A Rock Star Marketer's Journal

Relationships?  Yes, relationships.  And not just any relationship.  Really solid relationships.  If you and your company have solid relations then you have the greatest potential of success within this new business and marketing landscape.  Social media has changed the way we communicate, engage and contribute .  At the very core, if your company “gets this” than you have the basic understanding of social marketing.  People and Relationships.

So put down the spreadsheets, strategy meetings, etc. and take one day to talk to your company about this concept:  Have good relations with every customer.

They say that everything that goes around, comes around.   Today this is true in two cases:

1.  This isn’t a new concept, but one that’s becoming more important.  Relationships work best where one party treats the other party how they would like to be treated.  If you treat others well the favor is returned.

2.   It’s also true in business trends.  Think back to the early days of companies (I’m talking early days, before the internet and big box retailers).  Let’s use the example of the local drugstore  where everyone knows your name, they know what you are going to pick up before you even come to the register and they even make house calls to get your medicine at all hours.   Aren’t we coming back to that?

At the very core of this business and marketing evolution its about people.  Individual people.  It’s not about a company relating to customers.  It’s about a company’s people relating with other people (historically called customers).  What social media has done is open the channels of communications.    Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and various other social mediums has allowed us to expand our relations instantly.  We can now communicate with other people singly through older methods (phone, snail mail) or several through new technologies Twitter, Facebook, email. Companies can now drill down to individuals.  And individual people (easily swelling  through these mediums) can relate back to companies through people.  Look at your personal life.  Are you communicating with more people in different way?

Are you good at relationships?   You always continue to build and build your circle of friends and network? You are a people person, have strong relationships than guess what, you are a natural-born social marketer!  Now just translate that asset company wide.

When it comes right down to it, one of the key elements in building a strategic social media marketing plan is building relationships. And those relations have are built on trust.  It was, in traditional marketing, marketers would send out messages about how good their products were. Blast them out through traditional vehicles such as TV, radio and print.  But now know there’s evidence that consumers/customers have learned to ignore these messages. Not only are we ignoring these messages through new technologies and the internet, we don’t trust them. Customer relationships with traditional brands have diminished.  This is partly why we are seeing new companies emerge and take brand equity and market share away from established competitors.  It’s why we are seeing new brands emerge, like Zappos - who ever thought a shoe store would be so successful online?  Do you think Nordstrom is running scared?

If you take the simplicity of what it takes to build relationships and you build that into a company’s core values, you are definitely strengthening your chances of succeeding in today’s market.

Relationships.  Are they good?  Then that news will be shared.  From one person to the next.  Are they bad relationships?  Well then watch out.

Let’s face it, social media is changing the way companies are going to succeed. Companies will be built on integrity and trust. And if they aren’t, they aren’t going to make it.

Bold statement? Look at Dell, Inc. As described in a Business Week article and in more detail in Jeff Jarvis’ book, “What Would Google Do?”; a simple blog post changed the way a company operated.    After Mr. Jarvis bought a Dell “lemon” and had a bad experience with customer service, he blogged about it.  And lots followed.

Dell, Inc. completely changed their customer relations program based on one customer’s complaint that groundswell through social media.  They realized they had to work with their customers, engage with them and ultimately build their trust back.  If your company is built on trusting relationships you’ll never have to worry about this problem.  It’s easier and cheaper to keep trust than to try to win it back.

Another example is Nestle’s newest social marketing blunder.  Nestle disrespectfully responded to some fans on their Facebook fan page.  This again ground swelled.  We’ll see what Nestle does to turn their brand equity around.

Ultimately, what social media is doing, is making companies built on integrity and trust and in turn deliver that to customers. If they don’t, customers, through new social media outlets will make sure others know about it.

Think of your company as the next Cheers. Where everybody knows your name.  Or at least what it stands for.

I just got this video from @mashable on Twitter.  It’s an updated version of a previous post – and has VERY current data.

To summarize:

• Over half the world’s population is under 30 years old
• 96% of  Millennials have joined a social network
• Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the US
• 1 out of 8 couples in the US met via social media
• 80% of companies use social media for recruitment (and 95% of that percentage useLinkedIn)
• Ashton Kutcher and  Britney Spears have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Sweden, Israel, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway and Panama combined – 4.8 million each
• 50% of mobile internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook
• 78% of Wikipedia content is in languages other than English
• 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
• 90% of people skips ads via  TiVo/ DVR

A little more then a fad is my guess.

I recently came across this term. Dunbar’s number. I could pretend I knew what it was. But I’d be lying. Intrigued by the term in the context of a conversation with MIT students at Sloan’s Business in Games Conference, I decided to check it out. First stop: Wikipedia.

Here’s the explanation I found.

“Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150. On the periphery, the number also includes past colleagues such as high school friends with whom a person would want to reacquaint themselves if they met again.^“

Wow. Rinse. Repeat. Let me summarize. The ” limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships” is guesstimated to be 150. Is that possible? Is it low? Still questioning the basis of this theory I went on to find further information. Next stop. Google Advanced Search.

In a nutshell this theory was introduced by Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar “a British anthropologist and evolutionary biologist, specialising in primate behavior. The term became most popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, where it plays a central role in Gladwell’s arguments about the dynamics of social groups.” This popular book was released in 2006.

In 4 years opportunities to connect with others have multiplied through social networks including Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn among all the others. I know for myself that I have with high school and college friends, colleagues from my previous professional lives, etc. I have a lot more “connections”. We may not talk to each other every day, we may not see each other every day, but for those that I’m connected with I stay connected to their lives based on how much they publicize.

Does this impact Dunbar’s number? I guess we’ll have to wait to see how this all plays out. I think at the end of the day our definition of “friend” is going to change.

I have worked in the video game business most of my career.  Recently, I’ve moved my attention to the social gaming space for obvious reasons.

One of my “gigs” was at Hasbro Interactive, the digital arm of Hasbro the toy company.  As business unit director I was responsible for taking Hasbro owned IP and bring them digital.  Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, etc.  I had to pick the right platform, right developer and the right product concept.

Part of my training prior to running the business unit was to participate in “Hasbro University”.  It was here that I learned about Hasbro’s brands but most importantly the play patterns associated with particular products.

It was fascinating to watch through a two way mirror the way people played with the traditional products and drill down to the actual play pattern being used.  For instance, a simple example, is children playing with blocks.  Build play pattern.  Children playing with Perfection, time based play pattern.  Or adults playing Trivial Pursuit – knowledge play pattern.  Whatever the play pattern was, it was fundamental to the success of the product, the marketing of the product and the audience.  Girls/Woman, in general love dress up, nurturing, decorating, etc.  Boys/Men are more attracted to destruction, competitiveness and shoot them up.   These are gross exaggerations to get a point across.

As I’ve looked at the social games available on FB, the first thing I look at are the play patterns associated with the products and who must be playing those games based on that information.  Lo and behold, it works.  Take Zynga’s Farmville for example – a game largely played by girls/woman.

I put this type of game into the genre of “sandbox” games.  If you think of an open sandbox, put a variety of children in it, and see how they play.  They all play a little differently.  Girls may bring their dolls in, decorate the area for them and use the sand to cook and make a setting for their precious babies.  Boys on the other hand may bring in their trucks, dig, destruct….you get the picture.

Whether Zynga did this on purpose or not is probably something only Mark Pincus knows.   But by building a “sandbox” game, they opened up their product to the largest possible audience.  Farmville can be played by different audiences in different ways, appealing to both males and females and satisfying the basic play patterns of both audiences.

Of course the other factor that is driving the success of these products is the collaboration – and sorry folks, woman are much more apt to collaborate and help each other than men.

So thank you Hasbro, for the wonderful education in play patterns and understanding the fundamentals to making a product for a particular audience.