Social Media Marketing

A recent study has found a linkage between social media engagement and financial success and profitability. In the first study of its kind, Engagement DB has provided the marketing community with some compelling directional findings. While the study findings can not show true causality, it's very exciting to see the linkage between deep engagement within social channels and the financial performance of some of the world's leading brands. Some key findings include:

I recently stumbled across (OK, it was Tweeted earlier this week by @JasonFalls) a job listing for a Sr. Manager – Emerging Media Marketing at big box retailer Best Buy. It’s your standard job listing that calls for everything you might expect to see from a corporate giant looking for a Sr. Marketer:

We are happy to announce significant business wins with branding heavy-weight Hitachi – HTA. Hitachi-HTA (Hitachi High Technologies America) hired TNG to outline a corporate web strategy and to marry seven corporate brands in one streamlined digital approach. This win comes on the heels of our one year anniversary as digital agency of record for weight-loss powerhouse, Jenny Craig.

The short answer is yes. The bigger question is how and what will it cost you.

It seems that every business today wants to discover, interact with and harness the connectedness and influence of brand ambassadors. Why? One great benefit is to stimulate authentic word of mouth through people that other people already trust and listen to, AND are outside the formal corporate brand marketing and messaging machine.

Numerous studies have been done which point to the reality of what information sources people trust and it has become clear that brand messages are way down the list while information from colleagues, peers and friends is squarely at the top.

Intel is one of a number of corporations to jump on this trend over the last year and proactively develop a network of brand ambassadors. They’ve reached out to bloggers with influence, who are articulate, opinionated and have a following of readers who listen…and likely act on the ideas these brand ambassadors put forth.

As with many programs of this type, Intel did invest some dollars in making this happen. They pulled the bloggers from the virtual world of the Internet into the real world of the Intel campus, got to know these people better and in-person, gave then an incentive of a free Mac book Air and sent them off to continue putting forth perspective on Intel products. Pretty simple, it will be interesting to watch the evolution of this program to see how the investment of time, energy and dollars pays off, I think it will.

You can read more about the “Intel Insider” brand ambassador program online here: http://www.somewhatfrank.com/2008/06/intel-insider.html. Great to see big brands that get it that organizing people with influence online often involves getting people together in the real world to further solidify connections.

Aaron Bean is the Director of Strategy at The New Group, a digital marketing agency based in Portland, Oregon. 503.248.4505

A recent AdAge article alerts marketers eye balling social media to the fact that the members of social networks may be getting sick of constantly being asked to install this app or forward that message to their friends. If we follow my party analogy, this shouldn’t surprise anyone