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11
Oct
Money vs Time
Jeannie Chan

This week I learned that the more money you have, the less time you have to spend on any particular tasks. You could hire someone to do it for you.

However, if you don’t have the money, you’d have to spend more time.

This is the equation that any marketer must understand. You don’t need to have a lot of money to have a successful campaign. However, the smaller your budget, the harder each dollar must work, the more creative you’d have to be, the more work you’d have to do yourself. The larger the budget, the more crazy stuffs you could try, the more you could have someone else do the work for you.

However, a small budget shouldn’t limit the success of your marketing campaign.

What’s sad is that this formula, that’s so obvious with small businesses, is sometimes forgotten by big companies.

This is the new economy. This is the new reality. This is a new year. This is the new budget. Everyone of us needs to learn to do more with less.

Photo Credit: funny money, originally uploaded by Material Boy.

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29
Sep
Twitter is a Public Plaza
Jeannie Chan

Why hasn’t more companies adopted social media? Because social media is not social at all.

According to a recent study, only 20% of tweets are meant to share information. 80% of tweets are private thoughts that just happened to be shared with the world. However, that’s still a private transaction. That social media network is a small group of friends, and that tweet is the electronic version of a private conversation.

Consider my version of the real-life equivalent: An email conversation is completely private. That’s like a group of people in a closed door room having a conversation. A tweet, for these 80% of people, is a conversation that happens in a public place. Since it’s a public place, sometimes people overhear and chime in. “Sorry, I hear you’re talking about that new restaurant. I was thinking about going, you say it sucks?”

So, yes, private conversations can be extended to strangers. However, these are still strangers. At the end of the conversation, each party goes back to their separate ways.

Now, if this stranger happens to be Oprah, you may all of a sudden call Oprah a “friend”. “Oh yeah, Oprah and I the other day was talking about restaurants. She suggested that I should go try the one on ABC Street.” Now, of course, this doesn’t have to be Oprah. This could be a local celebrity, or a celebrity within a specific circle. Or, just someone, someplace, something that’s well known and well regarded within a specific audience.

Or, if you happen to run into this particular stranger everywhere, you may begin to be interested in getting to know this stranger. Obviously, you have like interests. (For example, I have made it a point to get to know someone after seeing that particular person at various art shows around town.)

My hypothesis is that social media works the same way.

If you are strangers, you will remain strangers. There are a few ways to overcome this. One of which is to form an offline relationship. Be the Oprah that they want to get to know better. The other way is to engage your audience in their natural habitat and keep “running into them”. That’s why musicians were successful with myspace. Recruiters are successful with LinkedIn.

This may also explain why Twitter is particularly challenging for marketers. There are no specific purposes for Twitter. Twitter is a public plaza. Many different conversations happening, but it’s virtually impossible for a marketer to form an engaging relationship with any one of them. It’s very similar to a marketer holding a product demonstration in a public plaza. People may just ignore them, or they stop, watch, and move on because they’re there to meet someone. They don’t have time for marketers.

That doesn’t mean that Twitter doesn’t have value to marketers. What’s a better way to disseminate news about a crisis than to use a speaker over a public plaza? No one putting up a flyer would ignore the public plaza, because at the end of the day, it’s a numbers game and there are a lot of eyeballs in a public plaza. Twitter works the same way.

In conclusion, social media has its value, but as always, it’s only a part of your marketing mix. Perhaps even only a small part.

Link: STUDY: 80% of Twitter Users Are All About Me

Photo credit: New York Public Library Outdoor Plaza, originally uploaded by celikins.

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14
Sep
Controlling Social Media
Jeannie Chan

I was shopping the other day and noticed a product on-shelf that had the coolest packaging. Then, I read Brandweek, and noticed that an article in there was featuring this packaging, and the strategy behind it. I was just about to tweet that article… but I stopped myself.

As I was finishing up the article, I realized that the article went on and mentioned several products that my company was in direct competition with. This was where I stopped with tweeting process. I found myself asking the question: if I tweeted this, would I be somehow endorsing my competitor?

I was not asking this question because I would think that my company would somehow get involved. I was asking this question because I am loyal to the entity that pays my paycheck. Why would I want to promote my competitor, even if it’s only in the most indirect way… I wouldn’t want to do it offline or online.

Now, this made me reconsider who controls the information on the social networks?

First, let’s consider that much of the information on the social networks first get circulated by a few social media celebrities. These celebrities have large circle of influence on the various social networks. Their friends / fans / followers on these social networks redistributes the information. So, on and so forth, and the information spreads.

Many of these social media celebrities are self-employed consultants. However, many of them also have ties with big corporations. They could have projects with them. They could be employed by them during the day. They could be formerly employed by them. They could just have lots of friends in these big corporations. They could just love the products these corporations make. So, are the information they provide completely neutral and without bias?

I think we know that these individuals have enough influences in their own rights that they are quite free to speak their mind. However, to say that their real-life connections with these corporations have no bearing on their message seem just naive. Their messages are always influenced by their real-life experiences with the companies.

Social networks online are always ever-so-intricately intertwined with real-life experiences offline.

What does this mean?

I’ve heard too many comments that go along the lines of “how should my company leverage social networks?”

For many companies, the right question to ask should be “how should my company leverage my real-life networks online?”

Companies have long talked about their fear of participating on social networks, because they’d lose control. The truth is the only thing they ever controlled was how people would interacted with their brands. If they have 100% control of this, they have control of social media.

If you know that every interactions people have with your brand is positive, messages about your brand on social media would only be positive. Nothing has actually changed.

Photo credit: most talked about brands – 2008, originally uploaded by Will Lion.

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