Viper Marketing

State of the Nation - pick up general trends from your social networking

Author: Neil Wilkins

Neil learnt his marketing with the likes of Orange, NatWest, BP Castrol and Ordnance Survey and now helps individuals and businesses to communicate more effectively. He trains and mentors marketers on professional Chartered Institute of Marketing qualifications through to post-graduate level.

Right here, right now, 24/7, at your finger tips, you have a flavour of how your world is feeling and how they may or may not react when you market to them.

So often we focus on ourselves when sending out direct marketing, be it direct mail, emails, newsletters and advertising.

Maybe before we do this we should check the state of our world and get a taste of how those in our world are feeling.

Take the simple Facebook profile image for example. On the face of it just a snapshot of each individual in various states of undress, drunken stupor or silly pose. Each individual image gives little away in terms of how your world of contacts is feeling right now. Collectively though there is a clear message. Use an application like Facebook Friend Block and you see all of your friends in one place at one time... literally hundreds of faces but check overall the colours, expressions and tones. Some days your Friend Block can be predominantly red, other days it turns monochrome. Is this a snapshot view of how your Friends are feeling? Could you use it as a benchmark for good and bad timing if you want to send out specific messages or marketing?

Then think of our new friend Twitter and its highly popular concept of Trending Terms. If you look at the style, tone and content that is currently trending can you see a pattern? This could be helpful with timing of sending out updates and messages and marketing as part of your own social media campaigns and strategies. Remember it's not all about YOUR timing or how YOU are feeling. Even Twitter themselves have changed their own proposition to say 'discover what's happening right now, anywhere in the world'... a kind of social barometer if you like. How can you use it to help yourself?

Global states of nations and feelings and sentiments are all very well but at a local level you need to understand in real time how your own customers and friends and families are feeling. Roll in two recently introduced applications that can give you this information on the likes of your iPhone or iPad:

Flipboard - What a great idea. A beautifully designed iPad-based interactive e-magazine that in real-time draws down the full stories, images, links and videos from your Facebook Friends and Twitter Followees and presents them as though you are reading a magazine. Over breakfast you can gauge how your customers and others in your world are feeling that day. Is today the right day to market to them?

Gist - Building on the Flipboard concept Gist integrates our selected customers' status updates and tweets with messages they send and blogs they post, all in one place, to show you an in-depth profile of their current state of mind.

These are just the beginning. Think about the timing of what you need to know and when you need to know it and integrate some ways of capturing this information.

Very soon you'll be thinking more about aligning your marketing and communications in time with how your customers and prospects are feeling rather than simply because it's convenient timing for you.

- Posted on Tuesday 03 Aug 2010 at 12:29 by Neil Wilkins

Tags: facebook (28), flipboard (2), gist (1), ipad (2), iphone (10), social media (33), social networking (13), twitter (24)