Using Social Media Marketing To Understand Buyer Desire

“Rivers of Revenue” is another books I highly recommend. In Chapter 3, Kristin Zhivago writes about tapping into buyer desire through customer interviews. In the current marketing environment, the growing adoption of blogs and social media tools make this easier and more effective than ever before. Through Technorati, BlogCatalog, and Google BlogSearch you can identify bloggers within your target market, and by commenting on these blogs, by truly adding to the conversation, you can overtime, obtain valuable “buyer-centric” feedback.

Let’s review a few of the reasons Zhivago outlines for conducting customer interviews and frame them in social media marketing terms.

The Unexpected & Unplanned For Success (Part II)

This post is a continuation of The Unexpected & Unplanned For Success (Part I)

Identifying & Responding To Unexpected Success

Identifying the unexpected success is likely the first challenge we as business builders face.  With respect to existing businesses, Drucker states that unexpected success events go unnoticed because “existing reporting systems do not as a rule report it, let alone clamor for management’s attention.”  Market analysis and management reports therefore need to be tailored to identify these opportunities.  In addition to focusing on area of under-performance, management reports could also include areas of over-performance.  They could ask, why did product or service xyz exceed both the company’s quantitative and qualitative performance metrics (financial, etc) ?

Who makes online content popular?

A common trend among websites is to rank free content stored at the site by popularity. Indeed, this is the entire basis behind social news and social bookmarking sites. However, video sharing sites, bloggers and even major news publishers, such at the New York Times Online and CNN online, have acquired this practice. The reason is simple: with so much online content at their disposal and to expedite good content discovery, many users prefer to assume that popular content is synonymous with good content. 50 million screaming fans can’t be wrong, right?

As interesting and relevant as this trend is, it begs an important question: who is responsible for the growth of content popularity? A recent article in the Journal of Interactive Marketing (DOI: 10.1002/dir.20111) by Guiyou Qiu and Purushottam Papatla addresses this very question. Using data made available by the social bookmarking site delicious.com, the authors tracked the growth of popularity of two items among site users. Here, popularity of an item grows as users add the item to their list of bookmarks. Strikingly, both items showed popularity growth curves that looked similar to the following:

The behavior behind online content sharing

Dan Zarrela conducted a fascinating survey that lends tremendous insight into the behavior of online content sharing internet users. If you are conducting a viral or word of mouth marketing campaign, his analysis is a must read. We’ll cover summarize the study and findings here for your convenience.

The study:

Dan issued a survey to 420 internet users and queried their sharing habits, resources and reasons. In particular, Dan evaluated the behavior of users of various social web technology resources (blogs, social news, email, twitter, facebook, etc.). Of specific focus were the following points:

Word-of-Mouth: It’s All About Emotions

According to WOMMA, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) is “marketing that leverages interpersonal communication between individuals to drive product awareness and growth,” and is comprised of five elements.

• Educating people about your products and services
• Identifying people most likely to share their opinions
• Providing tools that make it easier to share information
• Studying how, where, and when opinions are being shared
• Listening and responding to supporters, detractors, and neutrals

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