Much talk recently about how social media and viral marketing are changing the way things are advertised and sold. Done well, it has some real advantages for marketers. Nancy Arter on RRW Consulting’s Direct Marketing blog has a very interesting post on the subject. Here’s an excerpt of her view:
“The idea of customers selling on behalf of marketers is an idea whose time has come. Think of all of the time we spend trying to isolate that perfect consumer or business that may be willing to hear our message. Think about the hours of sleep lost over whether the DM campaign that’s hitting mailboxes in the next week will reap us a .5% or a 1.5% response rate — and the repercussions of either. With this shift, it’s all about the customers preferring our product, and preferring it so much that they discuss why they prefer it. What a concept!”
That’s the potential upside. Here’s the potential downside, courtesy of Roy Williams’ Monday Morning Memo:
“Word-of-Mouth is the new Mass Media. Video games and cable TV stripped our kids of their innocence at an early age, but the Technology that robbed them of idyllic childhood also empowered them with cell phones, blogs and blackberries.
Viral marketing wasn’t created by the advertising community. It’s simply the result of a horizontally-connected generation (1.) sharing their happy discoveries with each other and (2.) trying to protect one another from mistakes.
WHAT THIS MEANS TO BUSINESS: It’s no longer enough just to have great advertising. When your customers carry cell phones and can email all their friends with a single click, you need to be exceptionally good at what you do.”
Viral marketing only works if the consumers doing the viralizing (a word I believe I just made up) are happy with what they bought. If they’re not, they’ll take it out on you with blogs, forums, and Amazon’s Customer Reviews. If the product is shoddy or the service is poor, the chorus of consumer voices can quickly wipe out any gains an advertising campaign can make.
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