This video, featuring Barry Judge (CMO of Best Buy), is worth a few minutes of your time. In it, Judge raises two points crucial to success in social media marketing.
Talk With Customers, Not At Them. Like many brick & mortar companies, Best Buy’s marketing strategy used to center around television and print media. They ran ads that targeted every consumer within earshot, shouting to the world about their low prices. But then came the rise of Wal-Mart. And after that, of course, came Amazon. And suddenly low prices — best buys, if you will — were no longer as unique a value proposition as they once were.
As Judge points out, the target can’t be everyone anymore. There are too many people to reach, and those people have too many alternatives to choose from. So, the strategy can’t revolve around you and your company controlling and disseminating the message. The truth is: you can’t control the message, and you might not even be the best person to spread it. You are just one part of the conversation about your brand and your product. The customer is another part, and a far larger one. With the rise of social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook (and even blogs), customers are now able to share what they think about a product or service at anytime, in any number of places, and with a potential army of like-minded fellow consumers.
Hence, the importance of social media monitoring and expeditious social media response. You can and should be getting your message out there. But you need to be constantly monitoring how that message is coming across to your potential customers and how that message might be transforming as it’s passed from one person to the next.
Every Mobile Phone Is Now A Response Device. Whether the device in question is a simple messaging phone, a more advanced smart phone, or one of the newer, so-called app phones, I think Judge is right-on when he talks about the power of our mobile devices. Customers can now respond to ads instantaneously, and from anywhere. Whether they see a billboard at the subway station or a full-pager in a magazine at their dentist’s office, they have a device in their pocket that allows them to act on the offer immediately. In many cases, they can buy something right then and there from their phone. And they can also pass on the offer to friends in any number of ways (text message, email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.).
Something Judge doesn’t mention: phones with ubiquitous Internet access are also making it easier for customers to comparison shop without even leaving your store. If a customer has doubts about whether you’re offering the best price, and if you don’t give them a good enough reason to stay and shop with you, it’s all too easy to find someplace else that will give them the buying experience that they crave.
