New Report on Social Media Marketing From Harvard Business School
Sunday, September 30th, 2007The digital interactive transformation in marketing is not unfolding, as many thought it would, on the model of direct marketing, says a new paper from the Harvard Business School. Instead the transformation is happening in a model of consumer collaboration, in which consumers use digital media that lie beyond the control of marketers to communicate among one another, responding to marketing’s intrusions by disseminating counter-argument, information sharing, rebuttal, parody, reproach and, though more rarely, fandom.
The paper takes an interesting approach – it’s not about how marketers who thought the Internet would change the way we market were right – although they were right to a large degree. It is about how they were wrong.
Marketing management tends to frame its view of the future from a paradigm of control, say the authors of the paper. And only a few marketers realized that the Internet would give control and power to the customer. (They should have read the Cluetrain!)Â
The marketer in peer-to-peer environments is an interloper, more talked-about than talking. (All the more reason to use a tool like the new online reputation management software Brandseye)
At best its role is to provoke conversations among consumers, and at worst it becomes the enemy, attacked with invective or parody. Today, as marketing strategy grapples with the question of how to work with social media, old paradigms die hard. Marketing may be less a matter of domination and control, and more a matter of fitting in.
The paper suggests five marketing paradigms created by the Internet:
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Thought Tracing – this is based on the explosive growth of search engines and how people use search to find information and news online. Being visible in the search engines has become a vital part of marketing today
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Ubiquitous Connectivity – People are potentially audiences for persuasive communication not just when they are searching. Ubiquitous computing makes them always on. The cell phone becomes life’s remote contorl device.
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Property Exchanges – this is the sharing paradigm of ‘what’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine.’ At the market end of the spectrum there is eBay, and at the communal end are Flickr and YouTube.
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Social Exchanges - the least anticipated commercial consequence of digital interactivity was the digital virtual community. Cyworld, FaceBook, MySpace show just how pervasive and influential these commnuites have become.
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Cutural Exchanges – Marketing in this paradigm aspires to be an author in the culture of its customers. For marketing to play this role it needs to be welcomed, not resisted. BMW’s short films are a good example.
We’re certainly seeing an increase in requests for social media and SEO training from agencies and corporate communication departments. This paper is a good place to start to wrap your wits around how social media marketing can be incorporated into your plans.
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