I was surfing through related videos on youtube, and I came to 2 realizations. First that I’m almost criminally negligent in updating this blog, and second, using social media and being able to explain it are very different things.
I ran across this video by CommonCraft. I love their vids, I somehow feel more connected for videos of crafty paper cutouts then just a standard interview of CG animation. These are in the style of most Google launch vids explaining their new beta product or twitter example on the homepage explaining twitter and its use.
The video in question (See Here) was trying to explain social media with the same crafty method. The longer I watched the more confused I got. The analogy they were trying to use just wasn’t working for me. I inherently understand the functionality they were explaining, but in trying to simplify it with an analogy they made it so much more confusing because their situation was just a little too ridiculous. If you watch it, and picture the billboard on your front lawn you’ll see where I’m going.
It took some stretching and suspension of disbelief to get through the vid but it did remind me I would be blogging a bit more and got me thinking about a post I had promised as a follow-up to my last post. My last post focused on how small businesses agility made it possible for them to emulate the user experience of a large corp that invested in marketing tools. They don’t necessarily need the investments because on a smaller scale the analytics and automation don’t provide the necessary ROI to make the investment.
If you are a corp that is able to get sign-off to make that kind off investment however, you can take the example from the CommonCraft vid and flip it on its head. Think about it, using a tool like Eloqua which I have much more experience with, or its competitors like Marketo(Shout outs cause there people have commented on my blog in the past…Sup Steve :) ) and you are able to collect all that user generated activity to help yourself segment and better serve your customers. Failing using it to make product development decisions you can at least use the data to better target those more likely to listen to your pitches for products that are in production.
The video explains how a niche maker producing one flavor of ice-cream can use the user rating systems of many social media sites to explain their product from the buyer perspective helping other buyers better evaluate their pre-purchase decisions. Now take that same idea, flip your funnel and apply it to your marketing efforts. If you are an Ice-Cream producer who has hundreds of flavors you can take a similar approach to your buyer’s online activity to segment which flavor you would market to them. Steve Woods from Eloqua calls it digital body language, See his blog, or book of the same name.
Imagine how annoyed your users would be if each flavor sent out its own marketing initiatives. Someone who likes rocky road might hate Mint cheesecake. You wouldn’t want to make the mistake of cross marketing the two flavors. But if you are tracking their activity you might be able to identify a correlation between people who looked at rocky road or commented on it on facebook see they also look at other a few other types. Using that connection you can market the other flavors to Rocky Road fans who haven’t looked at the other flavor, as well as market Rocky Road to the other flavors consumers who haven’t tried it.
The beauty of this approach is that in so doing you could be generating more activity deepening your datasets making it more possible to identify even more patterns.
Now of course there are limitations but if you use this data to more strategically plan your activities as well as help drive your product development you can more predictably forecast both sales and satisfaction which makes everyone happier, management and customers alike.
That’s all for now, I’ve ranted on for far too long.
