Startup the Conversation Contest

The biggest challenge facing start-up companies is generating awareness for new products or services. Traditional advertising and marketing activities are costly and showing serious drops in effectiveness and RoI. Not to mention, the economy sucks and all businesses could use some help! So wouldn’t you like to win a conversation marketing strategic plan?

Conversation Marketing combines social media, influencer relations and other online/offline initiatives as a new way to connect with current and potential customers in the changing market landscape.

In 100 words tell us what the #1 conversation marketing benefit you’d like your company to achieve is and why—you could win more than $25,000 in Conversation Marketing services! No tricks, no gimmicks, no entry fees. Entries require only basic contact information which will not be sold or used to spam you!

The Prize
The winner will receive Conversation Marketing Strategy and Tactical services valued at 25,000 including:

• Strategic Conversation Marketing Plan
• Influencers Identification and Profiles
• Tactical Programs

To learn more about conversation marketing: http://www.idiomstrategies.com/

TO ENTER: http://www.idiomstrategies.com/contest/contest.html

Contest Guarantee:
There are a lot of companies who offer contests to trick the entrants into things they don’t want. We guarantee we are not doing this. We want to work with a start-up company who may not have the funds to engage a firm like ours so that we can illustrate how powerful this form of marketing is. We will do a case study write up on the work, but will not divulge any private or privileged information. Your contact information will not be passed on to anyone! We guarantee it.

We wanted to share a new conversation marketing eBooklet with you. Conversation is the Thing: Tips for Engaging in the Market Conversation (plain old pdf version.)

While looking at different options for publishing the eBooklet, I came across this really cool site, Issuu.com. There is a free version that looks fantastic. Basically you can publish documents as different types of publication looks (books, journals, presentations, etc.) with some very nice visual effects. It lets you embed the publications on your own site as I’ve done here.

I hope you’ll find the conversation marketing tips valuable and subscribe to our publications on issuu.com/idiomstategies.

A Duck, a Dog and a Donkey walk into a bar…

Conversation Marketing: Dog Explains

Yes. Smart marketers will find a way. It’s not a matter of jumping on the bandwagon with the unknown destination…it’s a matter of using conversation marketing with existing content to increase your page rankings, improve your SEO, or better target your leads…which conversation marketing done the right way does.

So yes, Mrs. CMO — you do have to include Conversation Marketing in your marketing strategies…well, if you want to increase your SEO and rankings, yes you do.

How do you fund conversation marketing or social media initiatives?

We think there is a paradigm shift  happening in marketing’s market conversation–a change from the concepts of just social media marketing to conversation marketing–strategic and tactical ways in which a company chooses to participate/engage/interact in the market conversation. As opposed to the typical definition of Social Media Marketing, Conversation Marketing focuses on building mutually beneficial relationships with Influencers; responding to market conversation topics and initiating topics that do not include traditional marketing messages; extrapolating market conversation content to utilize as company/product proof points and to counter sales objections; and internalizing the market conversation for business growth.

We hope to have the rest of the series out soon. Enjoy!

Everyone is talking about it these days.

What is it?  Ways a company should use it. Even why companies should not tweet. 

Friday, it truly entered the mainstream..

Oprah has entered the Twitterverse.

Even before her first tweet, Oprah had more than 73,000 followers. Hours later, that number has nearly doubled. Twitter itself has been experiencing phenomenal membership growth.

So people are asking…

Will this be the demise of Twitter?

I don’t think Twitter is going away any time soon. People will just change how they interact with it.

Even though I don’t follow hundreds of people, I sometimes get overwhelmed with the number of tweets I go through daily. There is a lot of noise out there. Once the ‘Oprah Effect’ fully takes its course, the noise will be exponential.

I’m sure there will be more and more ways for customizing and filtering tweets for people to get through the noise. (Just look how RSS has done that for other types of content.)

That’s only part of the equation of filtering the noise.

The other part…reputation.

One of the people I follow Twitter regularly adds value and tweets about product experiences, movies, events, music, and other things that are interesting and/or helpful. This person captures my attention. I typically will read every tweet this person writes.  

One the other hand, one of my other friends on Twitter writes mostly about what they had for breakfast/lunch/dinner (or other things that add no value). After reading their tweets over the past few weeks, I now skip reading their tweets

(even though technically I’m still a ‘follower’).

Reading tweets on my phone, I use this simple filtering system:

People who regularly write interesting tweets = Pay attention.

People who don’t = Skip/Ignore.

I’m sure a lot of you do exactly the same thing.

The reason I mention it is that it illustrates why just joining the conversation is not enough. It’s about adding value to the market conversation.

Companies that listen to what’s being said, contribute with (non-marketing-speak) content that people want to respond to, comment and share their views will build a strong reputation – breaking through the increasing noise. This will also enhance their relationship with their prospects and customers and help position them as a quality participant in the market conversation.

In doing all this… companies will actually be able to reap the benefits of the upcoming ‘Oprah Effect’.

The benefits to joining the conversation are many. Some of the best sales tools and product features ideas can come from participants who take the time to offer feedback. This provides valuable user generated content to help drive your business and most important, been able to extract content to offset sales objection. However, the prevalent benefit I see is that providing a platform for your customers and prospects, and leveraging that feedback in the form of actionable insight for product, marketing and sales strategy on an ongoing basis. Remember, this does not give companies a license to plastering their marketing messages in the different social media locations. Your customers and prospects are looking to fulfill their wants and needs, provide relevant information, NOT your products and services marketing pitch.

More importantly, companies will find that they become an increasingly important player in their industry, an influencer themselves when they become a trusted advisor. They will find that surprising and disruptive opportunities materialize that would never have been there if they hadn’t been engaged in the market conversation.

To actively participate in the conversation require an ongoing investment of employee time and effort, but the benefits can be tremendous:
• Build relationships with influencers
• Raise meaningful industry topics
• Increase brand visibility
• Increase direct inquires that are also more qualified leads
• Increase sales
• Increase sales win ratios
• Increase customer retention
• Reduce impact from negative user-generated content
• Decrease market research costs
• Increase equity of your created content

Join this conversation and share with us on why B2B companies should participate in the market conversation. I will share the “how” in my next blog post.

Why Social Media Fails–and How to Fix It was a panel that included Peter Kim of the Dachis Corporation, Charlene Li of The Altimeter Group and Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research. The audio from the session can be heard here. They covered issues that most marketers are trying to determine how to address when it comes to instituting social media programs:

1. How can I get my culture to adapt?
2. How can I make my campaigns work?
3. What am I supposed to measure?
4. Does social media even matter?

The comments by the panel and comments and questions from the audience were interesting. I agreed with some and didn’t agree with others. I urge you to listen and decide for yourself. In my humble opinion (ok, I’m not actually that humble), the answers to these questions are:

1. Business cultures probably don’t need too much adoption so long as you don’t approach the Head Hancho with a plan for “social media marketing.” Executives have always been open to “how to achieve the company goals.” Your plug for funding your programs would be better received if you highlight how “participating the market conversation” and “interacting with Influencers, Participants and Listeners” of the market conversation will achieve increased sales win ratios, more qualified direct leads, shorter sales cycles and reduced costs in consumer research.
2. You can’t make your social media campaigns work. As Charlene commented during the session, you need to stop considering these tactics as campaigns. What you can do to get quantitative results is to continually practice, as a company, active interaction with the market conversation ecosystem, whether through social media technologies or at a face-to-face meeting. Don’t forget, though, that ecosystem will turn you off if you come at them with the same old marketing bullet points and sales pitches. Don’t talk at people, have a conversation with them.
3. First and foremost, you need to measure what prompted a sale. No matter what, marketing can only be measured successfully if you know why your customers actually purchased. Brand building is very important, but not that measurable in statistics. What finally prompted a sale to happen is something you can easily ask your customer. Other than that, you want to measure the amount of interaction your company has with current and potential customers, the quality of the market conversation content (do they mention your company/product? Are your product offerings in line with what the market conversation says it wants/needs? Are you listening to the conversation to make sure your roadmap is going in the right direction? Are you addressing the market conversation with how to help fulfill their wants and needs or just with why your product should be what fulfills those wants/needs?
4. Absolutely. People are social. We build vast and complex networks of family, friends, co-workers, neighbors, community members, etc. With the new technologies now available these networks have become even larger and more complex. People want to know. They want to share. They’re looking for advice. No one is an expert on everything, and no matter who you are, there will be a time when you have a want or need to fulfill but you don’t want to make a decision without the knowledge of experts. You’ll hope to find someone who can share their experience on fulfilling the same need or want.

The Conversation is what businesses need to focus on and social media technologies are the crowning jewel of tools to achieve that.

Next on the agenda is a Web2Open unconference session to talk about engaging with the market conversation ecosystem to achieve business goal. And later, Tara Hunt’s session: The Whuffie Factor: The 5 Keys for Maxing Social Capital and Winning with Online Communities which will cover these five key points from her soon to be released new book The Whuffie Factor.

Yan, Tony and I will be blogging regularly about our thoughts, experiences and insights as conversation marketing professionals. You can read more about why we’ve started this blog on the About page or click on one of our names to learn more about us individually. In short, we are marketers who see that traditional marketing no longer works well and that companies can benefit by participating in the market conversation “with” Influencers and consumers rather than by talking “at” them with advertisements, sales pitches and press releases.

Social media and other online technologies have brought people together to share, compare, discuss and influence one another like no technology has before. But we also know that one-on-one conversations over the phone, via email and in person have not disappeared. A company’s specific market conversation is going on everywhere and by joining those conversations and participating with quality content that addresses the needs and wants of consumers, companies will:

• Increase brand visibility:
  If you’re participating with quality content rather than marketing bullet point messages more people will be noticing you rather than ignoring your ads.
• Decrease market research costs:
  You won’t need to spend as much on focus groups or market research because you’re paying attention to what the market needs.
• Reduce the impact from negative user-generated content:
  Not everyone in the world will love you and you will have some customers who are unhappy, but conversing with them both in public and private to resolve their issue deters them from telling everyone else that you’re a bad company.
• Increase the number of direct inquires and get more qualified leads:
  Potential customers will have a better understanding of who you are and what you offer before they contact you.
• Increase sales:
  When you actively interact with the entire conversation ecosystem you’ll expand your brand awareness and improve brand perception.
• Increase sales win ratios:
  Your sales team will be able to counter sales objections with relevant content from the market conversation.
• Increase customer retention:
  Actively communicating with your customers and the communities they’re involved with makes it less likely that they’ll leave.
• Increase equity of your created content:
  You’ll leverage activities in the market conversation to expand the reach of your created content.

As Yan, Tony and I continue to expand our thoughts on these topics, we hope you’ll join in with comments and share your experiences.