TamTamy Blog

Carrying out an action of marketing in a 2.0 environment requires a different approach from traditional marketing. The company which decides to change its structure, its IT tools, the way its employees work, besides working on the message itself, must also be ready to find a strategy on how to let the change be seen and spread outside.

The key points in a good 2.0 communication addressed to customers are basically five:

1. Use a Corporate Blog
We have already seen in detail what a corporate blog is and how companies can use it to their own advantage. Besides starting from the comments made directly by the people on how to improve the quality of the products, when companies build a common ground between themselves and their consumers they show a side of their “personality” that had remained hidden up to now. Personality, thus, in the sense of showing a human side made up of many people, and no longer only a brand.

2. Create a flow of information exchange
Just as companies learn from the consumers, who will punctually speak out through the posts they create on a specific brand, the comments, the links, etc., also the consumers can learn to trust the company and welcome important information they receive personally.

3. Create your own audience
Reaching all categories of consumers is highly improbable according to any kind of marketing plan, and companies themselves are very unlikely to even take it into account. What they will have to learn is getting popular online and offline, becoming a reference point for an audience of faithful listeners that is more limited but much more devoted to the brand.

4. Involve the audience interested
As we saw in the previous posts, the communication between consumers and company must be biunique. The dialogue must be open and companies will have to devote some time to talking with their customers and actively answer their questions, doubts or comments, raising further questions in their turn. When the audience feel committed and properly involved in a structure – be it even a simple corporate blog or a wiki – they will want to take part at more levels: simply adding the blog to their feeds, participating in the forums, or collaborating more concretely.

5. Be excellent and, above all, present communicators
Public relations on the Internet must be cultivated with all the tricks we are analyzing day by day in this blog. The presence of companies on the net must be widespread. The vaster their presence on social media, applications and communities, the stronger the viral effect that will follow.

Summing up, we can say that the empathy between companies and consumers is a basic factor that cannot be built only in part. When the division between “We are” and “You are” gets thinner, in that precise moment the user will stop being a simple observer and become a devoted customer.

Definitely radical, but surely with an impact and to be taken into account, is the move recently made by Skittles.com, the site of the coloured, fruit-flavoured candies.

Instead of using the social media on the market in a marginal way, or mildly integrating them into its pages, it has literally replaced its homepage with the interface of some social networks.

In the past days we discovered with surprise that, when you accessed the site, you found the stream of the messages on Twitter.

Now the skin has changed again, getting more similar to Facebook’s style and – just as it is on the most successful social network now – it is possible for all subscribers to become a fan, add Skittles to your favourites or suggest it to your contacts, sharing the information.

But this is not over. Through a control tool which appears in the front, it is possible to pass to the Twitter mode clicking on “chatter“; selecting “media” you can choose if you want to watch the photos on Flickr or the videos on YouTube; the “product” section refers to the pages on Wikipedia regarding the five types of candies on the market; finally, clicking on “friends“, you go back to the Facebook-like visualization.

Not bad, really, as a step forward in the path of the evolution of enterprise 2.0, which looks more and more to the final user and its potential customers.

It is a further confirmation that the integration between “social web” and “enterprise” is getting subtler day after day. What was reserved before only to consumers, now is contaminated by the presence of the companies, which merge and mix with the rest of the community, becoming part of its world and, in their turn, involving people, consumers and partners in a universe that used to be a long way off.

In few words: if you fall behind, you are lost.

Andrew McAfee, associate professor at Harvard Business School and expert in the field, interviewed by Tiburton TV at the conference “Talk the Future” of Krems in Austria, once more explains what enterprise 2.0 is and how it can help companies make their business easier, acquiring information and redistributing it in a quicker way.
McAfee looks to the future and describes what is important to go on developing a web 2.0 technology that can penetrate more and more into companies, considering that it is already very powerful in its present state. As there are no longer any geographical or temporal limitations, that had in part already decreased with the first-generation web and that now web 2.0 has cut even more, becoming part of a global world is extremely easy for any company which is present on the net. Information moves quickly from one side of the continent to the other, from company to consumer and vice versa, generating a continuous exchange between companies and the surrounding world.

These external incentives, the information cycle available online and everything which surrounds us are the elements that lead companies towards the creation of a winning competitive strategy, as the video above explains more in detail, together with other interesting themes.

Before concluding, I would like to underline once more how tools that are often wrongly considered only for an audience of consumers are on the contrary useful also in enterprises. Answering the final question on which social network he uses more frequently, McAfee says without any hesitation: “Twitter, thanks to which, when I have a question about almost anything, I just put up a ‘tweet’ about it and within half an hour I get back five or six answers.”

Nike+ is the Social Network that Nike has created to collect all the information connected to its customers’ training in running. A sensor installed inside the shoe records information such as time and distances covered, sends it to the iPod or to a special bracelet and puts it at the user’s disposal for upload on the site. With this idea, Nike has created a Social Network of lovers of running: a well-defined target, with huge possibilities to grow.

Every subscriber has the possibility to “compete” against the others, confronting his/her results or simply registering them for future statistical analyses.

Nike has managed to turn a synchronous sport such as running (to compete in a race you have to be in the same place at the same time) into an asynchronous event. Users can decide whether they want to compete on the best time, the longest distance, etc.

The idea was born in 2006, and since then about 93 million miles have been uploaded on the site. Nike has sold 1.3 million “Nike+ iPod Sport Kits” and 500.000 Nike+ SportBands (Source: How Nike’s Social Network Sells to Runners).

In this way, Nike has managed to delegate its sales to the Social Network. If you are a lover of running and you want to be part of this fascinating and winsome Social Network, you have to be Nike’s customer, that is, you have at least to buy its shoes and its sensor.
The community has become its sales force.
Today Nike is experimenting with a new Social Network to promote its basketball shoes.