Marketing in 2010 (free eBook)

When we talk about brand awareness, consciously or not, we correlate "brand" with one specific phase in the marketing funnel. Many have defined brand as a set of expectations and experiences.

These in turn generate stories we identify with as we develop our relationship with the brand and the company and people who represent it in our minds and interactions over time. Brands that set themselves apart command a premium.

Brand impact in valuation has been a challenging, but not impossible, feat to measure. It's a mixture of qualitative and quantitative data collected about the brand's public profile, its present role in creating demand, and its future strength as an asset.

I equate brand with the infrastructure upon which everything else sits. It needs to contain the integrity of a good reputation, the capacity for trust, the flexibility for evolution over time, and the simplicity to be understood and infused with your customers and employees stories.

Applications like sales, product development, engineering, customer support, and all of the other functions you associate with operating a company sit on that infrastructure and borrow from its characteristics.

Brand also includes the environment or context a company builds around itself to operate, its culture.

This is the sum total of rites, stories, and dynamics that bind people, inside and outside the organization. It includes channel partners and joint ventures. It may also include vendor relationships. An important point to consider as the service and media industries continue to consolidate.

Now think about social. Through the tools we have at our disposal we extend the reach of those interactions and experiences. The results flow back into how we think about our products and services (or they should). The stories your brand creates extend it beyond the company walls and, by reflection, deep inside them.

Execution in social media enriches brands and the people or tribes that make them work. It means you are changing the world and allowing the world to change you as a business in commensurate parts, while you interact with it.

What are the ingredients of this exchange that make social operational?

1. Tribe and networks (people)
2. Direction or compass (objectives)
3. Action and outcomes (measurable goals)
4. Maps (strategies)
5. Tools and tactics (media)

Engagement and outcome derive from the active - and continuous - participation of individuals and groups in the knowledge flows - within their tribes, and outside them. We constantly evaluate, consider, test, experience, adopt and filter information and ideas while we get them and us done.

How can we use these connection points between ideas and people to change businesses and their stories? This is the question for 2010 - social media becomes operational. Read on. 

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Thanks go to the generous contributors: Jason Baer, Olivier Blanchard, Danny Brown, Mark Earls, Rachel Happe, Gavin Heaton, Jackie Huba, Jonathan MacDonald, Amber Naslund, Shannon Paul.

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Download the free Marketing in 2010 eBook here.

© 2006-2009 Valeria Maltoni. All rights reserved.

Comments

[olivier blanchard]

Holy shmolies! I actually have the shortest piece in the bunch. :D

(I think I saw a flock of pigs fly by.)

Awesome follow-up to last year's e-book. This one is even better.

Cheers.

[Danny Brown]

Ha, I was thinking the exact same, Olivier - I mentioned to Valeria she might need to trim ;-)

Great collection of views, Valeria, and always good to see how different minds approach the operational side of marketing and social media.

Thank you for letting me be a part of it; looking forward to settling down and reading everyone's input this evening with a nice glass of red.

Once again, you provide your community with great value - cheers!

[Jay Baer]

Some really interesting angles in here. Thanks for letting me be a part of it. I'm surprised a bit by the breadth of opinion, although I don't know why I am. BTW, the Twitter 20 best of ebook (featuring many of these contributors) is launching pretty soon. I'll keep you posted.

[Shannon Paul]

Thanks so much for inviting me to contribute this year. Honored pretty much sums up how I feel to be a part of this. I hope others find it to be a valuable reference moving into 2010 -- I know I will.

Great contributions all around!

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Olivier - I had saved 6-8 pages for you in the layout ;) I'm so glad you were able to make the time to share your thoughts on what's next. I feel I was the most fortunate to be able to read everyone's thoughts ahead of time.

@Danny - I had 54 pages in the original layout. The aim was to shed some light on international points of view. As I learn more from my European colleagues, I appreciate the richness of the exchange.

@Jay - something to look forward to, your collection. Hopefully, you can see how my thinking is developing through these projects. And of course, I still remember the wonderful conversation we had at SxSW. Exciting times for us all!

@Shannon - thank you for participating. I've been inspired already. We all know that doing is harder than it looks. A few of us have gotten dings because it sounds so easy. On the company side of things, it's probably one of the most misunderstood and challenging things to do. The easiest thing is going with what worked before (best practices, right?). 2010 will be an interesting year.

[Edward Boches]

What's great about this is that it offers marketers some real insight, examples and recommendations for how to actually "be" social rather than simply "do" social. Right now I would imagine that all of the contributors along with many others encounter clients who want the "do" but aren't ready to commit to the be, which affects more than a few people on the front lines, but rather an entire company. Strategy, brand and employee behavior, cultural change, UX that extends back into the company's products and services are all essential for a company to "be." For brands that come to social from a customer service angle, it's easier. For brands that may only come to social from a communication and media perspective, it's harder. In many cases the folks responsible for the effort don't have enough clout to truly influence change. Eventually every company's behavior (product, service, marketing, community) will be affected first and foremost by the increasing participation, power and control of the consumer. We have gone from the remote control (filtering system) to YouTube (self broadcast) to Twitter (individual as distribution channel) to apps like
Red Laser (total power, almost.) More and more all brands will get that they have to build new kinds of relationships based on trust and that developing those relationships will call for the right kind of engagement at every single encounter with what we used to call our "target audience," now our friends, fans, followers and communities. Great stuff. Will be helpful in educating clients even more.

[Valeria Maltoni]

Bingo. Companies have a very hard time being. Even as individuals, we're used to the "to do" list, not the "to be". It's a circular conversation. Companies hire junior people - and it's the people in the middle who make stuff happen anyway - to engage with social, then they pay no attention to their insights.

I was writing my post for tomorrow when your comment came in. Without giving it away, I can tell you that there are folks already on the future generation of demand. (note word order)

[Akash Sharma]

It was a great read with all the insightful inputs from some really thoughtful people.
I liked the flow of the information from being methodical, to getting stuff into detailed points, to making it simpler to understand by using a story.
Thanks a lot to all of you and it would be an awesome year to execute social media.

[Shyam Kapur]

This is an excellent book. I hope more and more companies will recognize in 2010 that social media is not a "nice to have" but a "must have" component of anything they do. I would also encourage more marketers to get familiar with rich search tools like TipTop http://FeelTipTop.com that can be used to mine the most interesting knowledge from within social media effortlessly.