THis made a good read. Tough times make customers all the more wiser and cautious in selecting a solution, more so, today in financial services. The rapport built and the continuous engagement is what may eventually pay off - not the snazzy presentation our sales folks put together. And if tools from the social media mix don’t aid in building engaging conversations, we’ve wasted a lot of money and time, for nothing. I believe as marketers, we are all searching for that elusive mix - of a good blend of web 2.0 and traditional marketing. It works in some instances but i’m not sure if there are organizations that have cracked this code. To a great extent, i can say that i am floating in bubble2.0 at the moment.

Good analytical tools are a must, and a Website strategy that ties in with social media have shown tangible results in some of my efforts in the past. Mapping customers’ technographic profile to the marketing efforts is not an easy task. If one has the budgets, one can choose to be present everywhere and see which one works best, but if you are looking for very very cost-effective ways to tap into social media and make it work, it requires constant experimenting and research.

And then comes the all-important factor of credibility. Both in the form of your product and the success stories you market. This involves working across the product strategy and dev teams and getting them to buy into marketing. i’ve found this a tough call…

I am forwarding this to clients.

Cheers

Rajesh

Thanks Rob as always for your adds and Beth for sharing the link to your wikispace.

This is an excellent post! Here’s another resource that you might find useful:
http://socialmedia-metrics.wikispaces.com

When I discovered your post earlier today I needed to save it until tonight because you have a lot in there to digest. And I’m glad I waited because you’ve done a great job in summing up what I consider the true essence of what marketing needs to become to be successful. Perhaps this was always the successful approach but with the mechanization of the various delivery and measurement approaches of mass media we’ve forgotten that indeed it has always been about relationships between customers and providers (brands). I think you are right that the discussion about this needs to heat up a lot in all communications circles. Your point about the need to express these as stories - which would explain why the industry is desperate to see more case studies.

In many ways we need to almost rewrite the marketing and PR textbooks - get back to the essence of what relationships mean in life and how they serve to benefit the parties involved. Once we all can ground on this only then can we talk about the tactical “to dos” that can be built upon this foundation.

Keep these posts a coming because you are helping all of us who believe in this approach to gradually chip away at the task at hand - to get back to basics in terms of marketing and PR.

PS. And thanks for the Radian6 shout out as well.

With us doing the convening for the Inform and Connect and the Community doing the Act

Dean - pun taken and filed :):). I like your articulation in your post that you linked to - “Social media data can be integrated with alternative marketing data to help understand more fully the relationship between marketing action and downstream success metrics.”! Would love to see some quant measures being built in to measure imagination and energy too. Thanks for dropping by and sharing.

Comprehensive post and interesting for those of us tracking (pun intended) along with the ROI discussion. I work for Collective Intellect who, along with the good folks at Radian6, conduct social media analysis and brand monitoring. My own recent post (http://blog.collectiveintellect.com/uncategorized/how-do-we-measure-up-2/) grapples with some of the issues you raise above and, as a quantitative researcher, I believe that striving for some form of ROI, even if it is correlative, provides value to client partners!

Thanks for the thoughts,

Dean