NewsBytes: Beware the Bubble and the Alpha Mom
1) I bet this USA Today article by Bruce Horovitz has already caught your attention, but just in case - take a look at "Alpha Moms Leap to Top of Trendsetters." My question: Is it really a particular type of mom, or is it, as I suspect, a type of women who happens to be a mom that has so much trendsetting influence? P.S. The comments to the article, alone, are worth checking it out.
2) And, what of the "bubble" obsession about which Christopher M. Shroeder so insightfully wrote in his MediaPost commentary, "Gestalt: Deflating Bubble-Speak?" To quote the article:
"The obsession tends to be an awareness of ’something big’ going on combined with a fear of missing it. The
abstraction tends to manifest itself in one-stop-shop buzz terms vague
enough to cover any aspect of "something big" while remaining
noncommittal on the specifics."
If you are running yourself ragged trying to figure out how your brand can appropriately integrate "Web 2.0" or "social networking" before you’ve really studied their applicability for your products or services - take a step back and read this reality check.
March 30th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
So on the note of : … or “social networking” before you’ve really studied their applicability for your products or services - take a step back and read this reality check.
Its really true.
I agree with the reality check on the opportunity that these rising communities represent to brands. The internet has finally delivered its promise of the early naughties of an online community, but this online community exists because the internet has become a much more trusted space. Abuse the trust, lose the community. Any brand considering social networking spaces as a place to call their own, should view this as a bit of a holy grail and be utterly sensitive to it. As marketers you also need to realise that these are organic spaces we are trying to harness. These spaces are manifest by people and the underlying trend of the Content Generation.
So here I would point you a recent Financial Times article excerpt: Financial Times, Opening up the conversation
By Paul Tyrrell, Published: March 23, 2007
“What consumers really want, he argues, is a multidirectional way to interact
with brands. That is, they want to exchange information freely with both company representatives and other customers in a dedicated, facilitative environment, to improve their experience of a brand’s offering and evaluate new purchasing decisions.
Many companies have taken a step in this direction by setting up online forums or message boards – for example, most manufacturers of electronic devices, software and other complex products. They have thereby created self-sustaining communities of users willing to advise one another, reducing pressure on in-house technical support teams and, more importantly, improving customer experiences by providing quick solutions to common problems. But forums are faceless places in which someone’s tone, point of view and nickname are the only indicators of their character. And they don’t provide much information that would be considered useful in the context of traditional CRM.
A growing number of companies are, therefore, going one step further and creating their own “social networks” – similar in structure to popular websites such as MySpace and Facebook, though smaller and with varying degrees of functionality.
Here, consumers can provide more detail about themselves and exchange information about their experiences in the form of photographs, videos or even dedicated blogs.”
So the newly termed ‘CRM 2.0.’
Enjoy!