Interruption-based mass marketing that simply shouts messages one way to customers is not only one of the most ineffective strategies for today’s landscape, it’s also a red flag when it comes to building your brand’s image, reputation and value. To us, the smartest brands are now listening to the conversations their customers are having, watching where they are taking place and engaging with them on an individual level to add value in real time. Even better, an increasing number of marketers are not only deploying programs specifically created for the social platforms, they’re strategically harnessing insights from the data and using them to help plan and develop stronger brand positioning and marketing programs in the future.

From a marketer’s standpoint (especially those that fall into the challenger brand status), last year was about how to make your business run harder and faster in a bid to stay competitive in a downturn. In 2010, we at Sigma believe it’s going to be about proving value through both your consumer conversation quotient and the product experience. Brand value will be influenced more and more by the consumer, making it more important than ever for brands to deploy programs that are authentic and conversation-worthy. For challenger brands, this is going to aid in brand differentiation and consumer engagement. Differentiation needs to be bigger than just a brand name. True differentiation will come from consumer engagement strategies and a brand’s willingness to involve customers. Visibility and opportunity await the brand that is best at engaging their customer as well as making the product experience richer and better than the rest.

Last year, we worked with clients in footwear, burn care, technology and professional services, helping them embrace new marketing approaches fueled by the changing landscape. Fostering brand advocates and evangelists is not just for brands in the consumer space. It’s everywhere, and it applies to both consumer and B2B brands alike. As the new year kicks off and while writing your marketing game plan, ask yourself: Are you equipped in 2010 for true differentiation?

Related posts:
All Media Is Social. Now What? by Fuel for Thought

John Battelle & The Conversation Economy by C. B. Whittemore

We’ll kick-off the first conference recap with John Battelle’s (CEO/Founder, Federated Media) keynote on “All Media is Social.  Now What?”  John’s keynote was brilliantly right-on-topic to get us all kindling new ideas.  Here are four key areas he covered:

1.  The Rise of Conversational Marketing: First we declared our intentions (what we want) through search.  Then we declared our relations (social graph — who we are as defined by how we are connected to other people) on sites like Facebook.  Finally, during the past year we declared our utterances (what we are doing, what we are interested in, etc.) on sites like Twitter.  When you put all these declarations together — intention, relations and utterances, you have an economy of conversations.

2.  Conversation Economy: Every marketer is a publisher and every publisher is a marketer.  And every consumer is both.  What was once a one-way conversation has now become a two-way conversation. To succeed as marketers, we must leverage appropriate digital media and have conversations with customers at scale.  If you believe conversational marketing is real, we have to contemplate how we can best market in that native environment.  It’s a new form of exchange between numerous participants, and we as marketers are one of those participants representing the brand.  We are still in an early stage and we have to learn new skills by trying and relentlessly testing.

3.  What Brands Need to Succeed in Conversational Marketing: Marketing must become everyone’s job and it must become a horizontal practice rather than a vertical specialty.  This means rethinking from the top down and the bottom up.  To succeed in the Social Media, brands need the same things that are required in a Packaged Goods environment.

Scale + Safety + Quality + Engagement

4.  Conversational Marketing Guidelines:  Fuel for Thought tips and suggestions include:
-  Find conversations you want to join or start
-  Find the natural leaders of those conversations
-  Listen first, then join
-  Add value to the conversations
-  Make media annuities

To hear more great nuggets from John, be sure to follow him on Twitter at @JohnBattelle. To get an electronic copy of his presentation, please email me at jkim (at) sigmagroup.com.  The next post will recap Radian6’s workshop on “Why Listen to Social Media?”

The shift towards social media today is huge. Numerous articles, case studies and statistics extol the myriad benefits of this powerful new marketing movement each day.  However, getting your feet wet in social media can be quite a challenge as social media is not just another medium or channel where traditional marketing messages can be pushed. Instead, it’s all about understanding the culture of participation. And then harnessing and incorporating that into all your marketing and business processes.
So, what is the best way for an organization to embrace social media?  Here’s some of our top-line suggestions:

1.  Set a goal. All marketing programs, from advertising to promotion, starts with a defined goal. The same is true for social media marketing. Some of the common SMM goals and uses are:

• Converse with your market:  Corporate voice community
• Build and reward loyalty:  Loyalty community
• Generate ideas: Innovation community
• Customer support: Peer support community
• Stimulate a passion: Enthusiasts community
• Build and maintain buzz: Events community
• Create excitement: User-generated content or contest

A note about virals: As much as you may desire a “viral-something” (video, site, email, etc.), please keep in mind that “viral is a result, not a goal/strategy”, as Scott Monty stated in his recent tweet.  Also keep in mind that something will only become viral if your prospect thinks it’s worth passing along to other like-minded individuals, and so on.

2.  Realize and accept that everyone now has a voice. This mean your employees and customers as well as your detractors.  Technologies collectively known as Web 2.0 have spread widely among consumers over the past five years and today, everyone has the potential to be a content creator. Social networking websites (e.g., Facebook, MySpace, etc.) attract more than 120 million unique visitors per month and more than 82 million people in the US created content online last year.

Therefore, if you want to succeed in this new social world, you need to engage the people you want to reach by meeting them on their own turf, or by creating a turf that you make available for them (e.g., community).

3.  Don’t fall for ‘build-it-and–they-will-come’ syndrome. We have seen so many programs where a company focuses solely on a splashy design and tools and forgets to pre-populate their community with valuable content. We have also seen programs launched with promising content only to find out later that there are no updates as well as those without a proper marketing plan behind it to gain traction and visibility.  Please keep in mind that when a potential member comes to a community, the only way to have them join, share and return again is through fresh, compelling content.  Additionally, build out a support plan and schedule to promote your social media effort (e.g., SEM, SEO, social media seeding, PR, display ads, integrated into appropriate offline messages, etc.).

4.  Social Media is more than a campaign. It’s about having a holistic marketing program that includes leveraging social technologies over the long haul. It’s about socializing with your brand fans through commitment, integrity and honesty. At the end of the day, social media is about building relationships—this means you don’t just show up one day and then disappear when your campaign is over.   Just like in a real relationship, you have to treat social media users as you would treat the people in your life. Get to know them, interact without promoting and earn customer trust through transparency.

5.  Find the team to champion your SMM effort. Identify and enlist the right people in your company to spearhead the social media program. These people need to believe in the initiative and have the experience, energy and passion to engage others in the effort.  Additionally, choose a social media-marketing vendor to help you bring your goals to life and deploy the appropriate technology solution.  There are only handful of companies in the world with the right suite of in-house resources to effectively and efficiently support/operate a social media program.

The above is just a sample list taken from hundreds of suggestions. To find out more, feel free to contact us or explore some additional information on the following posts.

-  Ron Jone’s Social Media Marketing 101 – Part 1 and  Part 2
-  Adam Ostrow’s (Mashable) What are the Benefits of Social Media Marketing
-  The McKinsey Quarterly’s Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work

I’m a firm believer that challenges open doors to opportunities, and opportunities bring innovation with possibilities to further advance and emerge as a leader – as many brands did during the Great Depression.

As eMarketer CEO/co-founder Geoff Ramsey puts it, “Consumers are still consuming.” They are still out there, looking for deals and recommendations to make product choices. They are relying on all available resources to find what is right for them. For marketers, the good news is there are more options than ever to make a connection with customers.

Below is a compendium to Geoff Ramsey’s presentation at the Fuel for Thought event in November. It’s based on his recent whitepaper Digital Marketing Now: Seven Strategies for Surviving the Downturn that is available for free at eMarketer.

That’s it for today.   I hope we sparked some new ideas and look forward to seeing your test programs in market.