Week 2

“Brands belong to customers not companies”

Understanding of this makes companies realize how important it is to know how to listen and talk to groundswell. Creating “listening machine” is not easy that why I love these chapters – they give precise and useful advice what do. In every marketing campaign the essential thing is to study your target audience first: what it is, what it wants, what you want to get from it etc. Having a goal and a plan will help you move in a right direction. Talking to the target market is even more complicated. And various examples show us that. I really love the example of George Wright, Blendtec and his videos, as well as P&G case. That is brilliant to create a site where your audience will be free to discuss embarrassing or frightening topics. The example of Mini campaign vividly shows how sales results depend on following online buzz and participating in it. It’s true that people are fed up with ads and don’t trust them much, and opinions of bloggers are more appreciated. So informal communication with the target audience is necessary (the example I have on my mind is corporate blogs of billionaires, or when our President and all officials published their incomes on their blogs). But you need to be careful and find out if your audience in ready for such kind of communication. Besides in Russian there still exists a problem of lack of the professionals who can assist you with your social marketing campaign.