CMOs: Consumers Are Connected. You Need To Be, Too – Forbes.com
Here’s a great article on Forbes.com about how forward-leaning CMOs are incorporating social media into 2010 marketing strategies. The author discusses how social media should dovetail with other digital marketing channels, plus offers strategy suggestions for building a program.
Social media should lead digital marketing plans in 2010.
by Jeremiah Owyang
As we near the end of the year, CMOs are planning their marketing strategies for 2010. We learned during the recent Forbes CMO Summit that progressive CMOs are putting more resources behind their social marketing efforts.
They recognize that social marketing affects nearly all forms of digital marketing, including e-mail, advertising, search and Web marketing. It shouldn’t be treated as a silo. Even so, there’s confusion about how to develop a solid strategy. Here are some suggestions for how they might do that.
Social Marketing Affects All Digital Marketing Channels
CMOs must think of social marketing as a horizontal effort across all of their digital marketing assets–not as an independent experiment.
Most consumer brands, including Skittles, Best Buy and Dell, have integrated social marketing into Web marketing efforts. Yet beyond traditional Web marketing efforts, social technologies have implications to other digital channels. For instance, e-mail providers Silverpop, StrongMail and Responsys already have social marketing integration by encouraging consumers to share e-mails with their social contacts in Twitter, Facebook and beyond.
More dramatically, Google and Microsoft’s Bing announced partnerships with Twitter, promising to integrate tweets in search results. Eventually, tweets, blogs, and Facebook wall posts will influence these search results. The effects on paid search marketing are unpredictable.
Customers Don’t Care What Department You’re In
Not so long ago, flare-ups around customer support issues could be swept under the rug. Now, customers have a soapbox from which to tell everyone how they feel about your brand. From shabby employees at Domino’s embarrassing the company on YouTube to off-brand (if catchy) music videos like United Breaks Guitars’, customers are yelling back at brands–and sharing their opinions with millions of people at the same time. Search engine results about your brand are affected by this Web chatter. For example, searching Google for “Dell Support” results in links to blog posts about less-than-stellar customer service. Customers just want their problems fixed; their gripes can cause a lot of problems for a brand.
See the rest of the article here: CMOs: Consumers Are Connected. You Need To Be, Too – Forbes.com.
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