Today’s post was written by Sarah Sturtevant and was originally published on her blog, Marketing Masala. It is reprinted here with permission. Enjoy!
This is the second of my two-part series (the first is available here) highlighting the social media insights of Joakim Vars Nilsen, Creative Advisor at MediaFront, in Oslo, Norway. In his presentation below he shares how companies can be more effectively engaged with their customers 365 days a year by building their “social capital”, and ultimately, their revenues.
We are all customers. Whether you purchase consumer goods for yourself or B2B products for your company, what if every brand you interacted with as a customer tried to “engage you in conversation on Twitter, Facebook” or other social media sites?
Joakim Vars Nilsen’s poses this question in his “Walk the Talk” presentation before elaborating on why and how effective brand marketing has shifted beyond building “passive awareness”. That traditional passive awareness strategy typically involved flogging the same marketing message to customers a few times a year.
Companies, he suggests, would be better served if they combined traditional marketing methods with popular social marketing channels in order to create more valuable connections with their prospective customers 365 days a year.
The key for companies is to avoid using social media exclusively as just another platform to sell their products or self-promote. Joakim says that companies that use social media effectively and succeed in building a loyal following, contribute regularly to online conversations by sharing ideas about how customers can get more out of the products and services they own.
“It’s not what the product does that matters most to us, it is how we socialize around it that matters,” he says.
So brands need to create, find and actively participate in trusted online communities with “values that your brand/product/service generally shares.” Read more
