Overdue marketing rant...will the value be diluted?
Well I suppose it's long overdue...I have not shared my marketing goings-on in forever it seems like, so here goes.
Did I leave you hanging? We did in fact launch our new corporate website several weeks ago. Everything went off without a hitch, and by and large all reports are that people love the face lift.
So, now what? That's the question we've been chewing on in the absence of aftermath, destruction or chaos. Things that were put off for so long can now again be a priority. Much touted interactive features. The changes to our online home allow people to find what they need much more easily, but they still fall short of creating an environment for two-way interaction. We're working on several new initiatives that make a medium for conversation with our constituents and to not by passed by in the social media - social marketing explosion.
While the social internet has grown to encompass millions of cyberwalkers, it has yet to become the standard. I believe it's still on the cusp of the "mainstream" - wherein real fireworks happen. When every organization online figures out the enormous potential for this, and adopts it, then blogs will be as common as the 1998-inspired site with iframes. This begs the question, will the value be diluted?
In keeping up with my internet marketing news I learned that the market for search advertising is well over $5bn. If it isn't already, it'll probably approach $9 or $10Bn very soon. So my question, again, is...will the value be diluted? If every company under the sun is spending a big chunk of their marketing budget on getting their impressions for Google searches, not only can Google up the ante but they have. If every company under the sun is in your search result, the competition drives prices up and dilutes or completely eradicates any advantage people found from this medium early on.
Again, blogs are becoming a part of mainstream media- you'll notice that TV News personalities all have blogs online now where you can go to learn about the news or to find online resources they mentioned on air. Eventually we'll all have blogs, and then they will offer no real marketing advantage. The trick then is to be quick about implementing it. For those people who work in high tech companies, being agile and acting on the latest cutting edge phenomenon may be as obvious as getting your next Diet Coke from the company kitchen. For the rest of us, change happens slowly, and that is where the fight is.
Any suggestions for making it happen faster? Or is it better to just let things happen as they happen.
You'll find that technical experimentation on a trial scale is cheap to do. Google does this every day by pushing their people to experiment and "fail fast." Failing fast minimizes risk; failing fast frequently across all of the employees in your organization gives you the opportunity to hit the jackpot on even a couple great ideas that gain traction.
The problem you're encountering (and it's not in only your business) is the risk-averse, liability-driven paralysis that happens when the business isn't really committed to exposing itself to the social media market. To taking chances. To allowing for an open and HONEST two-way HUMAN conversation with its customers. Too often we attempt to whitewash our customer comments, which we as consumers can all see through as a blatant lie. The best feedback loops on the web are the ones that harness and expose the positive and negative aspects of the customer experience.
Without the negative, how do we get better?
As for your comment about dilution, recall that the best/most popular blogs are the ones written by people, not companies. If anything, your corporate blog post will be lost in a flood of more relevant and useful comments made by others in their own personal forums. Dilution, in a marketers eyes, is really the effect of the democratization of the messaging. Everyone has an opinion - your sole objective should be to get people talking while realizing that you have zero control over the conversation once they start.
In this new world, you don't build your metrics around your corporate blog. You build them around everyone else's blogs, websites, forums and homepages. And in a remarkable act of self restraint, you don't squash the conversation when you don't like what you're hearing.