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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.

via forbes.com

Ontem à noite havia uma discussão interessante sobre se "Facebooks", "Twitters", "MySpaces" e afins era algo positivo ou negativo. Sobre se estávamos na presença de algo benéfico ou alienador. Foi declarado um empate técnico.

Este artigo declara a discussão como meramente académica. Dum ponto de vista de marketing, social media é inevitável.

IKEA, the Swedish purveyor of fast-food furniture decided to open a new store in Malmo, a small Swedish town, and didn't really have a lot of money to let people know about it. So once again they looked toward their interactive agency Forsman+Bodenfors to create a rather special launch campaign.

The agency created a Facebook profile for the store manager, Gordon Gustavsson. Over a two-week period, it uploaded images from of IKEA showrooms to his Facebook photo album. Then it put out word that the first person to tag their name to a product in the pictures, won it.

Facebook being what it is, word got out and needy, enthusiastic Swedes begged for more pictures so that they could tag themselves to a new sofa, a new bed, or a new vase into which they could stick their plastic flowers or their dead grandparents' ashes.

Before Facebook could take credit for its own wonderful ingenuity in creating the world's most needed Web site, thousands of Swedes were spreading pictures of IKEA showrooms all around the personal galaxy known as their profile pages.

via: youtube

"You can't buy attention anymore. Having a huge budget doesn't mean anything in social media.
The old media paradigm was PAY to PLAY. Now you get back what you authentically put in. You've got to be willing to PLAY to PLAY."

Alex Bogusky

Take the 40-hour content marketing challenge. Just discovering Google Insights for Search will be an exciting pre-holiday treat.

It's coming. The transformation in the wine industry is proof enough. Glass and cork were always inexorably linked to the wine drinking experience, but that's changing. The transformation in this industry has been swifter than many imagined, but it wasn't the pioneer. It just reminds us of how mainstream eco-friendly packaging is about to become.

One thing about the packaging transformation worries me, however: some marketers won't grasp the idea that too much eco-friendly packaging can be just as bad or worse than traditional packaging. Materials are only one part of the equation. There's waste, curing (which uses wasteful thermal processes), sterilization (which requires chemicals), shape (which impacts shipping) and other considerations that manufacturers must factor in.

If we are on the leading edge of a packaging revolution, we'd better get our priorities straight. Is using recycled or recyclable material enough? What about reducing (total volume) and reusing? How important is cool functionality, durability or increased shelf life? How we answer these questions and translate what we learn into the product development process will determine how much progress we really make toward a real packaging revolution. It would be a shame if all we end up with is creatively designed packaging (to resemble recycled cardboard) that fools consumers into thinking they're their favorite products are eco-friendly.

Social media purists have laid down the law and, so, to participate in social media as a business, you must do things like, “participate in the conversation,” “engage your customers,” and “talk with us not to us.” I’ve got news for you. In the world of business, all that talk will get you exactly nowhere. Conversations do not ring the cash register. Engagement does not sell more product. Talking with people just means you have to take time to listen which prevents you from spending valuable time selling more product. (full article...)

Social Media Explorer | Why Social Media Purists Won't Last (by Jason Falls)