisons and other fun games designed to drive virality. Big growth can be realized from getting users to input some data and gave them information about themselves (whether it be an IQ test, which sort of Superhero you are, or contact info on old friends).
- Paid There have been several businesses that successfully grew by paying both new and inviting users. The economics can make this more difficult for media models than commerce models. However, it can drive a lot of new adoption and did for AllAdvantage and Paypal.
