Social Media Marketing « Word of Mouth Marketing | Social Media, Search, Blog, and Viral Marketing

Posts tagged ‘Social Media Marketing’

Word of Mouth From the Inside Out

Navel Marketing helps create organizations worth talking about and then arm customers to spread the word. On the surface, this may seem like a simple enough task, but too many companies today focus the majority of their efforts on how to get the word out with little thought as to why someone would care. Whether you choose to use more traditional tactics, such as advertising, or new methods, such as social media, your target market needs to know why you matter before they invest any time or emotion in your brand.

Marketing today is about meaning. Customers buy products but evangelists buy causes. You have to mean something in the marketplace before someone will take notice of your communications and, most importantly, tell others about them. Navel Marketing helps you develop the inner tools that create meaning for your customer, such as a cause, a unique and compelling position, a culture that reflects your cause, a simple repeatable message, a viral customer experience, and more. We then implement word-of-mouth marketing tools to help arm your customers spread the word.

November 15, 2010 at 3:09 pm bcritchfield Leave a comment

Marketing From The Navel

I often get asked about our strange name. Many times I even get blank stares when I explain the term “navel-gazing”. However, I chose the name of my company and my book very carefully, and it wasn’t just because I wanted to make people giggle (OK, it was partly that).

For those who know me, they know I have worked with dozens of companies all over the world. Through my experiences, I have seen both amazing successes and giant failures (and been involved in both). Throughout these experiences, I identified a pattern. For a while, I couldn’t put it into words. I tried “Honest Marketing” or “Transparent Marketing”, but none of those really fit.

I finally realized that each of the companies who were successful marketed from the inside out, where the ones who failed miserably were the ones who marketed from the outside in. In other words, the companies who succeeded developed their internal tools, processes, and culture and used marketing tactics to simply communicate what they had already become. THe companies that failed wanted their communications to reflect an image of what they wish they were or what the customer wanted them to be – they wanted to put lipstick on the pig.

There are many who come to Navel Marketing for our social media marketing services. Without fail, however, they have missed many of the steps it takes to create a company worth talking about. So we start at the beginning. We start by creating a cause, identifying what truly makes them unique, and creating a culture that reflects their vision (for a complete list of steps to create a “buzz-worthy” company, see the Navel Model). Once these steps are completed, the tactics are the easy part.

I have seen a lot written lately about what constitutes a true “social media marketer”. I even wrote about this fact a month or so ago myself. Many base it on their knowledge of the tools or their proprensity to approach marketing as a conversation. However, it is my belief that they are all still lacking core component – what are you going to converse about? What about you is worth talking about?

Whether you use social media, advertising, public relations, direct response, or any other form of marketing, it all starts with strategy. It all starts with creating a company worth talking about. Once you’ve done that, the rest falls into place.

January 31, 2009 at 3:20 pm bcritchfield Leave a comment

The Myth of the Social Media Marketer

I have mentioned this in presentations and on Twitter, but I felt it needed a blog post as well. I have been involved in social media for about the last 5 years. I have seen it grow from its infancy to a powerful communications and engagement medium. I have seen companies come and go and I have seen mega-brands created almost overnight. In my 16 years as a marketer, this is, by far, the most exciting and compelling trend to happen in marketing.

However, social media has spawned a not so pleasant side effect: so-called “social media marketers”. What I am referring to are the hordes of techies who figure out how to blog, podcast, or use social networks to build a certain following and then start billing themselves out as “experts”. How many “internet marketing experts” or “social media experts” have you seen boasting about their capabilities in their Twitter profiles or on their blogs? In a very short period of time (5 years) an entire service industry has been spawned by former engineers, unemployed college students, ex-sales people, high-school drop-outs, and housewives who are now marketing “experts”. Yeah, doesn’t make sense to me either.

One so-called expert posted a press release about how so incredibly awesome he was at social media. He has been getting coverage all over the social media networks, except it is as “The Biggest Douche in Social Media.”

If you remember nothing else from this post, remember this one key fact: there is a difference between users of social media and social media marketers. To give you an example, I know how to use Photoshop. Been using it for about 10 years to do little tasks here and there. I even delve into bigger projects occasionally and took a class on it at a local training facility. However, just because I know how to use Photoshop or Illustrator or Quark doesn’t make me a graphic designer. A designer has training and experience in colors, shapes, and the emotions of good design. The software he uses are just the tools.

The same holds true of marketers. Social media can be extremely powerful, but the rules of marketing still hold true. While social media may be replacing advertising as the communication vehicle, you still need to position, differentiate, and build an integrated communication plan. I have found that those who most ridicule the educated and experienced marketers as being “out of touch” with how marketing works today are those without an education and without experience. True, there are many marketers who are not keeping up with the changing nature of communications, by my prediction is that those who succeed long term in social media will be the classic marketers who learn how to adapt to the new realities of how consumers like to be communicated to. The Internet bubble burst because the realities of business had not, in fact, changed, only the delivery vehicle had. The same holds true for social media; the core principles of marketing have not changed, only the engagement vehicle has.

Are there social media marketers? Of course there are, and many of them are extremely effective. However, don’t believe every “expert” who tells you they can get you to the Top of Twitter or can build you a giant following on Facebook and have that equate to increased sales. The principles haven’t changed, only the tools have.