Page 46 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

In this chapter, we explain how to do that. Having a firm grip on the lay of the land
in the social web makes it easier to craft a marketing plan that works with it.
Understanding what your competitors are doing helps you understand your cus-
tomers’ expectations.

Classifying Consumer Activities

Before you launch a social media marketing campaign, you need to have a feel for
what activities consumers undertake on the social web. After all, your marketing
campaign is far more likely to succeed if it is in harmony with what consumers are
trying to accomplish on the social web. Consumer activity on the social web is
classified into these eight categories:

» Information: The Internet, with its academic roots, was conceived as a virtual
library and an information-sharing tool. And to this day, consumers use the
Internet for finding information more than anything else. In fact, it’s no
surprise that Google and Yahoo are two of the top five web destinations.
(Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon are the other three.) Google and Yahoo are
at the top because they’re primary search engines, helping consumers find
the information they’re looking for. That hasn’t changed, and even with the
Internet going increasingly social, searching and finding information remains
the number-one consumer activity online. If you’re running a marketing
campaign for a product or service that consumers seek, you’re most likely to
get strong results. When people are in “information seeker” mode, they’re
most apt to participate in campaigns.
» News: One primary use for the Internet is news. More people read the news
online than watch it on cable television. The instant, real-time nature of news
makes it particularly suited for the Internet. Many cable television channels
promote their websites to their TV audiences. But what’s even more interesting
is that practically all the major news websites integrate social media functional-
ity into their user experience. When you go to www.cnn.com, www.nytimes.
com, or www.washingtonpost.com, you notice that journalists have blogs and
that the articles allow for commenting and ratings. Figure 2-1 shows the blogs
offered by The New York Times. News sites often integrate video clips as well.
With news, your marketing opportunity differs slightly. Consumers are more
receptive to the campaigns if your product or service is either contextualized
in some form to what they’re reading or is directly targeted toward them.
What’s more, marketing programs that have cultural relevance or that are in
the context of events in the broader world do better. People simply pay more
attention to what is topical versus what distracts them from the stories of
the day.

30 PART 1 Getting Started with Social Media Marketing