Digital Tip digital and social media advertising

Digital Tip

Digital advertising & social media marketing, Sydney, Australia

social media

Are you marketing to your ego?

David Meerman Scott will be at the next Social Media Club Sydney (SMCSYD) event to talk about how marketers can “understand social personas and stop wasting money and resources”
David has many case studies on his blog and his book World Wide Rave, but the post that leapt out at me takes it one step earlier in the process referring to the marketplace being the outside world and not your office.

His question to all of us marketing in the new era:

1. Do you market to your ego? Or to the external marketplace?
2. Focus on your buyers, not your bosses.
3. The marketplace is the outside world, not your comfortable office

Social media accountability is a two way street

Accountability has been a big by-product of social media going mainstream. Companies are now being held accountable for bad behaviour, shonky customer service and dubious ethics by the blogosphere, and by the visibility and search-ability of social conversations across social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed. The old, impenetrable castle walls of faceless, anonymous corporate brands are in the process of being dismantled by the dispersed people power of social networks. The PR spin doctors can no longer control the message.

On the whole, social media has built a culture of authenticity, transparency and trust. So what happens when anonymous bad behaviour is demonstrated by the blogosphere?

A social media elevator speech

As today was designated Recycle a Blog Post Day, I decided to go back to my very first post, which was written to explain web 2.0 as a digital trend to a traditional advertising agency I was working for at the time. The only thing I’ve changed is the title and added and substituted “social media for web 2.0 in the post

One of the first questions people ask me about digital trends is “What’s so great about social media?” The easiest way to describe it is to use the 30 second elevator speech.

How Facebook privacy is being eroded for advertising

Facebook signup continues to grow at exponential rates across the globe. In three months since April 2009, they’ve added another 50 million users If you’re looking for statistics on Facebook’s infiltration into individual countries, the CheckFacebook site provides great stats about Australia.

What’s so great about Tumblr?

Tumblr, the NY based, mini blogging or micro blogging service, seems to be reaching critical mass, now hosting more than a million blogs. It’s been described as “the easiest way to share yourself” It’s the essence of the social web – Tumblr has had some high profile blogs get book deals based on popularity along, such as LATFH, and This is Why Your Fat. Smart copy and ideas get a lot of traction, like Wordboner, and Steal Our Ideas. Tumblr has created an entire sub-culture of categorized, sharable content, F***Yeah Tumblrs such as F***YeahBabyAnimals.
If you’re not familiar with it, its like a cross between Twitter and a more traditional blog such as Wordpress or Blogger. I fell in love with Tumblr a few months ago, because its so easy to use and intuitive. It became a way to keep the photos, conversations and links recorded in a timeline. I realised when I started using it that I’m a compulsive sharer, and it became a fun extension of the kinds of things I like in my personal life, a more aesthetic focus than my Wordpress blog where I write about work related subjects
What’s so great about Tumblr then?

How social media influences trust in advertising

Last week Nielsen released the 2009 Global Online Consumer Survey of over 25,000 Internet consumers from 50 countries. The survey covers degrees of trust consumers have for advertisers/brands. The top 3 are worth highlighting:

* 90% of consumers surveyed trusted recommendations from people they knew personally
* 70% trusted opinions from other consumers posted online
* 70% trusted brand websites
The key takeaway for me is that “strangers” opinions posted online offer as much trust to the consumer as the company website. That can be a glass half full or half empty depending which side of the social fence you sit on.