Blogging has waned along
with much of the navel gazing that typified the web and many web gurus. Or rather, it hasn’t so much waned as been sorted. Navel gazing and me-formation has moved to Facebook and Linked in, leaving the real writers blogging happily as they always did. Facebook and Linked in are blogs too, of a type, but social. True blogs are more likely to be anti-social if anything – couched in comfortable near anonymity and lacking the self censorship that comes with not expecting a blog post to be read by old friends and close family.
The blogs and bloggers that have remained have been sorted themselves becoming less self-obsessed and diary-ish and more informative and brochure like in character. (Apart from the set who are collecting each post for a future real world publication.) WordPress knows this I think and facilitate enough blog plug ins to make a blog and brochure site nearly indistinguishable.
Perhaps the genius of Facebook and latterly Google + arose from discovering, by accident or by design, that most people love nothing more than to talk about themselves – each status update offering a symbolic stroke in the form of a ‘like’, a ‘share’, a ‘+1’ or a supportive comment from friends and family, rather than a dispassionate readership in any literary sense.
Now that the blogsmoke has cleared, clients who dipped their toe into social media in the past few years are discovering that maintaining online conversations with ‘users’ or ‘customers’ is difficult. This isn’t a brochure, or an engagement… it’s a full blown conversation with a mob or loyal fan-base, if you are lucky, but more likely a peacekeeping operation with a few grumpy customers who’ve gained confidence from not hearing your voice or looking you in the eye…
Rarely, are such pages and communications popular in the true sense of the word. Because a post uses a word that’s trending on Twitter and gets shared does not make the sender popular, no more than shouting ‘up the Dubs’ would at a football match make the fan an instigator of public opinion. The fact is, the people who are famous online were famous already, or about to be. They’d be famous if there was no Internet.
These conversations, however few or many are all important, because other customers may be listening in. The Internet never forgets, so how you handle these chats and encounters is critical to how the all important search algorithms views your popularity, search engine relevance and quality in terms of site and conversational sentiment.
Each point of contact with your marketplace is a gold mine for the savvy marketer. For the first time you can hone your brand, your advertising, your market research and your product in a central holistic sense – a single database to explore what’s working, how well and why. This is the realm of analysis and analytics.
It is not only for mareting tweaks that analytics is of value. How many times in the past year have I looked at client data and realized they were sitting on a considerable opportunity for turning their data into money, in terms of saved resources, automatic market research, effective internal communication and powerful external public relations.
Data can become a product in its own right – saleable and valuable. Especially when it’s combined with easily gathered demographics, mapping one to the other to give a rich real-time overview of product sales and company performance.
Some companies are doing this well, and ‘get’ the concept that their business is becoming all about data, reporting, performance mapping and tweaking, where effective stats combine with sales figures bringing the CFO and the CTO to the centre of the marketing process. But many others are running around like headless chickens, terrified of the numbers, afraid of being found out.
They needn’t be. We’re all doing this for the first time and there is no need to feel under pressure, or bullied into performing tasks that were not in anyones job description, because these tasks and systems didn’t exist. The data wasn’t there, because the market wasn’t talking to you and purchasing through a digital interface.
In the recent past we had some pieces of the puzzle, but now we have the whole thing. The pieces are jumbled up, but they are all there on the table in front of you. You need help to recognize how to stitch them together but that’s what the stats and analytics guy is for – to guide you in the right direction, empower you with the tools to pick up the pieces and give you a map to show you which bit goes where, and why – bringing the whole picture into sharp focus.
It’s a new digital world of marketing, but we can do more with more confidence and less risk than ever before. That might make you insecure because you are accountable, but it should also make you excited about the potential to prove what worked beyond any doubt as well as spot and fix what didn’t before too much money has been spent. Bringing efficiencies to a business is always appreciated. It saves money and makes a business reactive, lean, intelligent and healthy. That’s what every business owner and shareholder wants, because these things facilitate one important thing above all else. Maximising profits. You can turn data into money – and prove it.
