Category Archives: Marketing

Watercooler shows are the shows people talk about in a social situation. The emergence of social media has taken the phenomenon of watercooler shows to a whole new level. Social media provides people a platform to talk about the shows. Every day millions of viewers are joining the conversation on social networks and they are using Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube and other platforms to share opinions and convert a normal show into a watercooler show.

What is essential for a show to become a watercooler show on social media? Apart from great show creating a captive audience, it needs a few key influencers to stir the pot on social media, to talk about the show, love it when something great happens, hate it when the things are not as they would like it to be, but irrespective of anything happening just keep participating in conversations about it.

Millions of people spending hours online on social networks and talking about these shows also leads to an interesting side effect. It creates a rich source of data to find insights about these shows. By intelligent mining and analysis of these conversations, marketers can find what key themes and characters are sticking with the audience to develop promos and advertisements for the shows, advertisers can find what demographic and psychographic segments are associating themselves with the shows to better target their products, and producers can get a sense of what is working and what is not working in their shows. Social media sets new standards for audience analysis and measurement for the shows which are much more realistic and practical as compared to traditional methods of measurement.

The evolution of social media has impacted a lot of industries. In-home entertainment industry is one of them. Every television channel wants its show to be the watercooler show with captive customers and eager advertisers. In today’s connected world, that “watercooler” is replaced by something that is much bigger, scalable and measurable.  Social media is the new watercooler!

Like, follow and subscribe: three words that have redefined the permission marketing in the recent times. Permission marketing is where people give explicit permission to marketers to contact them. There’s a big shift in how people perceive marketers courtesy of the social world. A few years back getting yourself on the do not call list was a cool thing to do, today liking a page on Facebook and following a brand on Twitter is so neat.

Sounds great. Now you got permission to communicate with your customers. That’s amazing! But something is missing. What’s the problem? The biggest problem in social media is overcrowding. Stats suggest that an average active Facebook user likes two new pages every month.

So how can a marketer best leverage the permission provided by consumers in social media? The first thing marketers need to accept is that just having a large number of followers and friends on social network is not the real definition of success in this space. In fact this is just a small part of your social media campaign. That’s because of a couple of reasons. First, the probability of your consumers staying in regular touch with you is slim. The reason being out of hundreds of friends and dozens of brand that compete for attention every minute, the probability that your brand will get the attention is as close to zero as it can be. Second, 8 out of 10 conversations about your brand are happening outside of your turf. If a consumer had a good experience with your product, they write it on their wall. If they liked a movie, they tweet it normally without linking it to the movie’s Twitter account.

It is awesome that you got permission to talk to your consumers. The important thing is to make full use of it. There are a couple of ways you can do this. One is by focusing on an issue that the consumers want to learn more about. The probability that the consumer will pay attention to the issue you, the experts and others talk about is much more likely than anything else. Second, learn about your consumers. Gain insights around who they are. What they want. What’s missing. Why they are forming a certain perception. Why they like you and why they dislike you. Then use these insights to take actions that will make you reach closer to the consumers and gain the real permission to stay on top of their mind in the social world.

In order to understand how to incentivize mavens, it is very important to understand how they are different from your spokesperson, brand ambassador and sales person. A spokesperson, brand ambassador or sales person is someone who works for a company. It’s their job. They say awesome things about a brand or they recommend people to use a company’s product primarily because they are paid to do that. Mavens on the other hand are the trusted experts in a field who seeks to pass knowledge on to others. These are the people who are contacted by others to find information in a field they command expertise. They do it just because they want to do this and are passionate about this.

The best incentives for mavens anywhere is recognition. One of the pioneers in this field is Microsoft. A big reason behind Microsoft’s success as a platform is the big array of applications on it. The applications are developed by a community of developers. Microsoft incentivize developers using the Microsoft MVP program. Microsoft Most Valuable Professional program gives special recognition to the developers who are active in the Microsoft developers communities and forums answering questions, making suggestions and contributing to the product. Microsoft invites them special developers conferences, gives them gift coupons to buy Microsoft software and a special tag next to their name on Microsoft communities.

Another good example is Coca-Cola. As Facebook became a big deal and companies started to look at it as a marketing platform, Coca-Cola discovered that their fan page was already there. A couple of Coca-Cola fans created the Facebook fan page and actively managed it. These individuals were real soft drink mavens who vouched for Coca-cola and took the initiative to help Coca-Cola fans engage with each other. Cola-Cola recognized that and instead of taking over the fan page encouraged these people to maintain it and provided them resources to do so. Over the years, unlike many Facebook fan pages, majority of content on Coca-Cola fan page is still generated by fans.

The most important thing to recognize while dealing with mavens is that you cannot manage them. What you can do is listen to them, engage with them and appreciate them so that they have the incentive to be part of your community and be the volunteers who act as your spokesperson, brand ambassador and sales person.

I wrote this post for Management Innovation Exchange. It is posted at MIX.

It’s awesome, it’s cool, I love it…these were some of the common phrases students attach to a couple of Microsoft product. But to top it off, these cool, awesome and great Microsoft products are not some glamorous gadgets, but the must have software known as Microsoft Office Excel and PowerPoint!

Spending last two year at a business school campus, I saw folks carrying all kinds of cool electronic gadgets from laptops to smartphones. Some people love their Macs, others love their ThinkPads. People swear by their iPhones and Blackberrys. The funny thing is that everyone has got their reasoning to prefer one over the other, and they are of course right from their perspectives, but if there’s only one product which holds up to true (Microsoft) monopoly status, it’s Microsoft Office.

I believe Microsoft Office is the coolest product Microsoft has got in its arsenal at this time. Replacing Excel and PowerPoint is not an option for anyone anytime soon (some might defer, but I believe realistically it won’t be that easy to get rid of them). The best thing for company to do is use these products to the fullest extent to show Microsoft’s coolness to the future generation.

The point here is for the company to build up on the already proven products which people love and build an ecosystem around them. Excel and PowerPoint should be linked to every productivity tool there possibly is ranging from email to instant messenger. Microsoft should take the lead and proactively market the fully featured office collaborative tools focusing on these two products (the keywords here being “fully featured”). Not doing that is pushing people to use competitive products for collaboration.

All these technologies are already there in the expensive version of the software where you can use Office Live Communicator and SharePoint. But these are not the tools a normal college going person use on a daily basis. They use the ones which are more commonly available and can be used for both work and fun. The only way to captivate their attention is to go where they are.

Talking in terms of numbers, let’s look at the cost of acquisition and map it to the Life Time Value of the customer (very stripped down, simplistic back of the envelope calculations). Consider a business school student who’s going to be there for two years. If Microsoft gives away a fully featured version of Microsoft Office with communicator, SharePoint and what not, it will be equivalent to giving away $500 worth of software per student. Microsoft releases a new version of Office every four years. A b-school graduate will be working in the real world for about 30 years on an average. That’s about seven releases of Microsoft Office software if it keeps up the current pace. If the investment made on the customer during two years at b-school makes him or her a loyal customer, with a 40% loyalty retention, the company can expect a return of $2000 per individual for whom this customer is making a software buying decision.

Microsoft: think of it more as a customer acquisition and retention opportunity than an additional software sale opportunity…it will work because you are earning mind share of the audience that is going to make the buying decision tomorrow!

Social networks have become the number one place for people to spend time. With more and more people spending time over there, it has become the place to be for businesses. The growing overcrowding on social media has made it very easy for anyone to get lost. The natural reaction here for businesses is to try and take ownership of their social worlds. But is it even possible?

Let’s first define the social world for your business. Is it your Facebook fan page and twitter handle? Or is it your microsite where you have all sort of cool games for people to learn about your products and the forum that you maintain to provide customer support? Well its all this and much more. The reason being, nine out of ten times, the communication is not happening on your turf. If people like your product, they share it with their friends in their tweets. They write about a horrible experience with your customer service on their blog. They provide recommendations and share experiences where they find it comfortable. So this defines your social world as the world out there, with no boundaries and no limits.

The point is, your social world is forming out there. It is continuously evolving. You cannot own your social world and you should not even try to do that. What you can do is be an active part of it. Stir the pot. Answer questions that the customers pose. Take feedback from your customers. Identify the mavens–passionate users and the opinion makers–and engage with them and let them be your advocates. That’s the best way you can leverage your social world.