Not too many previous jobs ago, my career was set in the halls of one of the largest ad agencies in the world. The office I worked in was only one of about 300 in the network. We would go into meetings with clients and talk about their print ads, their radio spots and their TV commercials. We would talk about the budget for each. We would talk about strategy and timelines and who would be in charge of what. Then, as we were all getting ready to leave, someone would say, “Oh, hey, what about the website?”
That was five years ago. A lot’s changed in five years.
Today, newspapers can’t give away classified ads, craigslist is already doing that. Radio comes off of satellites, free of commercials. TV is at our beck and call. And, what do you know? The general public has opinions. About everything. They want to share them, and if you don’t make it easy for them to do so, you’re two steps behind. Worse, you probably don’t even realize it.
That’s web 2.0. Social media. Word of Mouth. Whatever you want to call it, there is actually a method to the madness. Some would say that this total democratization of content that’s happening requires the willingness to give up total control over your own message. Actually, it requires the acceptance that you’ve never had complete control over it to begin with.
See, people talk. We all do. And we always have. We talk about the things we like. The things we don’t like. The things that we want other people to like and the things we really don’t want other people to like. Everyone, it seems, is an expert on something.
The web has given us a real-time venue to share our passions with the world. Last year, David Sifry, CEO of blog search engine Technorati, said “the number of new posts per day that Technorati is tracking is indeed increasing, from about 1.3 million posts per day to about 1.5 million.” Now sure, some of those bloggers are posting about the funniest thing that their daughter did that day. But many are carrying on conversations about the products and services they use on a daily basis. Web 2.0 is all about finding ways to harness the power of those conversations for your benefit.
Take a look at this little nugget from a marketing manger at Budget Car Rental. She says, “I can tell you that a $15K investment in blog advertising, as part of a $350K campaign I did last year for Budget, drove 20 percent of the one million uniques we got on the site in a month.”
That’s 200,000 people taking a purposeful action to find out more information off of a little over 4% of the expenditure. Those are pretty good numbers and it’s only one example of how you can reach people where they are, when the time is right for them and make it easy for them to reach you.
Imagine the possibilities when you incorporate other strategies like viral marketing, your own brand blog, community marketing and more. The research is definitive; we trust the opinions of our friends, family and co-workers more than TV, radio and print ads.
In fact, 67% of all consumer purchase decisions are primarily influenced by word of mouth. Perhaps even more telling is that 70% of the Inc. 500 marketers are planning word of mouth programs for 2008, making it the fastest growing marketing vehicle.
If you’d like to bounce around some ideas about how you can get a conversation started and keep it going with more and more people sharing your story, drop me or Pam Martin a line.
Dave Perks
540.552.1320 x214
dperks@newcitymedia.com
Pam Martin
540.552.1320 x257
pam@newcitymedia.com