Page 64 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

3. Turn customers into brand advocates.
And finally, after a consumer becomes a customer, deepen your relationship
with her so that the customer becomes a brand advocate. That’s not a new
strategy, except that now you can ask her to take specific actions within her
social networks as a brand advocate. Rather than just ask her to talk about
your product, you can have her actually reach out to her peers and then
reward her for her participation.

Dipping into Hot SMM Concepts

One way to stay ahead of the competition is to keep abreast of the marketing
trends that directly affect your customers. Several major trends have recently
impacted the social media realm. You should determine whether those trends
apply to your situation. Even if you do not immediately see a way to apply them,
you’ll want to monitor them closely. We mention them here and cover them more
in depth in the chapters cited below.

Discovering gamification

There are basically two camps of people online — those who believe that online
games are a complete waste of time and those who find them irresistible. But are
social games actually games? They are, and again, they aren’t. Social games incor-
porate game techniques in a social setting with the aim of encouraging you to
interact with a business, a charity, or perhaps an educational entity, to name
a few.

You’re playing a social game if you are on one of the social media platforms and
the game encourages you to take action that surrounds a brand. Where do these
social gamers like to play?

Typically when you think of a “gamer,” you might think of an adolescent with lots
of time and energy to master ever higher levels of game play. But actually, accord-
ing to the same study, the average social gamer is a 43-year-old woman. Busi-
nesses of all types are creating games that integrate the use of their products with
the daily play. One example of this is Clarins, a French cosmetics company. Their
game Spa Life on Facebook is about the challenges of running a spa. Their prod-
ucts are used at the spa and become part of the game solution.

But lest you think it’s all for fun, gamification takes several different cuts at the
online game experience. In September of 2011, a group of gamers who play at a site
called Foldit was asked to help solve a complex protein folding puzzle that had

48 PART 1 Getting Started with Social Media Marketing