Social Media Marketing

Should you or should you not mine the deep social connections between your customers and their friends as a source for finding new customers? This appears to be the next wave of socially-targeted advertising that is happening on the web, and based on a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, with impressive results.

Remember when you got started on Facebook? There was that phase a few months into it where every high-school friend was suddenly back on your radar, whether or not there as any reason to have remembered them in the first place. Waves of old and new faces would wash up on the shore of your in-box. Some of us indiscriminately accepted all. Some others took more time to approve or maybe ignore some of the more hinky ones.

Social Networks right now are merely dumps of nearly infinite connections, powered by XML and RSS. If the robot even thinks there’s a connection, it is programmed to go ahead and make it, hoping that you, the human, will sort it out later.

Rejuvenation does it again with a simple, but engaging way to engage with fans. As the Facebook status reads, “Dawn, one of our fans, inquired as to the whereabouts of her new McCoy lights, so I took a stroll down to production and followed them through the process of being built. This ones for you Dawn!” There are then multiple pictures showing the people and the process that go into making this fixture.

 Dan Laninga is Marketing Manager for Cygnus, makers of wall mounted and mobile computing workstations for healthcare. He is in a niche market and located in a relatively remote part of America. To say Laninga and his company face challenges when it comes to finding leads and maintaining client engagement is like saying it gets chilly in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Do you know the psychological profile that your trail of tweets tells about you? TweetPsych just may be able to tell you. Another new entrant into the ever expanding world of Twitter measurement tools,TweetPsych is uniquley different in that it seeks to provide a psychological profile of a person through deep linguistic analysis of their tweets. I'm always looking for tools that can provide insight into people's mindset and provide data that helps to build a more accurate persona, TweetPsych is a facinating discovery.

Check out Chris Brogan’s presentation at Web2 Expo 2009. I particularly like the part about social media and serendipity, which is similar to a discussion I had early this week about promoting those “cosmic collisions” with shoppers that make them stop in their tracks and think differently about your brand.

The New Group President, Steve Marshall, and Digital Strategist, Tom Bennett, will be speaking at a Linfield College Alumni Luncheon at The Westin in Portland this coming Wednesday the 11th. Steve, a Linfield College Graduate, is a 20+ year international marketing veteran. Tom is a 20+ year marketing veteran and TNG's own social media guru. 

Not every interaction or engagement with your brand by consumers has equal value. Especially if your goals are to influence consideration of your brand or ignite word of mouth sharing about your products.

So do you have a schema for measuring engagement with your brand across online social channels? If so, how have you determined which actions and points of interaction are the most valuable? Which get higher weighting than others?