Archive for February 2010
Google Enters Social Media Game …
Part of the Top 10 online marketing tools for small businesses includes an account with Google. The search giant includes access to many free and useful applications, and this week it was announced that Google has added another application to its lineup.
Google Buzz is the company’s latest entry into the social media sphere, and actually looks promising if nothing else. The sites saw 9 million posts in two days, and its features include mobile functions that help users add “geo-tagging’ to their actions.
What does this mean for business owners? It’s another site to meet with prospective customers, and I think in the long run this application might be the one to give Twitter a run for their money.
Google has already established its main revenue streams, and at this point as a company is simply adding new ones to become more profitable and users friendly. Twitter on the other hand has yet to pull a profit, and given Google’s history of letting other companies find solutions and then coming back with a bigger and better one, this might just be the killer.
The other thing to take from this is just how “wild west” the social media arena really is. The key ways of doing things are nowhere set in stone, and now is the time for risk takers and small business owners to experiment withe multiple online marketing strategies.
Every Product Launch Must Have …
I am currently working on a campaign for a client and we are in the midst of planning a campaign launch. Going over all of the items our team has considered for making the event a successful one led to me this post about what every new launch needs to be successful in web 2.0.
Now in the old days, a launch really needed just some media and advertising and the rest would usually take care of itself. Today however more people are wary of what they see in the media and look to colleagues and friends for advice. These days the truly marketing savvy company would include an online strategy to bolster the momentum of a product launch.
This does not mean though that the company buys advertising online, and in fact is quite the opposite. A company needs to create and distribute tools for their followers to help pass the word along and generate excitement about the new product. This can be done ahead of time to build excitement, both through online and traditional media, and needs to consider what the follower would be excited enough to tell their tribe about INSTEAD of what the company wants them to push.
Whether or not businesses realize, they are now no longer in complete control of their message. This has been the case before with traditional media, but the number of players and their effective role was limited enough so that a company could reasonably dictate what a message was in most instances. Now the paradigm has shifted, and the followers are the ones dictating the message. Because there are so many people online creating messages, companies are really at the whim of what the people are saying.
For example, a recent Facebook trend has been the “Can this Pickle get more fans than Nickleback?” page. Now I am sure that the parent company of the music group is none too pleased that this page is taking off the way it is, but what can they really do? The momentum has been building, and its very possible that the group will eventually have more friends than Nickleback. The thing that should also scare business owners is that the page itself was created on 2/3, so in 6 days they have registered over450K fans. Viral sh!t-talking is something every company needs to be aware of.
So what are tools that companies could utilize? The same online options, including the Dark Horse Communications Top 10 Tools, with relevant information is a good start, but the underlying key is that they be portable. Followers need to be able to quickly and easily move along your message across a variety of platforms, whether its Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc. Calls to action for the followers is also good, but even better when asking them to create their own recommendation content for your behalf.