There have been quite a few online discussions around search and live feed lately. It seems that given the rapid growth of social networking, the multiplication of information sources, search marketing could change dramatically in the near future.
The current scheme of online search marketing is organized around delivering relevance and therefore evolves around content. For marketers it translates into being found when consumers are looking for information related to their offer. Marketers do not control the timing of the delivery and the consumer is acting on the search.
Shifts that are currently taking place could change this and make it all about timing and about marketers finding the consumer:
The volume of the information available is and will continue to grow at a tremendous rate marking it harder to sort through the information.
The quality and relevance of some of the information available will provide marketers with the opportunity to push their content.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is about pushing content ahead of everyone else’s and we can safely assume that the competition for better rankings will intensify fiercely. This pushes every one to produce more content (UGC, dynamic content, blogging, sites updates…) to ensure that the engines “understand” our relevance resulting directly in more content to sort through. The law here is that there will be more content to search and rank everyday than there ever was the day before and we are all fighting for the same amount of attention.
Social Networks
We are exchanging information through our networks and these networks are providing live streams. As more users are adopting Twitter, Facebook…, content flowing through live feeds will multiply even more dramatically.
Multiplication of sources connected to the internet
The addition on all sorts of products and appliances connected to the internet will generate enormous volume of transactional data: when fridges, microwave ovens, and all our household appliances will be connected to the internet through our home wireless networks, information will be exchanged between these appliances and their manufacturers, perhaps between the appliances as well and with other products such as our mobile devices.
This will amount for huge data sets having to be sorted through by search engines and while some information will be totally irrelevant to marketers, some will be, and finding it on time will be the challenge. We can imagine that search marketing’s next stage will then be for marketers to seek the consumer and push our message based on timing, the right timing that is: reaching the consumer when he needs a product or service, whether he is already searching or not, and in some instances whether he’s aware of the need or not.
A freezer enabled with RFID technology could communicate to my I-phone that I am out of frozen fish and update my shopping list. By looking for and finding this information the marketers at Gordons Seafood could sent a coupon to my I-phone while I am at the store.
A similar scheme can be imagined with consumers’ social networks. Indeed, finding consumers that are asking their networks questions about products and services will enable marketer to push their information either directly or via influencers in networks.
Paul Ivans noted during his keynote address at e-pharma last month that channels coming together (e.g. the way I am using wii fit will impact offers I get on my mobile device) provides marketers with the opportunity to extend their offer. Finding who to extend to and when to push the offer will be a big part of what he called the digital connected tissue.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Quote of the Day - March 7th 2009
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts - for support rather than for illumination”
Andrew Lang
Here is something we need to pay attention to when we evaluate our marketing programs' performance.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Quote of the Day: March 5 2009
"In cinema, there are those who want to act and those who need to act. Those who want to act usually don't...."
Heard it on the radio today but I missed the author.
True for life and action.
Heard it on the radio today but I missed the author.
True for life and action.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Where are my filters?
Using social networks to “filter” the information and connect with the “Experts”.
Great podcast from Knowledge@Wharton (http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu): “Emerging Technologies, Part 3: New Tools for a Collaborative Environment”
A talk with Doctor Guido Jouret from Cisco discussing how the technologies such as social networking and mobile, driven by consumers’ adoption, are migrating to enterprises. These technologies are being tested and are being slowly rolled out by large enterprises as young(er) professionals join the workforce and expect the use of these technologies as an entire and critical part of how they function and perform their work. Facebook applications and wiki apps (which are already used in some companies) will help enhance knowledge sharing, searching and development.
One comment of Dc. Jouret correlates very well with how marketer should look at social media and describe how we are (or will be) using our social networks to distinguish the information we are willing to consider. While there is so much information out there and so little time, we are using our social networks to filter the content and connecting with the experts (based on the trust we place in them) to distillate the content to us. Indeed, here lie the benefits of the social network. My recent e-pharma twitter buddies channel to me all day long thoughts, references to content and information that are relevant to my interests in social media and pharma. These are my chosen experts…Big thanks to my filters!
Links:
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast_archive.cfm?podcastID=32
Great podcast from Knowledge@Wharton (http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu): “Emerging Technologies, Part 3: New Tools for a Collaborative Environment”
A talk with Doctor Guido Jouret from Cisco discussing how the technologies such as social networking and mobile, driven by consumers’ adoption, are migrating to enterprises. These technologies are being tested and are being slowly rolled out by large enterprises as young(er) professionals join the workforce and expect the use of these technologies as an entire and critical part of how they function and perform their work. Facebook applications and wiki apps (which are already used in some companies) will help enhance knowledge sharing, searching and development.
One comment of Dc. Jouret correlates very well with how marketer should look at social media and describe how we are (or will be) using our social networks to distinguish the information we are willing to consider. While there is so much information out there and so little time, we are using our social networks to filter the content and connecting with the experts (based on the trust we place in them) to distillate the content to us. Indeed, here lie the benefits of the social network. My recent e-pharma twitter buddies channel to me all day long thoughts, references to content and information that are relevant to my interests in social media and pharma. These are my chosen experts…Big thanks to my filters!
Links:
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast_archive.cfm?podcastID=32
Monday, February 23, 2009
About Content Ownership/Liability and Social Media in Pharma
A post by Josh Stylman on the ad-age blog (“Facebook Serves as Own Example of How Web Bites Back: What Happens When You Post Something Without Thinking It Through”) takes an interesting look at content published online its ownership and its lifecycle. (I strongly recommend reading it).
In a nutshell Josh makes the point that it’ much easier to put content online than it is (if it ever is) to remove it. He judiciously points out that once online, content might actually be there forever and brings up the concept of companies and individuals’ digital footprint.
This “digital footprint” is most likely a major concern for any pharma company considering Social Media, and could prevent any meaningful engagement in this space. While a lot of debating is around Adverse Effect (AE) reporting, I strongly believe that AE can be overcome with education and putting some guidelines around it. I can even envision these guidelines being established industry wide under the umbrella of an organization such as PhRMA.
The digital footprint of marketing content however, and most specifically the online marketing claims footprint of a pharmaceutical company (or anyone acting on behalf of) are a more pervasive problem and one that implicates a company’s aptitude to deal with the risk of spontaneity impulsiveness and to a certain degree authenticity in social media. As Steve Woodruff wisely pointed out at e-pharma and in this post "social media salsa meets pharma waltz", success in social media relies on authenticity, exchange (2 way communication), transparency and finally immediacy. Combine this immediacy (interact now with spontaneity) with responsibility (i.e. who is liable for the content regardless of where it resides) and content ownership/perpetuity (can I take it down at the FDA’s request?) and you’ll understand why pharma is proceeding with caution. Indeed, in a world where content has been reviewed, and approved only after many iterations and hours of discussion, it is hard to envision the empowerment & delegation needed to implement meaningful and rapid dialogue on a large enough scale to have an impact.
Marketers in pharma are facing the challenge to balance the output of well thought, proofed (and I mean legal) and relevant content in a timely manner. Finding that balance will be critical but no easy task.
Links:
http://adage.com/digitalnext/post?article_id=134673)
http://www.mpdailyfix.com/2009/02/social_media_salsa_meets_pharm.html
In a nutshell Josh makes the point that it’ much easier to put content online than it is (if it ever is) to remove it. He judiciously points out that once online, content might actually be there forever and brings up the concept of companies and individuals’ digital footprint.
This “digital footprint” is most likely a major concern for any pharma company considering Social Media, and could prevent any meaningful engagement in this space. While a lot of debating is around Adverse Effect (AE) reporting, I strongly believe that AE can be overcome with education and putting some guidelines around it. I can even envision these guidelines being established industry wide under the umbrella of an organization such as PhRMA.
The digital footprint of marketing content however, and most specifically the online marketing claims footprint of a pharmaceutical company (or anyone acting on behalf of) are a more pervasive problem and one that implicates a company’s aptitude to deal with the risk of spontaneity impulsiveness and to a certain degree authenticity in social media. As Steve Woodruff wisely pointed out at e-pharma and in this post "social media salsa meets pharma waltz", success in social media relies on authenticity, exchange (2 way communication), transparency and finally immediacy. Combine this immediacy (interact now with spontaneity) with responsibility (i.e. who is liable for the content regardless of where it resides) and content ownership/perpetuity (can I take it down at the FDA’s request?) and you’ll understand why pharma is proceeding with caution. Indeed, in a world where content has been reviewed, and approved only after many iterations and hours of discussion, it is hard to envision the empowerment & delegation needed to implement meaningful and rapid dialogue on a large enough scale to have an impact.
Marketers in pharma are facing the challenge to balance the output of well thought, proofed (and I mean legal) and relevant content in a timely manner. Finding that balance will be critical but no easy task.
Links:
http://adage.com/digitalnext/post?article_id=134673)
http://www.mpdailyfix.com/2009/02/social_media_salsa_meets_pharm.html
Friday, February 20, 2009
The flip side of the iceberg
We all know (at least most of us do) the iceberg view of the dissatisfied consumer (basically and in broad terms, for every consumer that voices dissatisfaction to a given company, there are even more dissatisfied consumers who will not contact the given company and will talk negatively about the given company to their friends).
One obvious benefits of monitoring social media and engaging in social media is for marketers to react quickly and provide a response to anyone who broadcast their issue with a brand and thus in a best case scenario giving marketers a shot at turning these vocal entities into brand advocates...
and we pretty much all know this by now...
The flip side of this however is for marketers to understand and quantify how the positive experience is being voiced and the iceberg structure behind the positive advocacy and finally how it compares to the negative iceberg structure.
I heard at the e-pharma summit last week, that basically 60 to 70% of social network comments related to a brand are usually positive. That's a good start. But knowing the iceberg structure behind the positive voice is what we need to understand, that is: for every consumer that voices a positive experience, how many are saying something online? How many are not saying anything to their friends and how many friends are they? How does the brand advocacy iceberg compares to the consumer issue iceberg?
One obvious benefits of monitoring social media and engaging in social media is for marketers to react quickly and provide a response to anyone who broadcast their issue with a brand and thus in a best case scenario giving marketers a shot at turning these vocal entities into brand advocates...
and we pretty much all know this by now...
The flip side of this however is for marketers to understand and quantify how the positive experience is being voiced and the iceberg structure behind the positive advocacy and finally how it compares to the negative iceberg structure.
I heard at the e-pharma summit last week, that basically 60 to 70% of social network comments related to a brand are usually positive. That's a good start. But knowing the iceberg structure behind the positive voice is what we need to understand, that is: for every consumer that voices a positive experience, how many are saying something online? How many are not saying anything to their friends and how many friends are they? How does the brand advocacy iceberg compares to the consumer issue iceberg?
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