3 steps to integrating ratings and reviews into social media marketing
(via MarketingProfs )
Check out these 3 examples:
Product or service sharing. Car-sharing services, like Zipcar and fashion rental companies like Bag, Borrow & Steal allow you to rent everything from ball gowns to designer bags without the commitment of ownership. Use it when you need it and give it back.
Redistribution. Craigslist, eBay and Freecycle are the big players in this space where the idea is to pass (or sell) something that you don’t want any longer to someone who does.
Collaborative lifestyles. People are renting or loaning out their own homes and cars to travelers who want to skip hotel and rental company costs.
What’s the implication for marketers?
How to stand out from the crowd, capture attention, and forge a relationship. A city bus driver in Brisbane promised — and delivered — a happy, safe trip by engaging his riders with a surprising announcement.
By 2016, 80 percent of marketing tech investments will come outside of IT, Gartner predicts. Here’s where those marketing dollars are going now.
* Marketing automation. Content management and social media monitoring, as well as the automation, aggregation, and analysis of social data. Also, established technologies such as sales-force automation and CRM. These increase the effectiveness of the marketing processes themselves.
* Social technology and mobile technology. Both technologies produce fundamentally different interactions with and among customers. How to take advantage of this? At one end is the monitoring new behaviors — what they comment on in social media and how they shop or look up information when not at a desk, for example. At the other is using these new conduits to customers to serve them actively, such as tapping into location data to provide localized recommendations — marketers use the terms “geotargeting” and “hyperlocal” to refer to these new types of possible services.
* Analytics for real-time business intelligence. Historically, companies have used business intelligence to assess the past, then roll out changes based on that assessment. But in a fast-moving world, that insight often comes too late. Also, it’s typically based on data collected for very specific purposes, so the insights that can be gleaned from it tend to be limited to those original purposes. But new, often cloud-based technologies — collectively called big data — are providing ways to analyze information very quickly (even in real time), from multiple sources. Companies can adjust their operations and marketing more quickly — and even more targeted to specific types of customers
Cloud services are creating a distinct sense of overlap and a blur of corporate responsibility as CMOs evaluate, acquire, and field extensive new IT capabilities for digital advertising, customer experience management, CRM, and other related functions across a growing set of touchpoints, which now include at a bare minimum traditional media, online media, social media, and mobile devices. A decade ago, much of the service delivery for these functions would be delegated under the CIO, who would support the marketing department and other groups in their IT endeavors as needed (although largely on IT’s schedule.)
TD Bank is innovating with Goggle+ pages to create social media videos and content that are hyper-local.
Says TD CMO Vinoo Vija: “Our ultimate goal is for more consumers to walk into our stores by giving them content that makes the store much more accessible.” Vija, who has not created local Facebook pages, expects search rankings to rise.
(via TD Bank Invests in Google Content | Digital - Advertising Age)
A major mobile initiative from IBM involves software, services and partnerships with other large vendors.
IBM. plans to deploy consultants to give companies mobile shopping strategies, write mobile apps, crunch mobile data and manage a company’s own mobile assets securely. Thousands of employees have been trained in mobile technologies and corporate millions will be spent on research and acquisitions in coming years.
“We had people who were direct mail specialists but now are specialists in how best to use Twitter. It’s the evolution of marketing.”
- Ed Abrams, VP marketing for midmarket, IBM
A US survey of senior marketing and communications leaders finds 74% of companies seeing the need better collaboration between the two functions, according to Makovsky, an integrated communications agency.
Here’s what marketing can learn from PR:
Here’s what PR can learn from marketing:
Why collaborate?
Some leading retailers in UK are offering wi-fi. Others are considering it. Of course, wi-fi may make it easier for customers to compare prices and order from competition, but the wi-fi connection allows the retailer to offer promotions and personalized information in exchange for registration. Check out the comments at the end of the article for a lively discussion on pros and cons, from readers.
