Below are points from the book that I found most remarkable, some what focus areas for traditional Marketeers and the young tech savy Agencies handling online marketing. ..
Will keep updating the post as and when I get around to completing the book.
- "Your customers are already talking about you. The fact that you aren’t participating is yourimplicit endorsement of whatever it is that they are saying."
- social media is driving interconnectedness to a whole new level!
- Trust is essential to any form of conversation on the Social Web.
- It is the democratization of information on the internet space; by the people, of the people and for the people
- So how do you influence a crowd? Well, given that you can’t tell “it” what tothink, going the direct control route is probably a loser. Instead, listen to it. Tap it.Learn from it. And then “do that.” One of the characteristics of social media is thatyou can listen to it, measure it, and track it over time. You can use what you learn tomodify and improve what you offer, and in so doing influence the online conversation.
- It is Participatory in nature
- Recent studieshave shown that of the estimated 3.5 billion word-of-mouth conversations that occuraround the world each day, about 2.3 billion of them — roughly two out of three —make a reference to a brand, product, or service. Word of mouth is increasingly manifestingitself through digital social media, where it spreads both farther and faster. Thisuse of the Social Web is increasingly important to marketers.
- Communities — whether formallybuilt around a specific interest or cause, or informally built through more casualconnections — sit at the center of the Social Web.
- Step back and look at most traditional forms of media: They are “push” and“tell” oriented. They place the marketer in control of the message and dictate for theconsumer a subservient role. Social media tips this balance: On the Social Web, boththe consumer and the marketer have an equal voice in terms of permission to speak.This not the same as implied trust, which is something else altogether, but it does serveto support the notion that as a marketer you need to participate in the communities ofwhich your audience is a part in order to gain trust.
- Your existing customers are — orshould be — among your strongest evangelists. After all, they are buying your productTip: The addition of consideration-phase marketing bridges a critical gap for marketers between awarenessand purchase while opening the channel for effective word-of-mouth.85■ C ons ideration and the Pur chase Funn elagain and again...they must like it! Your objective should be to get them to talk abouttheir positive experiences. This gives you the double benefit of making the currentsale — to them — and a future sale to the new customer that they create for you.
- These twodevelopments — the realization of a global network and the digitization of content —multiplied each other, driving the growth in the use of the Web as an information andfulfillment platform.
