Latest Social Media Reports

I've blocked off my whole calendar for today and created my own 'offsite'. I have two goals; 1. get caught up on some new Forrester reports that came out in the last month and 2. develop international guidance for my Windows subs regarding what they should be doing in Social Media in FY10. The guidance is the really hard one, I'll cover that another day. But here is my overview of two reports I read this week.

Forrester Reports:

Social Technology Strategies for 'Boring' Consumer Brands by Josh Bernoff

I think this paper will be super helpful to the majority of brands out there. Let's face it, there is really only a handful of brands that are really exciting and can talk about themselves all day. I know I don't have one of those brands. Windows is an operating system, it runs in the background. People know they need it but the majority of our users don't really know what it does or quite frankly even care. They just want it to work when they turn their PC on. They are more passionate about their hardware (Dell, HP, Sony) than the operating system. As Josh suggests in the report, we focus on what people love DOING with their PC because that they are passionate about. Gaming, photo sharing, document storage. People could talk all day about these things which have a relationship to Windows but it's not the focus on the conversation.

Two great takeaways from the paper are:

• Concentrate on your customers' problems, not on your products or services.
• No matter the objective, the key is to recognize that you're creating a long-term asset, not an advertising campaign

Using Social Apps in Ad Campaigns by Sean Corcoran

About a month ago I had a opportunity to talk with Sean about how I think about social applications and the role they play in our ad campaigns. It was fun to be a part of his research for this paper. A challenge for agencies (and therefore marketers who use agencies) is the quick fix. It's getting easier and easier to come up with new ways to gain attention for a brand. Micro-sites spring up all the time with cool user generated contests or 'submit your favorite' whatever. YouTube is filled with brands looking to give away stuff to people who will upload recipes or videos and these are great ways to get the conversation started with your customers. But then what?

The best way to leverage the investment you make in these campaigns is to make sure it can work for you when the campaign is over. I asked someone on our Win7 launch team this week how much we are willing to spend on throw away campaigns and how much are we spending on sustaining programs. I think there is a value to the big bang campaigns for PR, momentum, etc. but it should be a conscious decision that we are okay spending X amount of dollars on short term pushes rather than long term investments (ie. community building activities that pay off again and again over time).

My two favorite points from this paper are:

• Commit to the community
• Plan a transition or exit strategy

Technorati Tags: windows marketing,social media marketing,forrester reports,social media,Youtube,user generated content