Are You Wasting Your Relationships?
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
This morning I discovered these two pearls of wisdom:
Paul and Helge are zeroing in on something that I've been droning on about at work for months now. If you're out there convincing brands to integrate social platforms like Blogging, Facebook, or Twitter into a new campaign, you need to make your client understand that those efforts will be relatively worthless if they're not willing to be there to maintain the relationships once the campaign is over.
Anyone who's had any success at building up their own personal brand across the web will tell you that it takes time, patience, devotion, and sustained effort. These social environments are fantastic at cultivating a loyal and passionate following because of the effortless intimacy they enable. But, if you're counting "friends" or "contacts" or "followers" as if they were just more impressions, you're missing the point. Each of those numbers represents a real live human being, who has decided to give you a chance to convince them that you have something of real value to offer them (and it can't just be your product, it's got to be bigger than that).
There are a ton of excellent quotes in this presentation by Graham Brown at mobileYouth.org, that Helge also posted, and this one really gets to the heart of why we need to shift our goals from short-term impressions to long-term relationships.
Lot's more here:
And check out Part II here.
"Inspiration may get us started, but it never keeps us going. And that’s where motivation works." ...It's a fantastically interesting way to think about what's wrong with advertising today, constantly trying to inspire the consumer to buy in fleeting forms, without doing the generally harder and more difficult to measure work of consistently motivating a person to purchase. - Paul McEnany
Creating awareness and attention means nothing in a world where loyalty and relevant meaning is the currency. ...getting someone's attention is extremely expensive if you don’t use it to create recurrence. - Helge Tennø
Paul and Helge are zeroing in on something that I've been droning on about at work for months now. If you're out there convincing brands to integrate social platforms like Blogging, Facebook, or Twitter into a new campaign, you need to make your client understand that those efforts will be relatively worthless if they're not willing to be there to maintain the relationships once the campaign is over.
Anyone who's had any success at building up their own personal brand across the web will tell you that it takes time, patience, devotion, and sustained effort. These social environments are fantastic at cultivating a loyal and passionate following because of the effortless intimacy they enable. But, if you're counting "friends" or "contacts" or "followers" as if they were just more impressions, you're missing the point. Each of those numbers represents a real live human being, who has decided to give you a chance to convince them that you have something of real value to offer them (and it can't just be your product, it's got to be bigger than that).
There are a ton of excellent quotes in this presentation by Graham Brown at mobileYouth.org, that Helge also posted, and this one really gets to the heart of why we need to shift our goals from short-term impressions to long-term relationships.
Patient youth marketing strategies will win out. Focus on building a beachhead of passionate supporters who love your product.
Lot's more here:
View SlideShare presentation
And check out Part II here.
6 Comments:
I believe the technical term is, "Bingo!"
The first three blog posts are easy. Tweeting for a few weeks - no sweat. But what are you doing 6 months, 2 years from now? That takes commitment. A commitment most brand managers aren't ready to make or don't understand the need for.
Great points here.
This does bump into that question of whether agencies are (or can become) the right people to guide social efforts, since it falls to the client to nurture those relationships.
Doing that well seems to requires a dauntingly large mobilization of inspired employees - and needing to trust them as well.
Maybe agencies need to become much more involved in teaching/training than doing/making.
By the way, enjoyed your list of favorite new blogs. Yours has become one of mine.
I fully agree with Eugene. The focus of our work as agencies (I work for Razorfish in Germany btw.) in this field has to change from projects to consulting and teaching. The times when we got the briefing, retreated back into our caves and got back a few weeks later with a finished product which we presented with a big show to the clients is definitely over. Now we recommend working at our clients place and think about proposing more time-based contracts then project-based ones.
But the most important thing is to develop a long-term strategy for engagement with the social sphere before any further action is taken. If a new client comes with a briefing for "just a little Facebook campaign" we ask if he has a bigger strategy. If not, we will tell him that he needs one or his campaign will fail.
That good part is that Germany is really behind in things like social media marketing which helps a lot to do the basics before you even have to clean up any mess.
this question of where the agency role ends and the client takes over has come up a couple times now.
i'm definitely a proponent of this becoming an integrated client-side discipline. ultimately, these social skills need to be embedded within the brand's operational DNA.
agencies have an important role to play as teachers and guides, but at some point the client has to be able to take over.
Adrian Ho wrote about this in his article in campaign which I quite liked. Like I commented on that, I'll comment here: It needs to be our duty to also be able to tell clients that "no, you're not ready" when it comes to social media a.k.a. relationships. The big problem is that clients think in terms of campaigns. They start and they end, and you measure them on that period. This (everything) has changed now. What the brand and product is to the consumers has been very much dependent on how they can communicate with those. When that changes; what the brand can be to the consumers (what they can mean) changes too. But that's a more fundamental change than companies are used to handling. It's a revolution, which needless to say is a kind of big change. Campaign thinking is the biggest issue in my oppinion.
sorry, it was in adweek...
http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/community/columns/other-columns/e3id78469d811368539a899e78f92093921?imw=Y
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