The Semacraft Blog

originally posted at muchiri.com

Is it the market’s business what you do after hours?  Is it the customer’s business where you sourced your raw materials, whether the CEO is faithful to his wife or even the CMO’s stand on healthcare reform? Shouldn’t all that matters be the product or service the brand promotes consistently at the perfect price, place & packaging?

Divorce rates in the UK currently stand at about 11.5% per 1,000 married couples.  In the US, the rate is at 3.5%.   When you consider that marriage rates in the US are at about 7.1% per 1,000 this means half as many people are getting divorced as are getting married.  Obviously the idea of failed marriages is not a foreign one.  And then there’s the permissive nature of today’s urban society.  So why the outrage at Tiger Woods and John Terry for infidelity?  They are not even in the marriage business! They are sports personalities!

Apparently, the consumer’s business extends to what famous people do when they are not doing what they are famous for. On this side of the new normal customers aren’t choosing which brands to be loyal to solely based on the price or quality, it’s now about the other things the brand does when it’s not ‘at work’. It’s about all the other peripheral things that have nothing to do with how the product is produced.

What do you tweet about when you’re not tweeting about your product/service? What was your last ‘unrelated’ Facebook post? What have you done for your customers lately that had nothing (or little) to do with you?

Lesson for business? There’s no clocking out. You’re at work 24/7/365. You’re not helpful only when customer’s need more information about your product or following up on a proposal you sent. It’s now all about the customer and what they think is important. If your tweets, status updates, videos and photos are all about you then you’re just a self-obsessed brand people have little time for. Find out what your customers are passionate about and become passionate about them. Be helpful on the customer’s terms.

It’s how I think it is. What do you think?

We see ourselves as an agency that designs, monitors and manages our client’s presence on the Internet. The corporate website, I must admit, is almost always the first place we begin. However, for some brands, it isn’t always a practical approach. The way consumers are encountering brands online is changing fast and the corporate website is not necessarily the first place they look.  Or the search engines either.
Many consumers rely on what their peers say about the brand on social media platforms or regular word of mouth before they make the decision to check out the website.  This means the corporate website is now a last resort location for data (technical specs, pricing, contact info) that the consumer is unable to easily find on their peer networks.
In his post on the Six Pixels of Separation blog, Mitch Joel raises the point on whether the end of large website builds is here.  I agree with his perspective that the days when businesses built large websites where everything was centralized and the brand controlled the conversation are largely over.  That is why we should be thinking of a brand’s presence on the Internet beyond the corporate website because ‘beyond’ is where the consumer lives.

Of course this means the traditional ways of measuring ROI for online initiatives has to change.  Website analytics are now a very inadequate way of measuring a brand’s impact online.  Analytics now have to extend beyond website hits to mentions on Twitter & Facebook, views on YouTube and participation of consumers/prospects on other media such as LinkedIn.

Do you think you may be holding on to a dead website?

Social media websites introduced a new problem to the workplace. What to do about people spending all day on Facebook and Twitter. It’s not a new problem, these sites have been around for years. The solution many business managers/owners/policy makers are still coming up with is simple. Block them! Organizations responded the same way to Hotmail and Yahoo! email services.

There’s one very big difference between the workplace in the nineties and the workplace today.  There were no Internet enabled cell phones with Facebook apps installed on them.  The rationale for blocking the sites becomes fairly impractical when your staff can update their status, giggle at a funny picture or chat with their friends on their favorite social media tool. Oh, and their cell phones are connected ALL DAY.

The Nielsen Company recently published a study showing we are spending 82% more time year on year on social media sites.  That simply means, despite your business’ best efforts to block access by your staff to these sites, they spent 82% more minutes updating, sharing and giggling on them last year than the year before.  It’s a futile waste of time trying to block them.  My advice to you Mr. CEO is simple.  If you can’t beat them, join them!  They are out there spending time connecting with others, creating content and sharing it whether you like it or not.  If you could get a word in edgewise they could be creating and sharing content about your brand.  If you showed them that the brand is interested in them, they may even use their status update to brag about you.

Instead of burying your corporate head in the sand, get yourself a good social media policy, implement it and become good at playing on the social media field.  Because whether you like it or not, the game will go on without you.

In his article on why brands are becoming media, Brian Sorlis makes a compelling case for why content strategy must be an integral platform on which we build our social media strategy.  Many marketers don’t have a documented content strategy despite aggressively pursuing multiple social media channels as business enablers.  These channels need content that is fresh, relevant and regular.  This means we need a plan.  Like magazines and newspapers, brands now need editors, writers and publishing calendars.

Writers need not be journalists contracted to develop and write articles for the brand on it chosen medium.  They can be staff members who blog about their area of expertise.  They can be brand evangelists who submit articles every so often on their experience with the brand.  They can be anyone!

I agree with Brian on the role Editors are now going to play.  Due to the increasing complexity of communication technology today, Editors need to be the hubs where social media, corporate website, print media and electronic (tv/radio) content generation and distribution meet.  As an absolute necessity, whoever plays the role of Editor (in-house employee or outsourced consultant) will have to be a part of the organisation’s web strategy conversation.

Do you have a documented web strategy? Content strategy? No? What are you waiting for?!