Social Media Marketing is catching on as a hot word in the marketing realm.'N' number of books have come up on them, some of which can be found in our BIMTECH library while articles & case studies have been generous on them too. Marketeers were quick to pick up the signs & we had jargons after jargons being rolled out during press releases & seminars (Oops! Summits) such as 'tribal marketing', SNPs, 'Guerrilla Marketing' to name a few. But the current scenario has really got me worrying about its future in long term perspective. What I see is a clear case of indiscriminate usage & over-usage at that which is leading people to take social media marketing for granted. So lets take a look at the Dos & the Don'ts here.
Social Media marketing involves potential customers & consumers of a product automatically falling in sync with the marketing of a product where in if and when a product makes an entry, ardent surfers start buzzing about the product on networking sites as Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Orkut, Youtube, etc. It may be something in the offing as "hey dude, heard about the software being developed at the Googleplex" or it can be about a new star on the block as the latest drink or automobile. However, what is to be kept in mind is that these discussion should be carried forth by genuine users or potential users rather than company executives. Firms now-a-days have reportedly created a battalion of tech savvy youngsters who are payed for religiously pushing their products online. Well, lets not talk about ethics here as in the shrewdly materialistic world of business, it holds selective applicability. However, from the marketing perspective, such practices stand faulty as the power of Social Media Marketing lies in it's subtlety.
Your Tweets & posts & blogs should not be targeted at pushing the product & its features; instead engage the online crowd into a discussion via which the product would make a quiet entry. Then you allow it to be hijacked by the customer base where each suggests different uses & modifications for the product, while stimulating an association with the product. It's a mammoth task for the marketeer to let customers toy with it & comment on it & before people start relating with it, it might take quite a while. But at the end, that is the core orientation that social media marketing demands of you; to be for the customer & market it through the customer. BUT, the catch is, the moment a customer gets to know that he is being used & that there are too many evidences in your posts& blogs of selling the product by manipulating the customer psyche, he may grow tiered of it & feel like just another pawn in the hands of a marketeer & believe me, no wants to be that!
Check the above add of Smirnoff's Tea drink which has been genuinely made to entertain the audience while managing to advertise the product thus garnering 4 million views within a year. Today, a lot of movies before their release start spreading the buzz through social networks. Even Marvel Comics has resorted to micro blogging on Twitter while Philips pursues a blog to update their customers on the latest innovations on the block & get insights from them. Social Media marketing as I see brings you a notch closer to feeling the pulse of your customer & allowing them to mold your product to their liking & make it popular via viral marketing & WOM. There was an incident wherein Barbi officials had blocked networking activities which involved people morphing Barbies & giving them different looks, thus competing with each other & pulling out jokes. The company found it as an attempt to tarnish the Barbi image & distort her (though I do agree that some versions made by the public were distorted). At the end all I did say is that they lost a golden opportunity to cash in on Viral marketing, incidently, one initiated by the public themselves. As more people would have engaged in it, some would have come up with some genuine designs & looks for the doll & the portal would have proven to be mine house of customer survey & market research with no bulky fixed cost.
Social Marketing is a great tool in terms of a PR strategy. However, here is one media which would loose its charm if exploited to the fullest, cause after all in social media marketing as has often been said, its all about marketing without marketing.
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