I like a good prediction post as much as the next person and so I was intrigued to read an article by Augie Ray from Forrester entitled: 2010: The Year Marketing Dies…
In it, Ray asserts that, due to a number of factors (including the demise of traditional media, the growth of technologies like PVRs that are rendering TV advertising obsolete and the growth of social media), marketing as we know it is under going a dramatic sea-change.
And 2010 is guaranteed to be the year when social media has its biggest impact on brands to date. The recent real-time search changes will only quicken this as I’ve already suggested and as Ray states:
The search engine changes mean that 2010 will be the year when brands can run but they cannot hide. Gone are the days when marketers could carefully craft messaging and then broadcast that message in a few channels to huge portions of their audiences. Oh, you can still spend money that way if you want to but in our transparent world, no marketing budget can possibly overcome the actual experience consumers have (and share with friends, followers and Google) with the product, service, or organization. It no longer matters what you say; in 2010, your brand will be more defined by what you do and who you are!
So actual experience will replace the image that brands want to portray about themselves, especially as we all get more involved in social media and climb up the social technographics ladder (see above). What does this mean in practice?
customer service and customer experience becomes vital
product development needs to be more user focused
marketing and PR teams need to be ready to act and react to issues; crisis management becomes crucial, but harder
marketing and PR campaigns need to focus on engagement rather than trying to enforce brand values
no part of the business can afford to ignore the audience
Central to all of these is the ability to understand your audience. One line in particular in Ray’s article is fundamental to this too:
“in 2010, your brand will be more defined by what you do and who you are”
With the media scrum around all things Twitter at the moment, it’s no surprise that the ‘revenue-model’ issue would raise its jealous little head.
If I was in charge, I wouldn’t be worrying about revenue models. They are on the tip of an iceberg. Now the focus should be on improving the service as numbers grow and securing its position amongst the legions of copy-cats that have and will come along.
This story feels slightly odd. It has been widely reported before that this was on the cards, but would Biz Stone really reveal all at this point in time to Marketing?
Much as I love Marketing, I think they might be jumping the gun slightly. Stone said:
“We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts.” [my emphasis]
I would suggest this is merely one model being looked at. And I doubt it would be possible to implement. The chief obstruction in my mind is how on earth they would differentiate (and/or police) brand accounts and personal accounts? Maybe by limiting follower numbers? But then some of the biggest Twitter ‘celebrities’ have huge numbers on their personal accounts – and yet they are possibly the most powerful brands using the service [a subject for another post me thinks]. Any my own account often transcends biz/personal boundaries…
Robin Grant from Wearesocial makes some additional, valid arguments in the comments under the original article [it seems his words were slightly skewed too...]
I’m sure Twitter will resolve this issue well before the VC cash runs dry. Either they will sell up to the big G, or will work out a way to fund themselves with the x million users they currently have and the endless numbers they will surely attract in months to come.
Tuesday was a great day. We sat in the office, in awe of an undoubtedly great man. We were transfixed.
As Paul Carr said in his weekly column, the usual British cynicism that so often comes to the fore when anything American is concerned disappeared like $1 Obama water offered to a million-strong crowd.
The reason: he’s a great, natural marketer.
From day one, Obama has marketed himself brilliantly. There was a great comment piece in last month’s Revolution magazine which compared some of Obama’s early speeches from before he won the nomination to the email he sent on the night he was elected. The messages were almost identical.
That’s great branding. Great messaging and great strategy. We are always telling our clients that if you get the messaging right at the start, then everything else follows and works much better. It’s true and Obama knows it. I guess from a political standpoint, it suggests that this is also a person who is true to his beliefs and his vision. A good business lesson too.
Sure, he was very different to what went before, and that certainly helps. But so is the best marketing. And Obama accentuates and plays on these differences, if subtlety. Marketing the same message in the same way as everyone else is only going to get you so far. Doing something different, something unique, gets you noticed.
David Meerman Scott has brilliantly demonstrated the linguistic differences between Obama’s inaugural address and the one Bush gave 4 years ago. It’s subtle but it seems to hit home.
As Seth Godin says: be remarkable. Obama is certainly remarkable – the person and the brand.
Politically speaking, the hard work starts now. And, at the end of the day, he is a politician, not a marketer.
But in the days when countries are hiring PR agencies, what better leader to have than one that seems to understand how to inspire, persuade and communicate effectively to his own country and globally.
