New Marketing Tools in 2010

New Marketing Tools in 2010
By marketingsavant.com

To say that much has changed in 18 months is a bit of an understatement.
The effectiveness of the tools that we’ve used for decades has been called into question on the past few years.

Marketing technology goes well beyond and before the advent of social media. Surely, some of the tools we discuss are social media tools. However, and more importantly, they are the state-of-the art vehicles that today’s marketers need to understand to grow their bottom line and keep pace with the ever-advancing customer base and marketplace.

10 Questions Marketers Want Answered About Digital & Social Media
1. What are the best practices and tactics to use?
2. How do I measure the effectiveness of social media?
3. Where do I start?
4. How do I manage the social balance?
5. What are the best sites and tools out there?
6. How do I make the most of my available time?
7. How do I find and focus my efforts on my target audience?
8. How do I convert my social media marketing efforts into tangible results?
9. How do I cohesively tie different social media efforts together?
10. Does social media marketing work, and if so, how effective is it?

What Is Buzz Monitoring?
Marketers are known for talking, not listening. Sure, we lis¬tened, but if advertising history is telling of anything it tells us that marketers love to produce “stuff” that they hope consumers will like. Social media listening and buzz moni¬toring flips that mind-set; it’s a phrase used in online pub¬lic relations and social media marketing to track relevant conversations on the Internet. It provides great opportunity to learn at a grassroots level what people really think about your brand, products or services in the statusphere, the collection of all the online conversation in social networking areas such as Facebook, Twitter and others.

By monitoring the online conversation happening in blogs, forums, social networks and other social media channels, businesses can bring the voices of their customers directly into their marketing departments and cut down on the need for expensive market research tools such as focus groups and phone surveys. In fairness to the market and marketing researchers worldwide, social media listening will never fully replace a scientifically developed panel, customer advisory board or survey that gives us statistically significant and valid data on which to base our marketing decisions.


How Do Marketers Find Out Who’s Talking and What Do They Measure?
There are different parts of the conversation - enterprise, mainstream media, and consumer generated content. Unless you’re monitoring the buzz, you won’t know what’s there. In every social media moni¬toring program, there are a few fairly obvious things that every marketer should track. If you need more reasons to track social media, think of the new product ideas, keyword research for SEO, warnings of possible scandals and customer reactions that you’ll be able to amass.

In addition, there are three key metrics involved in what is referred to as “Online Reputation Manage¬ment”:
1. Share of voice. This is a measurement of how much and to what degree people are talking about you.
2. Tone of voice, a.k.a. “Sentiment analysis.” This is a measurement of whether the conversation is largely positive or negative. If the sentiment is positive, reward those who speak well of you. If the tone is largely negative, you need to take action to get to the root of the problem IF one really exists. If it’s based in misinformation, you’ll need to engage the critics and correct their misunderstanding.
3. Trends over time. It’s important to monitor the above metrics over time to see the effects of your advertising, marketing and public relations efforts.

Best Practices for Monitoring the Conversation
Getting started monitoring the online conversation can be pretty straightforward, but there are a few guidelines that can help you get a jump start.
1. Look for evangelists and help the spread the good word
2. Engage with ‘middle ground’ consumers to influence them.
3. Look for “incidental detractors” and engage with them to fix problems.
4. Seek out and minimize “determined detractors” - the people who just can’t seem to be happy.

Monitoring Steps
1. Conversation discovery – Use brand monitor¬ing services, keyword watch lists and alerts or, at a minimum, at least doing persistent searches?
2. Conversation aggregation – How are you gathering your data? Options include Google Reader or MyYahoo.
3. Conversation escalation – The decision to move from passive to active participation in online conversations.
4. Conversation participation – Determining how to participate. It could be via emails, comments, posts, tweets, etc. OR you can participate more indirectly through social bookmarks, tagging, etc.
5. Conversation tracking – There are many op¬tions, from customer relationship manage¬ment software to review of email strings.


Next month Microblogging that’s growing fast, make sure your in the know.