The Power of Real-Time Social Media Marketing: How to Attract and Retain Customers and Grow the Bottom Line in the Globally Connected World (MARKETING/SALES/ADV & PROMO) - Hardcover

Macy, Beverly; Thompson, Teri

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0071752633 ISBN 13: 9780071752633

Publisher: McGraw Hill, 2011

Synopsis

Today's Hottest Trends for On-the-Spot Marketing!

"A must read for media and marketers.”
―Alan Cohen, CEO, OMD USA

"What do fish tacos, data storage, and disaster relief all have in common? Each has harnessed the power of marketing that amplifies via the real-time social web. These and many other case studies are part of this engaging new book that details strategies for marketers to understand, evolve, and profit in the social age."
―John Gerzema, Chief Insights Officer, Young & Rubicam, and coauthor of Spend Shift

"Understanding what's possible and how to use social media will be essential for every marketer; this book will hold your hand in this brave new world."
―John Miller, CMO, NBC Universal TV Group

"Like it or not, social media is here to stay. It needs to be understood, managed, and harnessed. This book tells you how. Read it!"
―Zhihang Chi, Ph.D., Vice President and General Manager, North America, Air China Limited

"Beverly Macy is a true innovator and thought leader in the field of social media marketing."
―Cathy Sandeen, Ph.D., MBA, Dean, UCLA Extension, University of California Los Angeles

About the Book

In an era when information travels at phenomenal speed along the “real-time Web,” a brand can explode into popular culture overnight--and die just as quickly. As a marketer, how can you stay ahead of the curve? How do you control the chaos? Two words: Social Media.

With The Power of Real-Time Social Media Marketing, you'll learn how to take advantage of today's "fluid" business environment and develop innovative ways to meet market demands. And here's the best part: all your tools--Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other sites--are free!

Leading figures in the exciting new world of sophisticated social media marketing, Beverly Macy and Teri Thompson explain how you can use this global, real-time platform to change how consumers interact with your brand. They then present detailed case studies illustrating how top organizations and emerging brand giants have proven the remarkable effectiveness of social media marketing. Find out how:

• The American Red Cross turned a single "tweet" into $33 million worth of donations to earthquake victims in Haiti
• Orange County Transportation Authority engaged citizens to participate in transportation planning and use
• DIRE CTV boosted customer loyalty and trust by finding and solving complaints in real time
• EMC transformed business processes by leveraging workforce social media proficiency and "open" behavior models

Marketers no longer have the luxury of time to develop, test, and measure a brand. Use the lessons in The Power of Real-Time Social Media Marketing to launch your brand in a fixed amount of time, accurately measure the impact of your activities, and instantly adjust to any unforeseen events.

About this title

About the Author

Beverly Macy is CEO and cofounder of Gravity Summit and managing partner of Y&M Partners. She teaches executive marketing courses for the UCLA Business and Management Extension Program. Macy lives in Beverly Hills, California.

Teri Thompson is a creative director at Gravity Summit and the president of Rocky Peak Enterprises, LLC. She served as media director for U2 singer Bono's (RED) campaign with Fortune 500 partners and held marketing and production positions at ABC, CBS, and NBC. Thompson lives in Simi Valley, California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

THE POWER OF REAL-TIME SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

How to Attract and Retain Customers and Grow the Bottom Line in the Globally Connected World

By BEVERLY MACY, TERI THOMPSON

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-07-175263-3

Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface
CHAPTER 1 Real-Time Marketing: The Now Lens
CHAPTER 2 The Way We Communicate Has Changed Forever—Why Now?
CHAPTER 3 The Power of Conversation and Engagement
CHAPTER 4 Real-Time Marketing Strategies
CHAPTER 5 Real-Time Marketing Case Stories: Lessons in Leadership
CHAPTER 6 Analytics and Measurement
CHAPTER 7 Viewing the Future of Real-Time Social Media: The Next Lens
Notes
Index

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Real-Time Marketing: The Now Lens

Consider the following:

* One tweet—a message with no more than 140 characters—turns into$33 million-plus in disaster aid.

* A town hall meeting on transportation systems in Orange County, California, isviewed in Russia, Western Europe, and Asia.

* Formerly struggling competitors are thriving by sharing customers.

Real-time marketing is the unlimited, boundless opportunity of now. Thisbook explains why the time has come for marketers to plant a stake in the groundas thought leaders for the businesses they serve and transition their companiesinto this new zone. It also reveals in broad terms what is changing in theglobal business landscape and how businesses can adapt their strategies tomaximize the power of real-time social media marketing for the present andfuture.

In addition, the selected case stories in Chapter 5 represent real-worldstories that are just beginning to surface and illustrate the explosive power ofreal-time marketing. They provide exclusive insights from innovative companiesand organizations that are realizing significant benefits by applying new real-time strategies. Their stories highlight specific solutions and tactics used fortackling the complex and exciting opportunities that the use of real-time andthe power of social media present.

Corporate executives, small business owners, entrepreneurs, marketers,advertisers, and consumers are actively seeking education and information onexactly what is required to join the conversation and harness the potential ofreal-time social media marketing because the world has changed forever. There isno going back. You cannot afford to be a wallflower. Step into the conversationnow.

People all around the world are connecting via social networks and communitieswith lightning speed. Every day it seems that the numbers build. The swiftnessis exhilarating because real-time is what is happening in this instant, whereyou are or where someone else is at the exact same moment, next door or on theother side of the world. This new speed is being combined with the developmentof free social media platforms that create virtual water cooler spaces wherepeople share similar interests, opinions, reviews, and conversations. These twoelements—real-time and social media platforms—deliver informationfaster than television or radio, with a broader reach and at dizzying speeds.

The merging of real-time with social media–empowered conversations hasbecome rocket fuel for the world of marketing. Marketers now have the ability totarget consumers with laser accuracy and link them to a brand with relevant andongoing dialogue on platforms such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,Flickr, and YouTube. The conversation chain has no limits in its capacity tosweep up every demographic and ethnicity. Facebook was started by HarvardUniversity student Mark Zuckerberg as a proprietary way for friends to stay intouch and foster relationships, regardless of the dramatic liberties taken inthe film The Social Network, released in fall 2010. In late 2009,Facebook's fastest growing segment was baby boomers. As of July 22, 2010,Zuckerberg announced that the number of Facebook profiles worldwide had explodedto over 500 million. That number is larger than the U.S. population. To put itin perspective, if Facebook were a country, it would be the world's thirdlargest.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau's Interactive International Data Map, 52percent of the world's population was under age 30 in 2010. These global digitalnatives are mobile, socially networked, and live fluidly in real-time. The humanneed to connect and share is evident in the various platforms that are beingembraced around the world. OhMyNews is a favorite all-digital citizen journalismcommunity in South Korea with tens of millions of profiles, while Renren.com andits new merger partner Kaixin are a leading force in China along withKaixin001.com and 51.com. Google's Orkut is still Brazil's top social network.Hi5 is the hub of choice in Mexico, Peru, Portugal, Romania, Thailand, andMongolia. Maktoob is the place to be in Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Oman, SaudiArabia, and Yemen. V Kontakte just passed Odnoklassniki as the most popularsocial site in Russia, areas of Eastern Europe, and Turkey. StudiVZ isexclusively for college students in Germany. The digitally socially active inJapan are on Mixi.

The map in Figure 1.1 shows social media around the world.

1.1 World Social Media Map as of June 2010

Since this human tsunami is occurring in real-time, marketers, content creators,and enterprises must view their world through the Now Lens. Consumers wantdirections now, search now, movie reviews now, personalized news now, sportsscores now. People want it on their screen of choice—the TV, computer,smartphone, iPad, or Xbox—to share with friends, fans, and followersnow. Consumers are creating or clamoring for content that ispersonalized, sharable, and available anytime, anyplace, anywhere.

Those who provide content and capabilities to these demanding consumers inreal-time will capitalize seemingly overnight. Corporations that are preparedwill discover that "conversations" are one of the most powerful brandaccelerators and business development tools to appear in years. Conversations inreal-time are shoring up customer retention and brand loyalty. More than ever,real-time marketing must be viewed as a business management function thatcontributes to the bottom line.

Companies that quickly learn how to master the art of attracting and retainingcustomers in real-time will be ready to generate sustainable, profitable growthand will end up winners in the globally connected world. Companies that don't,won't. It's really that simple. That is why it is imperative to take amoment to understand the following facts about and insights into these digitalnatives from around the planet. These are the people you will be marketing toand the companies you may be working for sooner than you think.

Global Perspectives

China

Mona is an 18-year-old Chinese native who is studying science at a communitycollege in Southern California. Before her arrival in the United States, she hadtraveled extensively throughout Europe, Dubai, and Mongolia. As is typical ofdigital natives, borders are insignificant to her. Though she is far from herfriends in China, she uses social media as a tool to stay close and see whatthey are doing by means of their status updates and photos. She uses the Chineseinstant messaging service QQ and Renren, which is similar to Facebook. All herfriends use those social platforms to avoid making expensive phone calls. Mona'sgoal is to continue her undergraduate and graduate work in America and thensecure a job. If that does not happen because of fierce internationalcompetition for opportunities in the United States, she will return to China.

Sam Flemming is based in Shanghai and is the chairman of CIC, a company hefounded in 2004 as the first and leading social media research and analyticsfirm in China. CIC is at the forefront of exploring Chinese digital culture,helping leading brands in that country such as L'Oreal, Pepsi, and Nikeunderstand how social media can be leveraged across the entire organization. Samprovides this insight into the state of social media in China today:

According to the government run China Internet Network Information Center(CNNIC), which serves as the de facto source of China Internet statistics, Chinahas over 420 million Internet users as of July 2010, making it the largestInternet market in the world. Important to note is that we are still at therelatively early stages of adoption, considering that while the United Stateshas over 80% penetration, China has only 25%, with a total population of 1.3billion people.

The use of social media is impressive. The most recent government standardstatistics from the CNNIC show that there are 231 million bloggers, 130 millionpeople on bulletin boards (BBS), 210 million people on social networking sites.

In China, with more people online and with more places to talk, those who aretalking are more engaged than [in] any other market. Chinese consumers usenative social media channels like the Xcar BBS community, Sina microblog andsocial networking site Kaixin to share opinions and experiences about brands bythe millions.

More than just talk, consumers are even organizing themselves for grouppurchasing discounts and online/offline protests against poor customer service.The phenomena of the brand/consumer relationship that's justbeginning to happen in the West has been happening in China for years.

Africa

Gilles Bouhoyi is a Congolese-born entrepreneur who started his career at age 20as an executive in the family business in Brazzaville, Congo. After completinghis MBA, he attended the Certificate in International Trade and Commerceextension program at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studiedsocial media marketing. His interest in social media led him to conceive asocial academic network project that got the interest of several colleges anduniversities, including UCLA.

Bouhoyi is also the founder and CEO of Phoenix Asset Management, a LosAngeles–based firm with a satellite office in New York that signed apartnership deal with Fidelity Investments to offer global investment productsand services to private and corporate clients in Africa. Gilles contributes thisinsight:

Global popular sites such as Facebook, Hi5, YouTube, Daily Motion, MySpace, aremostly used for fun and to establish personal connections. Hi5 is more popularamong Africans, though Facebook has recently been gaining market share. DailyMotion is way more popular than YouTube in Africa.

In the last five years, a new cast of users dominated by twenty-somethings hasemerged. These newcomers are entrepreneurs who use social media to advance andpromote their real life businesses.

Venicia Guinot, 23, a Congolese-born student in marketing and communication inJohannesburg, South Africa, started a group on Hi5 called "Continent Noir"(Black Continent). Within two years, she created an organization of the samename aimed at fighting poverty and promoting development in poor communitiesacross Africa. Continent Noir uses its network of Africans across fivecontinents to help choose projects to work on, organize them and look forfunding.

Venicia has also launched an online magazine that she hopes will one day be theAfrican equivalent of the Oprah Magazine: Tropics Magazine. She uses Facebookand Twitter to give awareness of the site and attract new visitors. KwakuChintoh is a photographer and web designer from Ghana who has launched "MokoCharlie," a bank of images of Africa to promote another view of the continentand show a face that is so often overlooked by many outside Africa. His imagedatabase is growing by leaps and bounds.

Still, much of the energy of social media in Africa is largely focused onpolitics. The last two years have seen the multiplication of sites like CongoWorld in Lingala which aims at connecting the communities of a particularDiaspora around many themes including business opportunities.

India

Raj Suvarna, an MBA graduate of Baylor University who is currently based inSouthern California, frequently travels back and forth to his native India. Heoffers this snapshot of real-time marketing and the growth of social media inIndia:

India is home to over 1 billion people where 18 official languages arerecognized with thousands of dialects. The country is like a coin with twofaces: On the one side is 42% of the population which is below the poverty line,struggling to make ends meet. On the other side is an India known for itsdynamic, young, educated, multi-lingual, talented workforce ready to propel thenation's economy to new heights. India is only behind China in terms of GDPgrowth of 8% year over year (U.S. growth rate 3%). The middle class is expandingwith rising incomes followed by an inflation rate that is not sustainable.

While MySpace was thriving in the earlier part of the decade in America, Indianswere busy connecting with each other on Orkut (Google's platform for socialnetworking) and Hi5. AIM is a popular instant messenger service, MSN was andstill is the dominant platform Indians use to communicate online. Even the lackof high speed unlimited broadband and PC's in every home does not stop thisgeneration of young Indians wanting their voice to be heard by being some of themost active profiles on Orkut, Facebook, and Twitter.

Hundreds of Indian celebrities are now tweeting and responding to theirfollowers in an extremely informal and personalized manner bringing their fanseven closer than ever before. Facebook fan pages are giving them a platform todiscuss movie reviews, post pictures and even get feedback on what works andwhat doesn't.

The IPL (Indian Premiere League) of cricket has been a phenomenal success andits players, team owners and the governing body have done a wonderful job ofconnecting with the common man on player selection decisions, venues, andupdates on times.

An Indian company named SMS Gup Shup has developed an easy way to communicateand share by giving the Indian consumer the ability to build a group via aregular text message, add participants and continue the conversation as a threadwhich all can participate in and see.

Istanbul, Turkey, by Way of San Diego, California

Nahit Karaca, age 22, and his friend Onur Paskoy, age 24, attend one of themajor universities in Istanbul. Nahit is entering his final year, studying urbanplanning; Onur is wrapping up his studies in electrical engineering. Theroommates decided to spend a summer in America with jobs bicycling San Diegotourists around the restaurant district in four-seater carts. Nahit wanted toget a taste of California while trying to decide where to pursue his master'sdegree: Europe; the United States; or Turkey.

He, Onur, and all their friends keep in touch on Facebook or by texting on theirmobile phones. While in the United States, the two young men plan to takeweekend trips to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas. Like Mona fromChina, these are true digital natives who view the world as having no borders,are fluid travelers, and are always connected.

U.S. Hispanics and Latin America

Andrew Orci is the President CEO at Orci, a Los Angeles–based advertisingagency that specializes in reaching the Hispanic market. He offers his insightsinto Hispanics' adoption of real-time social media in the United States andLatin America:

Even before the Internet, Latinos have been intensely socially connected. Forcenturies, the Plaza or Zocalo was the place where people congregated to connectwith their community. It's part of who we are historically. Today, Hispanicshave embraced social media as a tool for expanding their connection to theirsocial network. They have become technological leap froggers now that advanceddevices are affordable and ubiquitous. They are flocking to wireless, laptopsand mobile. For example: 24% of iPhones are owned by Hispanics. El Paso, Texasis the texting capital of the U.S. Hispanic use of Facebook has blown up, takingthe lead over MySpace and Hi5. Hispanics are less engaged with Twitter becausethe platform doesn't offer the possibility of dialogue nor of more direct groupinteraction.

Hispanics are the largest movie-going audience. They also index higher than thegeneral market for accessing the internet through mobile (32% vs. 20%). This ismirrored in Latin America, where growth and adoption of social media isvolcanic. Many global brands fail to realize the opportunity that exists in thishighly connected market. If a person in Texas buys a global brand and tells arelative in Peru, that person's relative may be the brand's next consumer.

Hispanics in the United States have one trillion dollars in buying power. Thatis bigger than any country in Latin America. And with over 400 million Spanishspeakers south of the border, the potential is enormous and their participationin real-time social media will continue to grow.

The Shared World

These youthful global voices demonstrate that static, centralized broadcast one-way messaging is a thing of the past. Now it is two-way, three-way, one-to-many,and viral for millions. The concept of "a friend tells a friend, and then thatperson tells another friend, and so on and so on" has truly come topass—locally, regionally, and globally. Communication and data managementare taking place in "the cloud," and the process is interactive. As a flock ofmigrating birds are held together by an unseen glue that tells them where toturn, dip, and fly, real-time conversations are flowing in the ether and cannotbe physically contained. This is incomprehensible and counterintuitive for thosein traditional business sales, marketing, and public relations practices.

In the new shared-experience world, consumers group together to create trendsthat can coalesce rapidly into unparalleled business opportunities. Real-timemarketing will require swift reactions to take advantage of spontaneousmovements, crazes, and fads as they happen. Going forward, success or failure isgoing to depend on how marketing and corporate communication leaders steer theircompanies into the dynamic world of real-time marketing.

Marketers are fast realizing that real-time is the antithesis of what theylearned about journalism, marketing, advertising, and public relations:

1. Control the brand: message, position, reputation

2. Control the message: do not let it control the brand

Conversations about your brand are taking place right now regardless of whetheryour chief marketing officer or someone else in the company is driving thedialogue or not. The new communication shift has flipped the rules, withconsumers in the position of defining both messaging and the brand. There isseemingly no control, and so companies around the world are trying to decidewhether they can sit out the conversation (i.e., engage in business as usual) orshould join the conversation.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from THE POWER OF REAL-TIME SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING by BEVERLY MACY. Copyright © 2011 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: McGraw Hill
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0071752633
• ISBN 13: 9780071752633
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272