Chapter 4 - CIO to Marketing Person

Chapter 4 is all about my first lesson on social marketing.

When I began this journey I thought there were 2 types of marketing; email and social

Reality there are numerous, commonly divided into;

• Email Marketing (Push)
• Adword Marketing (Pull)
• Social Marketing (Pull)

We are all familiar with email, or the spam it creates in some cases. There are many sub lessons to be learned but here are a few;

1. Don't send mail as XYZ User name, Send it as organization name where your business has name clout in your industry
2. Business messages are primarily text based (not images) so focus on a good, SHORT, message with links or attchments to other materials.  Links are better because you can track who went to it.
3. There are many types of campaigns you can run, the more high value the contact information you have, the more you should use a permission based approach to sending emails.

The next category is truly a science unto itself,  Ad-word advertising. I don't claim t know enough except to be dangerous in this space. Here are some things you should think about when considering a campaign like this.

1. Does your audience search for what you are offering on teh web. General assumption is everyone "Googles" or whatever you favorite search engine is for everything these days, reality is Adword engines can tell you what is being searched in order to achieve better results.
2. You can control your time of day and geography of when your ads appear. It could be all of Great Britain, but more so if within 150KMS of London as an example.
3. You can control how mush you spend, but be prepared to put serious money to this if you get good at it.

 Final category is social marketing, not really marketing as you would suspect because nobody wants to be sold to, and on a social community where you interact with members they can revolt against you very quickly if you too aggressively sell to them, so here are few tips.

1. Remember that it is you they want to buy from not your company so create a level of interaction where you are focused over the organization, ie: you act on teh organizations behalf but they interact with you
2. Cappy Popp shared a real killer line re use of branding, unless you are a lifestyle product, a passion, or a cause don't use your brand as the community, focus on your industry as the community. eg: lifestyle product is Harley Davidson so they can create a community around their name.  My company isn't a world wide known brand so I should focus on my industry, International Trade.
3. Start small and manageable. If you try and start initiatives across too many social technologies you divide your audience and risk losing focus too easily.

My final lesson I believe is this, today we talk in terms of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter as top of mind social technologies, this market moves fast and  what these are today could become the myspace of yesterday, so don't focus on the technology as much as the strategy.

Thanks for listening...