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fredag den 29. april 2011

Social Media and the importance of proper content?

If you want to have success with your Social media networks you need to be able to fill in the proper content. Proper content who decide what it is?
You as a marketer have one important “boss” on this subject – the ones who read your content. If you daily have a high number of readers you have certainly made a hit, and this is actually despite what your content expresses. Everyone wants to make content and of courses the ones who make the content has something they want to share with others. It is important to make a difference in who you are addressing with your content. If you want to send a marketing content it is on type of communication you want to send or is it your private or non-business content you want to share, you choose a Social media or just a media which will give you the best platform for expressing your content fully.

Reading surveys on content marketing, a number of challenges described by companies as the most important for their investment and engagement in the subject:
1. The first challenge for marketers is to make engaging content. You can compare engaging content in Social media with the same content you can find on various seminars or congresses. In a seminar or congress you can have the brilliant speakers who can engage people with content which is mediocre and you can have speakers with the most engaging content but not being able to present it in an engaging way. The dilemma of content is not always the content itself but the presenter of the content. A good presentation of content is more than half the job.
2. The second challenge for most marketers, is there enough content to fill the gap of communication with costumers and do they have topics that have not already saturated the market. Marketers have to ask them self is it quality or quantity of content that costumers need to find the content successful!
How important is for the costumer to have a different spin on content already saturated the market. Should the content just be put into a coherent context and referred to with a reference to an earlier publishing or should further be done?
3. The third most difficult thing is to excite your costumers you need to have the engaged employees or a third party who knows enough of your business so they can full fill the content to the market – this is a challenge for your budget.
How does a marketer work around these challenges to get the most Social Media content with the best quality to the market?
According to B2B Content-Marketing survey[1] your success as a marketer depends on your ability to “adopt” in each of the single category of content marketing. An effective marketer use eight tactics and less effective marketer use only six tactics. The content category, which score best is Social Media followed by e-Newsletters, case studies, blogs, webinars and videos. The investment in content marketing by effective marketers, allocate 30% of the marketing budget versus less effective marketers who allocate 18% of their budget to content marketing. The survey reveilles that effective marketers benefit more from senior managements buy-in on content marketing which gives the effective marketer the possibility to work more with the engaging content as content marketing is a part of the overall company strategy. The challenge with content gap is even possible to work around as long as you have support from senior management and herby easy access to marketing funds. As long as senior management support content management the proper persons in the company to excite the costumers and again if support is coming from higher-ups you will have funds and support for getting the success in the content marketing to your costumers – and the social media is one of the important tools in the marketing tool-box.


[1] MarketingProfs/Junta42,survey B2B Content Marketing: 2010 Benchmarks ,budgets and trends

lørdag den 23. april 2011

Social Media a communication revolution or just hype?


Social Media is in my perspective a different way of communicate, if it is a revolution can be discussed but it takes the communication from a one-to-many to a many-to-many perspective. Social media is not a strategy in it self but a part of the overall communication platform. I would not call Social Media for hype either. Social Media is a sustainable tool which in many regions round the world gives both professionals and non professional people a new voice and a different way of expression their opinions and views and their product and services towards the many in a non expensive way and even get the opportunity to get a feedback get an exchange of opinions.
You can find regions where some would call it a revolution in the way of government communicating with the people to give the people a fair chance of knowing what is going on in the country. In the case of Mexico, the one-to-many media has been set out of influence when giving a picture of the drug ware going on. The drug cartels have used threads and even liquidations of journalists who write about the drug business – here government uses social media – twitter to warn the local population about where to go and not to go and tell about government actions towards the drug cartels (Quid Nunc 2010).
In Myanmar /Burma the Social Media YouTube have been used to show the world how the Junta of generals are suppressing the population and how they are using the countries resources for their own benefit while the general population are suffering. Due to YouTube evidence, sanctions can be set towards the Myanmar junta regime.
But also less intimidating incidents are brought to life when the youth are using all the mobile devices to express them self as being authors of their own blogs sending tweets to followers and even get famous by using FaceBook and YouTube to present themselves  toward the world showing their skills and abilities to others through the Social Media. During national Danish elections politicians “fighting” towards each other to be the one with most friends on FaceBook – this gave the politicians an indication of where the election were going. Social Media is not just for enterprises to show and communicate products services it is more like a flow of goods and information’s as well as financial and social exchanges takes place in the network (Håkansson, 1982). In some regions of the World Social Media are considered, as a communication revolution as it helps spreading the word easy and cheap, but it will not be considered just hype as long as it is used as part of the overall marketing strategy.

tirsdag den 19. april 2011

How Social Media can work in a clasic marketing framework?


When you want to take social media into your company strategy it is always important to compare and measure how it will work in an well known and tested framework. This is the way you as a marketer can ratify towards your management that this is not just a new “buss word” this is a sustainable part of the marketing platform.
To do this in a sustainable way I will use Michael Porters “five forces framework” on an online social network media – FaceBook - as an illustration of how the framework may be used in analysing the business model of online social network/media. This is also an illustration of how the “old” paradigm can be used in the illustration of the new social media and communication from one to many over to many to many. FaceBook provides its users with a free service for creating and hosting their own social networks on the
FaceBook media. This free service however can be considered limited as there could be limited disk space. As of most of the network sites online ads are placed on the user created social network pages, in order for FaceBook to earn some revenue from the advertisers. Another model used or could be used by FaceBook is to provide optional “premium services” to the users by charging an extra monthly fee. As shown in the framework (figure 2.1) the main buyers are advertising companies and the subscribers of “premium services”. The buyer power is high since the advertisers and the premium users may get the same services from other Social networks/ Medias.
It is interesting to see that the main supplier to FaceBook is the visitors who visit FaceBook sites, mainly because the number and types of people visiting the site determine how attractive the site is to potential advertisers. In comparison, other types of suppliers that supply the server hardware, Software, or network bandwidth to the site play a relatively less significant role. With respect to the Suppliers being the visitors, the supplier power is high, mainly because the existence of many orders to reduce the supplier power, FaceBook will need to provide attractive services to its users, to allow them to create attractive social networks to attract more visitors. The number of members has grown substantially on FaceBook and the fact is supplier power has reduced, this is due to most people prefer to join a social media/network site where his or her friends are already members.
The threat of substitute products or service is high as there are many other alternative services available to the buyers. The switching cost will be the “social networks” hosted on FaceBook. Currently it is not possible to move the whole network from one service provider to another provider[1]. This makes the switching cost high when a member of a FaceBook social network decides to switch media site and join another provider network site. The threat of new entrants in this case is medium. Lots of online social networking sites are been launched even though few is as popular as FaceBook even though the young generation starts to move towards other sites as these continue to be launched and the trend continues.
Due to the popularity FaceBook has created a position which looks like an entry barrier for other social media sites. As the number of people who are using FaceBook is as high as it is in comparison to other sites the entry barrier lies in the quantity of “followers” on the FaceBook site.
Since many similar online social network sites exist, the rivalry among existing competitors is fierce.
Figure 2.1: Source: Michael Porters “Five forces model”
Revenue generated to FaceBook comes from online ads and subscription to premium services. What is interesting for FaceBook is the cost of gaining new costumers is very low as users join voluntarily and provide their own content through their profiles. In addition the cost of running the sites of FaceBook and the web servers is also relatively low. So a fast conclusion could be using a classic advertising and subscription revenue model will gain substantial profitability due to low cost social network sites. The idea that marketing and communication activities in information-intensive environments must be transformed and reconstructed has been recognized by numerous researchers (e.g. Glazer 1991, Reid 1991, Blattberg, Glazer and Little, 1994). Most important from a marketing perspective, however, is the manner in which the Social Media network changes the marketing and communication structure.


[1] From October 2010 FaceBook has made it possible to move your site from FaceBook to another provider without any cost. This is to soften the critic from the users of FaceBook being a monopolistic in handling collaboration.

lørdag den 16. april 2011

What binds the Social Media, SaaS and Cloud Services together?

Looking for a link between the 3 concepts, the first word that makes sense and seems like the “glue” is the word change:

  • Social media is changing the communication between consumers and businesses. Communication is shifting from One-to-many to the Many-to-many model.

  • SaaS (Software as a Service) is changing the way on how businesses and consumers buy software. Where the buying process is license based shifting to be service based on demand.

  • Cloud services - is changing the way of how hardware and Software products will be sold to businesses and consumers. Capacity and volume is going from be on a dedicated server to be on a cloud device.

Social Media is a key enabler for SaaS because it enables low cost and effective marketing and sales capabilities. The resellers are not ready for any of these changes either in selling and delivering products as services. The resellers will be looking to their vendors for leadership in this new paradigm. Some traditional vendors are going to push their resellers into bankruptcy by pressuring them to sell products rather than Cloud services. The old channel/paradigm is going to have to make some tough choices very soon. A new channel is going to emerge to specialize in selling Cloud services and not hardware or software products. (Mike Dubrall 2010)
One reason it is so difficult for the vendors to change from selling licenses and products is the struggle to make the same high profit in selling software as a service and cloud services. The profit in selling the new services has to be found in the social media way of thinking and the google model of selling advertising space together with your services. Social media is critical. It gives everyone “hands-on” experience and a glimpse of how channels and costumers of the future are going to look and act.
As we can see the costumer has gained a central place in the strategy thinking as companies in the traditional (Old paradigm) tried to “attack” the costumer with pervasive messages to make them buy more products/services. With the “Social Media” a new turn has been taken to get the costumer to the next level to join, co-create critic the company’s product and marketing strategy in short to make the costumer an influencer/collaborator rather than  autonomous on the product (Mohr & Nevin 1990).

fredag den 8. april 2011

The influence of Social Media on the shifting power from enterprise to consumer

The shift in power from enterprises to consumer has been seen during the exploding use of the internet as information can be spread over the globe in seconds control is now very much in the hands of the consumer. According to Jarvis (2009):
“Previously, the powerful enterprises, institutions and governments believed they were in control, and they were. Now the internet allows us to speak to the world, to organize ourselves, to find and spread information, to challenge old paradigms and to retake control”
What makes the internet so interesting for all involved parties is the creation of a total new marketplace – a virtual place where products, services and information exist in a digital version and can be delivered in the same digital version through all channels (Rayport and Svikola, 1994)
Companies and consumers have been quickly to adopt the new marketplace for their own benefits. The new interactive channels allowed companies to reach new markets or even expand the influence on the existing ones and the consumers had suddenly the opportunity to save time and money in gathering information when buying products and services online. The interaction approach has been researched in marketing literature and particularly in Sweden at Uppsala University in 1960s the thesis’s has been developed about interaction” Between the parties in a network various interactions take place where exchange and adaptations to each other occur.” A flow of goods and information as well as financial and social exchanges takes place in the network (Håkansson, 1982 and Johanson and Mattsson 1985 and Kock 1991).
The interactive dialog between the exchanging parties has increased with the commercial internet (Peters, 1998). The new market space described in figure 2.2 has changed the behaviour and the value creation and communication models. 

(Source: The managed innovation Group LLC, 2005) (Figure 2.2)

The shift has gone from One (company)-to-Many (consumers) model, where the value for the user comes from a high content of quality and reliability and authority of the company to the Many-to-Many model where the value for the user comes from an infrastructure for active participation in
content creation and a community of trusted co-creators. This means that the contribution to the medium and the message will come from both directions (Hoffman and Novak, 1996). The opportunity for the company in the one-to-many model comes from developing high content, understanding the needs of advertisers and building stronger relationships with these. When the model shift to the many-to-many model the opportunity for the company comes from building communities of reader/writer/editors with very high levels of participation and loyalty; reduced content creation/acquisition costs, increased audience size by creating viral groups of creator /marketers, improved content quality by providing tools for trust, credibility and reliability, and quality using technologies such as collaborative editing, reputation managers, public profiles, social networks and recommendations based on friends and contacts. The argumentation from Chaffey (Dave Chaffey et al 2007) is that the kind of communication mentioned above allows messages send through the internet to be targeted more effectively.
The consumer can go all the way from awareness to interest to desire to action all in the same medium at the same time. The popular way of expressing this new communication style is mentioned in figure 2.3. According to Peters (1998) there are 4 changes in the new “social media communications model” compared with the old media “Broadcast model”.

Social media communications changes
Contents
The communications style
– tend to have a little or no time lag between the giving, receiving and responding aspects of communication between parties.

Social presence
-or perceived personalness, the feeling that communication exchanges are sociable warm, personal, sensitive and active.
Control of contact
-early research into willingness of consumers to utilize technology I shopping behaviour concludes that the ability to control the pace and presentation of product information has the strongest influence on willingness to engage in computer mediated marketing activity (Carson et al 1996)
Content
-The content can be customised either by users
or by senders. Where users are able to control the content, or presentation of the message it is said to be interactive
Table: 2.2 Peters (1998) Social media communication model compared with the old Broadcast model

The emergence of new digital technologies signals a radical shift of who is in control of information, experience and resources (Shapiro, 1999). A key feature of the new Social media working in the digital technology is how it is value creating towards the users. The value for the consumer is that an infrastructure for active participation and even control in contact and content creation has been made possible (Peters, 1998) According to Normann and Ramirez (1994) a community of co-creators/ producers has been created for the consumers as interaction is possible among different players, hereunder suppliers, costumers, employees and managers. A result for the marketer and the enterprise company is they are loosing control over the communication which is delivered to their consumers.
According to Gatarski and Lundkvist (1998) communication is interactive when we are talking of the meaning of sharing information and creating simple messages for two way conversations. These conversations can be applied in production when generating mutual ideas creating new products and services.

Conclusion
When enterprises recognize this paradigm shift in control is when they can stop grapping on to what is lost, and start investing in what is really going to engage consumers. If the enterprises business objectives can be reached, engagement means supplying engaging content which is a way and a place to talk about the product and services. The control can be seeded out to the consumer, and it is possible that the word which is spread about an enterprise and its products and services can have a positive impact on the enterprises business. To reach a positive word of mouth it has been stated in the literature review that if you respect the consumers and their community they will respect you as an enterprise. This is a simple rule which can be summed up that enterprises have to behave in a way that is suitable to the environment they are in. Enterprises are in a community inhabited by humans, and these humans may be online, but that makes them no less human and may choose to engage or ignore an enterprise on these premises.

søndag den 3. april 2011

Web 2.0 and Social Media - will Web 3.0 contribute with something significant ?

What is Web 2.0?
In the marketing literature Web 2.0 and Social Media/networks are mentioned as interchangeable. The term Web 2.0 has been introduced by Tim O´Reilly (2005) and was quickly used in Silicon Valley as a notion emphasizing the comeback of a renewed internet. The original definition made by O´Reilly focus on the common elements of the new generation of web applications: “The Web as a platform, harnessing collective intelligence. Data is the next Intel inside. End of the software release cycle.” The discussion among authors has delivered several suggestions of what Web 2.0 really covers. Doing a Google search on Web 2.0 you will get several million results of definitions of Web 2.0. The academic literature has not made a clear picture what the terms really means, attempts has been made to describe the Web 2.0 applications as a first step towards a comprehensive definition (Needleman 2007; Coyle, 2007; Anderson, 2007). Hoegg et al (2007) notes that many of the definitions do not attempt to rationalize the core philosophy of Web 2.0 but rather describe its symptoms. These authors explain their views of Web 2.0 as “the objective of all Web 2.0 services is to mutually maximize the collective intelligence of the participants”.  The definition proposed by Constantinides and Fountain (2008) combines and collects the technologies and social elements of the Web 2.0 concept:
Web 2.0 is a collection of open source, interactive[1] and user controlled online applications expanding the experiences, knowledge and market power of the users as participations in business and social processes. Web 2.0 applications support the creation of information user’s networks facilitating the flow of ideas and knowledge by allowing the efficient generation, dissemination, sharing and editing/refining of content. 

What is web 3.0? 
Web 3.0 is described by Tim Berners (Founder of WWW) as the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is:
  • A place where machines can read web pages as human reads them.
  • A place where search engines and software agents can troll the net and find what we are looking for.
  • It is a set of standards that turns the web into one big database (Nova Sivack 2008)

There are two “Schools” working with the semantic web. The first “school” is working with a reannotation of the web, adding all sorts of machine-readable metadata to the human readable web pages everyone use today. This metadata are in place, including the Recourse Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and this is already been made into real world sites, services and other tools. The Semantic Web metadata underpins today Yahoo´s food site and Oracles Spatial database tool. The problem for this “school” is that making a complete rennotation of the Web is a massive undertaking. As a user you get the aility to do all these very complex queries, but it takes a tremendous amount of time and resources and metadata to make that happen.
The second “school” takes another approach to make it easy to work with huge amounts of data, they are building agents that can better understand Web pages as they exist today. This “school” are not making the pages easier to read, they are making the software agents smarter. Examples of this is the BlueOrganizer and AdaptiveBlue. The software agents/browser plug-in works as when you visit a Web page the browser plug-in can understand what the page is about and automatically retrieve related information from other sites and services. What need to be done is to further develop the technology to be able to parse and process existing services and databases to able to serve the internet users even better.
As we can see for the movement we will have to “live with” Web 2.0 for a while until it is even more profitable to further develop the Web 3.0 capabilities.


[1] Exchange of goods, services, information as part of reciprocity