Summit: Marketing today is faster, more intimate

Facebook, at the tender age of 8 years old, boasts 845 million users as well as a 2011 profit of $1 billion. Earlier this month it filed its initial public offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, seeking to raise $5 billion – slated to be the biggest sale of shares by an Internet company, according to the BBC.
Facebook’s debut follows LinkedIn’s May IPO, which valued the business at $4 billion, according to the BBC.
Following the money, Providence Business News has organized an e-marketing and technology conference for interested marketing professionals, business owners and others.
The event will take place at the Providence Marriott Downtown, at 1 Orms St., on Feb. 28, from 8 to 11 a.m. Tickets are $35.
Panelists – ranging from a lawyer to the CEO and founder of the e-marketing association eMA – will participate in two sessions. The first focuses on e-communications, while the second looks at online-marketing strategies.
“Social media is changing the way we buy and sell goods,” said Robert Fleming, CEO and founder of eMA. “Twenty years ago we sold to people through mass media – TV, radio, etc. Today, it’s more of a dialogue – people are more interested in the experience of the product from [the moment] they open it up.”
“We’ve really taken an earth-shattering change with the dialogue we see with customers. We’ve seen instances where [customers] shut businesses down [through] review sites and social sites just by things the companies have done,” he said. “You can’t really get away with much today in terms of bad customer service or bad customer experience.”
If you are going to do email marketing, for example, putting ‘don’t reply’ in the email sends a message that ‘we really don’t want to hear from you,’ Fleming said. That’s saying ‘you’re not important enough to respond to us.’ Those types of things are irritating to people, and companies need to [re-evaluate] if they’re doing those things.” The implications of this new type of customer relationship “are why we have organized the summit,” explained PBN Editor Mark S. Murphy, who will moderate the two sessions. “The question is, how does a business embrace this intimacy, using what tools and what strategy?”
Panelist Christopher Ciunci, CEO and founder of marketing consulting firm TribalVision, sees 2012 as a year for building on trends we’ve already started to see. For instance, creating mobile-friendly websites will continue to be an important issue for small businesses.
Facebook is going to continue to shine, he said, forecasting that tools will crop up, making it easy for small businesses to create a page on the social network, monitor their presence, and eventually – an e-commerce platform.
“Your website can be Facebook,” said Ciunci, while noting that people don’t yet give as much credibility to a company’s Facebook page as they do to an official website, but “that trend is certainly happening.”
“The other [interesting] thing that makes this unique is [large] companies are spending tens of millions of dollars to put something on a platform they don’t own. And they have no control over it,” Fleming added. “Facebook can literally push a button and wipe them out. We’ve seen businesses get thrown off Facebook [and] LinkedIn because they violated some term or condition – for example, if they violate copyright or use someone’s trademark in a derogatory manner.”
Online-reputation management – a new service cropping up among local technology companies – is an important new aspect of marketing.
“One of the shifts you see in marketing today [is] you no longer can get away with inflated promises and claims, and then not deliver. Now, people are out there slamming you and your products, your restaurant … your brand. And they’re doing it on social networks which reach millions of people almost instantly,” Fleming said. “Managing expectations is important. … If [companies] over-promise and under-deliver, it doesn’t matter if they’re large or small – they’re going to have disappointed customers. If they under-promise and over-deliver, they’re almost always going to have happy customers,” he added.
But, is this trend here to stay? “The genie’s out of the bottle,” Fleming said. “It’s not going to get any easier for marketers to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. [Internet marketing] is bigger than television was in the 1950s or radio was in the ’30s.”
Fleming notes that review sites, including Amazon, Yelp, Google Places, etc., serve a function that Consumer Reports used to fill, and they are accessed from smartphones while consumers are shopping.
Ciunci added that he sees “friends recommending to friends” only getting bigger. He asserts that you value more what your best friend says about a burger place, rather than “some random stranger” on a review site.
Local startup Swipely is an example of this trend. While it uses credit card data to build a custom affinity-marketing plan for local merchants, it also has created tools to allow friends to rate their retail experience.
“Social media is not just about following what your nephew is doing in a track meet in another state,” Murphy said. “Businesses now have a way to talk to people directly and personally, but they need help in understanding how to do it right.”
One of the issues related to those review sites – paying people to give you fake positive reviews – is an important topic in the marketing world, but most have the same answer: “You’re going to get caught,” Ciunci said. •

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