In an interesting find today, Brian Woodward, a Senior Consultant with GCI Mannov (PR Firm in Denmark), pointed to Miller Electric’s social media efforts in a recent blog post titled “The Case for B2B Social Media”. Mr. Woodwards post is a brief introduction on the use case for social media in global B2B companies. The three example companies he used were Chevron, GE and Miller Electric.
Talk of communities is all the rage on the web these days. But does building a community really matter? Isn’t having a company website enough to reach my customers? The answers to these questions are yes and no respectively.
To understand why building a community matters we need to understand an idea called the Law of the Few popularized by the author Malcom Gladwell in his popular book The Tipping Point. According to Gladwell, a tiny percentage of people (called connectors, mavens, and salesman) do the majority of the work to build momentum. It turns out that this is a restatement of an old idea, the Pareto Principle (or better known as the 80-20 rule). The main concept is 20% of your customers are able to reach 80% of your customers. That is a reach that beats a typical e-mail marketing campaign. So how do I reach the 20% that are the buzz makers?
It turns out all you have to do, if I can steal a phrase from the movie Field of Dreams, is build it and they will come. Create a community, engage that community, and then sift your data to identify your buzz makers. Once identified, a little care and feeding is all they need. You have just extended your marketing reach well beyond traditional methods. Traditional marketing is important, but people rely on the recommendation of friends when purchasing products. Here is a way to influence that opinion.
If you want expert advice on community building contact us here at Envano and we will create a plan that will extend your marketing reach.
Social networks are maturing. No longer are they the sole domain of college students providing details of last night’s youthful transgressions. Social networks have become sophisticated tools to interact and share information with a trusted network of friends and colleagues.
Social networks have become a mountain of captive consumers that are ripe to be marketed to. Take the Facebook phenomenon. According to Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, they currently have “passed 50 million users, doubling once every 6 months,” and this number includes “only active users who have used Facebook [in the] last 30 days.” He goes on to state that Facebook has “more than 25 million people [are] using Facebook every single day. Each person is viewing more than 40 pages a day, more than 65 billion page views a month.” That is a lot of exposure for a brand inside Facebook.
That data alone makes social networks an exciting marketing target, but we can sweeten the deal for you. It turns out that social networks are really good at connecting friends together. According to a recent social Internet survey conducted by Faves.com, 36% of Web users “highly trust” the information they receive from their online social network. What’s more is that this number jumps to 90% when we add those that “moderately trust” their social networks. Contrast this with only 4% of people having a high degree of trust in the content/opinions from vendors and advertisers in blogs or forums and you can see that it’s important to get these networks energized about your business. 2
Trusted networks are the easiest way to gain credibility with your marketing message. Social networks provide you an easy path into these trusted networks. The result is highly targeted and energized consumers visiting your site and purchasing your products.