A study by the Luxury Institute, reveals that 6 in 10 wealthy consumers use social networks on a regular basis. No longer just a MySpace, youth driven on-line media channel; social nets are pulling in the wealthy at a dramatic pace.
I guess this should indicate continued e-commerce growth and provide major opportunity and support for ad agencies to divert customer funds on-line. Hopefully the “social media” will keep things under control - and self-police the marketing (read: Facebook Beacon).
Networks such as LinkedIn have done a great job of keeping pages “clean” and without MySpace style page clutter. But time will tell, as the “participatory web” community members become desensitized to the brand messages. The “Wealthy” in this report has been identified as those with an average income of $287K and average net worth of $2.1 million (Source: Luxury Institute).
Let’s hope we can keep golf (and anything associated with golf) off-line as luxury brand marketers design interactive strategies to reach the social elite.
Fast Company did an article in Feb titled “Is The Tipping Point Toast?” - putting Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point under fire. Duncan Watts, a network theory scientist working at Yahoo has performed a number of experiments challenging the Tipping Point theory. Overall the article is an interesting read - but full of many “no shit” points.
Seems like the biggest trend is to grab hold of some “silver pill” philosophy with the hopes that it will launch that “shitty product” that nobody seems to want. Come on - what happend to brand “Touch Points”??? There are no short cuts and spreading a message is quite different than motivating a sale.
Another popular buzz phrase you have probably heard is the “Long tail”. The long tail refers to a niche based culture replacing the hit driven economy. Products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough. The Long Tail is a potential market and the distribution and sales channel opportunities created by the Internet often enable businesses to tap into that market successfully.
The real long tail impact seems to be coming from the affiliate marketing publishers. Those individual bloggers who are given financial incentives for promoting products on their site. Don’t underestimate the power of niche influence.
1. Recognise your antisocial nature … until you fully embrace the fact that your relationship and communication with your consumers has been fundamentally antisocial, you will never be able progress on the road towards becoming a brand that can embrace social media i.e. a socialised brand. Repeat after me, “My name is Brand X and I am antisocial”.
2. Don’t think digital … the answer to becoming a socialised brand does not lie in the digital world even if your relationship with your consumers ends up being based on digital channels. The answer lies in having a credible story, content that brings this alive and channels that help consumers “reach-in” and become engaged. P.S. a credible story is nothing like what you are accustomed to thinking of as a brand proposition. P.P.S. just having a corporate blog, a MySpace page, a podcast, posting stuff on YouTube does not, of itself, make you a socialised brand.
3. Remember – the tools of social media sit best in the hands of consumers (it’s who they were designed for) … use them at your peril, you may end up looking silly. At all costs avoid the My(insert your brand name here)Space syndrome – a lot of digital agencies are getting rich helping clients make this mistake.
4. Stop thinking about reaching out to consumers … that is old media, old media agency planners thinking. Don’t think of the tools of social media as a new channel that allows you to push messages to niche groups. Do the right thing (see point 2) and consumers will use the tools of social media to find you – your audience will select itself. Focus your energy on making your brand a beacon and your brand a host. (I am sure there is a Seth Godin book in there somewhere).
Thanks to Richard Stacy for sending this one in, and gapingvoid:
The Information Architects from Japan have put together a very nice visualization map of the 300 most influential websites. To create the mashup, IA took the sites and pinned them down to the Tokyo area train map. I had been playing with version 2.0 for a little while, and they already have the new, updated 3.0 version. The key change on V3 is that they featured the most influential websites - regardless of category.
Visualizing complex networks is challenging and the folks at Visualcomplexity.com are striving to be the one source place for anyone looking for information on the subject.
Today, I post in celebration of yesterday’s xc-ski session #25 (for 2007-08). The reason it is post-worthy, is because each session was started from my back door - requiring zero drive miles. Brilliant!
The Ford Modeling agency is featured in the new Inc. magazine - with a great article about how they have leveraged YouTube video for company exposure. After creating a number of high quality videos, the agency found that they had created a new media category “organic product integration” - as they call it. Ford partners with (sells placement) fashion brands for “organic” use of products - and discussion, by the models. The videos are getting tons of hits which means big dollars to the media owners; Ford. What a sweet twist on traditional channel strategy. They already have the hot models - so they create, sell, market, and own the distributed content.
The video topic got me searching for some other unique new media uses, and examples of higher quality uploads (not that the normal bike face plant on YouTube isn’t sweet) - and I came across a killer flick on Vimeo.
Advertising Age has announced some trends to watch in 2008. The one that jumps out is strategic alignment, which will be crucial to new media success.
THE POWER OF STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT: Marketers succeed when brand messages are fully integrated and synchronized across all media channels. That requires strategic alignment — leadership that ties everything together — particularly when the forces of change can potentially pull them apart. Strategic alignment is one of the most important roles of the chief marketing officer, and In 2008 more CMOs will ensure organizations are strategically aligned. Lead agencies will be appointed to make sure all supporting agencies carry out the same brand message.
