The Power of Tagging in Persuasion of Consumer Behavior

A video from B J Fogg is worth sharing this week. In the video he briefly introduced how Facebook utilize the tagging photos together with email links to relevant consumers to drive the traffic to their site.

According to Fogg, Facebook open the function for their users to tag friend's photos and share with others. When someone's photo is being tagged, he/she will receiving an automatic email with the direct link to that photo.

To synthesize the points from my last two blog posts, this action has immense power of change that person's behavior because: the direct reach of the person--connectivity (email); convenience and accessibility (direct link that drive the people to the photos without login process); high relevance (his/her own photo being tagged); networks--humanity (a friend or someone knows you tagged your photo). These create the stimulus that triggers people's motivation to change their behaviors. As a result, Facebook successfully persuades the people to visit their site.

8 Killer Social Media and Digital Marketing Quotes

Best quotes heard at the Digital Marketing Mixer (Cited from Jay Baer's post):

“Content Doesn’t Win. Optimized Content Wins” – Li Evans
“People Don’t Expect Your Company to be Perfect. They Expect You to Provide Solutions” –Debra Ellis
“Don’t Train. Simplify” – Dr. BJ Fogg
“Measurement is Like Laundry. It Piles Up the Longer You Wait to Do It” – Amber Naslund
“Your Customers Are Listening in Social Media. And So Are Search Engines” – Li Evans
“Many crummy trials beats the big thinking” – Dr. BJ Fogg
“The Art of Twitter is in the Retweet. You Must be Interesting” – Peter Shankman
“Tactics Without a Strategy is Worse Than Doing Nothing at All” – Li Evans

What’s your favorite idea or quote from the Digital Marketing Mixer? Leave a comment, and let’s chat.

33 tips of Social Media and Digital Marketing Part 2

From the Engaging with Customers sessions

18. Build relationships with fire starters
19. Build community first, monetize later

(Social media community becomes the new brand intangible word of mouth assets in addition to traditional brand awareness, values and key stakeholder loyalties)
20. Offer value on Twitter, don’t self promote
21. Have passion and jump on every possible situation you can on the social Web
22. Build relationships with customers to create a memorable brand experience
23. Set goals, measure, and iterate

(Even the most flexible, adaptive, and natural looking social media site has to be strategically planned. The practitioners create a forum that attracts the consumers’ participation and promotes dialogues under the similar prescribed theme and rules. However, the best strategies of marketing are those accomplishing both brand’s and consumers’ goals, fulfill both brand’s and consumer’s needs, and reframing and unifying various interests under the same framework—the brand values.)
24. Social media guidelines for your company should be short and succinct

(Short and succinct means practitioners have much freedom to adapt their tactics according to the changing of market.)
25. Be organized internally to effectively manage social media externally

(keep communicate to the outside with the same voice, tone and manner, and standpoint)

From the Peer to Peer sessions

26. Blog about how your products/services fit into your customer’s lives
27. Humanize your blog

(Feature of humanity is always the first priority for social media practices)
28. Get your legal counsel talking to other companies that have successfully implemented social media
29. Have conversations with senior management to determine their appetite for social media

(A bottom-up educational popularization of social media marketing is useful to shift the mind of senior management members from traditional media tools to social media)
30. Provide your community something that is personally beneficial to them
31. Let your members decide how they want to use “their” community
32. In online video, be mindful of people’s time, attention and surroundings
33. Use trackable links to measure success

33 tips of Social Media and Digital Marketing Part 1

I just read an article by Jay Baer, who summarized from 2009 digital marketing mixer conference in Chicago 33 tips of Social Media and Digital Marketing. I’d like to share with you these points and some of my ideas in different font color following each points.

From the Marketing Must Knows sessions

1. Build credibility before you sell via social media
2. Allow open (but governed) access for employees to Twitter and blogging
3. Broadcast emails are not effective. Create relevancy and be helpful
4. Use your Facebook fan page to promote key content of your email newsletter
5. Join the right conversations and the right time
6. Think about your Web site’s “front page” as a collection of pages, not one home page
7. Improve search spending ROI by using down-funnel data
8. Invest in social media. It’s not free.

The key advantage of social media as the marketing tool is that it employs the person-centered communication format (i.e., accessibility, topic relevancy, interactivity). So it sets the high bar for social media practitioners (i.e., promoting credibility, investing time and money on social media, participation in dialogues of the consumers)

From the Integrating Marketing Programs sessions

9. Test the unusual
10. Clean up your landing pages
11. Keep your troops informed
12. Insert retweet buttons into PDF files

(That’s an evolutionary practice that leads to the change of traditional one-way author-reader relationships to highly interactive co-authoring relationship. Perhaps, the Amazon Kindle can considering such function since it has already been equipped with the PDF reading and Wikipedia posting functions.)
13. Remove gates in front of your content
14. Use your brand community for market research

15. Engage in online communities as a person first, as a marketer second

(The stress of humanity (e.g., user friendly interface, consumer-centered communication, personalized content) is another important feature of social media. The Social media practitioner should be highly involved into the online activities in order to keep updating their mind of such fast developing new media channels and co-opt it for marketing use.)
16. Use Google keyword tool to learn how customers describe your products/services

17. Optimize all your content for search

Customer Service through Tweets

Social media becomes the catalyst of innovational and evolutional approaches for companies to improve their customer service nowadays.

More than half of the Fortune 100 companies are using Twitter for customer service, recruiting employees, blasting news and announcing promotions, according to the study by public relations firm Burson-Marsteller and its digital-media unit, Proof.

Company	Twitter handle	Off-hour service
Allstate	Allstate	Y
AT&T	ATTNews	Y
Best Buy	BestBuyCMO
Best Buy	Twelpforce
British Airways	BritishAirways
Comcast	ComcastCares	Y
Dell	multiple accounts	Y
Delta Air Lines	DeltaAirLines
DirecTV	DirecTV
Ford	ScottMonty	Y
GE	GE_Reports
General Motors	GMblogs	Y
H&R Block	HRBlock
Hardees	Hardees
Harley-Davidson	harleydavidson
Honda	Alicia_at_Honda	Y
Jet Blue	JetBlue	Y
Marriott Int'l	MarriottIntl
New York Times Co.	NYTimesComm	Y
Nordstrom	Nordstrom	Y
Nortel	Nortel
Oracle	multiple accounts
Pizza Hut	PizzaHut	Y
Popeyes Chicken	PopeyesChicken
Quicken Loans	quickenloans
Renault	Renault_Live	Y
Samsung	SamsungMobileUS	Y
Southwest	SouthwestAir	Y
Starbucks	Starbucks	Y
State Farm	StateFarm
Texas Instrum.	TXInstruments	Y
The Home Depot	homedepot	Y
Toyota	Toyota	Y
Tyson Fds.	TysonFoods
UPS	ThomasAtUPS
Wells Fargo	Ask_WellsFargo	Y
Whole Foods	WholeFoods	Y

source from Nielsen

One of the most important advantages of twitter is that it enables the companies to listen and respond to customers in a genuine and timely manner. From a more historical perspective, twitter set a high bar for the customer service industry—to promote company’s reputation by promising and honoring the promising of instant gratification.

Instant gratification is not the creation of the companies, but, rather, the demand of the customers. They certainly are looking for help on Twitter. In one recent survey, 58% of respondents said if they had tweeted about a bad experience, they would like the company to respond to their comment.

On the other hand, twitter also has its limitations. It is hard to solve the complex issue within 140 characters. That’s why, ideally, Twitter should be one of several customer service solutions (e.g., phone, e-mail and online chat support etc.).