Marketers Encouraged To Break A Few Rules

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The most successful marketers will break a few company rules through search engine marketing and social media this year -- similar to the way Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane developed a method to calculate the value of baseball players, according to Josh Bernoff, SVP of idea development at Forrester Research.

Tapping customers on technology platforms that companies can't completely control can become a bit uncomfortable -- but they can do it productively, said Bernoff, who delivered the keynote at Covario's customer conference Wednesday.

"Every innovation in social media is provocative to the organization, because you're talking directly to customers and encouraging them to talk to each other, and that's an inherently uncontrollable situation," Bernoff told MediaPost.

Forrester did a study to determine how many instances in a year that one person can influence another on products or services in a social channel. Half a trillion times yearly in the U.S., either on Facebook, blogs or other discussion forums, he said. Then the research company created two categories. Mass Connectors -- about 6.6% of the 177 million online adults -- influence 80% of 256 billion impressions in social networks. The other group -- Mass Mavens -- contribute 12.6% of the online population. The two overlap.

Useful content on Web sites can become an effective tool. Bernoff pointed to the autotrader.co.uk, which launched a mobile application allowing consumers to take a picture of a car and search for nearby dealers or private sellers of that make or model. He also gave an example from Whole Foods, which created content on its Web site, tweeting the updates on Twitter. The content was retweeted by followers, which generated clicks back to the Web site.

Companies move through Forrester's defined states of social maturity at varying paces. Among the large corporations, about 20% are laggers. The majority of companies have begun testing social media through Twitter and other tools, but only 10% have begun to expand campaigns, and few are considered to be breaking the rules to test the limits. That must change in order to keep up with the pace of innovation, Bernoff said.

For those willing to take the risk, Bernoff laid out a road map -- 10 things to do to make what he calls "productive trouble:" tap into friends across the company; develop a reputation for excellence; don't whine; fix things; ask why; work extra hours on the correct things, develop a peer relationship with your managers, get good at apologizing because you're going to ruffle feathers; don't touch the third rails; know your strengths and weaknesses; and don't be afraid to put your job on the line.

Marketers can overcome resistance from IT departments to stifle innovation and deployment of new technologies by offering to share the risks. Companies need to shift the responsibility, so that IT departments identify risks rather than stifle development, and share any risk between IT and business.

2 comments about "Marketers Encouraged To Break A Few Rules".
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  1. Grant Crowell from ReelSEO.com, February 9, 2012 at 9:53 a.m.

    I think part of this is about, how do you make an effective business case to the decision makers at large companies to take the risk? That's not just with greater adoption of social media, but with an internal social technology infrastructure? I think that some change agents within these large enterprises are still looking for more "fuel" to help make their case to an executive sponsor and their board, beyond just be called a "lagger." But it does sound like a good road map to have for those who are ready!

  2. Joe Bencharsky from WebTraction, February 9, 2012 at 5:21 p.m.

    Management staff needs to understand that if they are not taking control of their online brand, image and marketing message, they are abdicating that responsibility and the general public and competitors will assume that responsibility. There is no longer a choice of "opting out" of Social Media...they are there whether they choose to engage or not.

    Management is not savvy enough to put it in a wider context: what is the ROI of Public Relations? What is the ROI of media buys? (Sure there are fancy statistics that can give an indication what is 'Likely" but they forget, those numbers are not reality...they are merely used to them.)

    The internet provides everything management and marketers always dreamed they could have: almost immediate response, low cost advertising, measurable influence, sales figures that directly result from marketing expenditures...and yet because they don't understand this, they are keeping their heads buried in the sand hoping it will all go away.

    Social Media and the Internet are not fads. They are a foundational shift in how media works, how humans communicate and how information is consumed and disseminated.

    Any companies not waking up to this reality will go the way of Xerox (remember when it was a verb?), Kodak and Pickett, to name a few.

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