Marketing 2.0: Bridging the Gap Between Seller and
Buyer through Social Media Marketing
Bernie Borges
Paperback, 6x9 in, 312 pages, Bibliography
Wheatmark, August 2009
ISBN: 9781604942880
Endorsements
"Marketing 2.0 is an essential online playbook for any
small or medium-sized business executive. Bernie teaches how to
create and develop winning strategies on the web that will attract
people to your company and your employees through relationship
building and content marketing. If you implement the strategies and
tactics in this book you'll reduce or eliminate outdated marketing
practices and you will drive new business—as well as keep
more of the current business you have."
— Joe Pulizzi, International Speaker,
Co-author of Get Content Get Customers, Founder of
Junta42
"Marketing 2.0 helps CEOs and CMOs navigate the new
social web by providing a roadmap and driving instructions to our
desired destination. Bernie skillfully explains the history of the
Web 2.0 phenomenon and the lay of the land, warns us about the road
hazards, and spells out the potential rewards. With these new
social media tools at our disposal, marketing will never be the
same again. Small companies can now compete on an even playing
field with giants. Large companies can become irrelevant in the
blink of an eye if they fall asleep at the wheel. In short,
Marketing 2.0 is a must read for anyone in business who
wants to succeed with social media marketing."
— Gary Katz, Founder & CEO, Marketing
Operations Partners
Description
Are you a trusted seller? Are your product and service offerings
easy to find on the web? Do you inform, educate, and entertain
through your content? Do you listen and engage people through
online channels?
Today's buyers want to be engaged differently than in years
past, and many traditional marketing tactics simply do not work
anymore. Social media marketing is a revolutionary way to build
solid relationships with buyers long before first contact.
Marketing 2.0 demonstrates through strategies, tactics,
and real world examples that the greatest risk to businesses is NOT
adopting these indispensable social media marketing techniques.
About the Author
Bernie Borges got his initial inspiration for Marketing 2.0
from his speaking engagements and interaction with clients through
his Internet marketing agency, Find and Convert. Borges is
available for keynote presentations and full-day seminars. He is a
frequent speaker at trade shows, conferences, and company events.
Visit Find and Convert for more information or call
1-888-660-1981.
Excerpt
There is a gap out there in the market. The gap exists between
sellers and buyers. Sellers are using shouting tactics in attempt
to reach buyers, and it just doesn't work well anymore. The
outbound marketing tactics that worked in the 1980s and 1990s just
don't work anymore in the late first decade of the new millennium.
Buyers have too many filters available to them. Buyers can limit
the content they consume through RSS subscriptions, use caller ID
to filter out unwanted phone calls, record television programs and
skip through the commercials, and sift through unwanted mail.
Marketers play a numbers game, celebrating 0.5 percent response
rates to shouting style marketing campaigns. This form of marketing
is not just ineffective from an ROI perspective; it's plain
ineffective.
What buyers want is a relationship. They want to know you and
your people. They want to know that you're listening to them, and
they actually want to engage you, the seller, in conversations.
Why? Because they can, and because you can, and because you should.
If you don't ... well, you just may lose your buyer.
The initial inspiration for this book came primarily from
speaking engagements, where my audiences typically comprised small
and medium-size business (SMB) executives. The purpose of these
presentations was to discuss the evolution of Web 2.0 and the
effect of social media marketing on business. Each presentation
provided a brief high-level overview of the history of the Internet
from a technology perspective, as well as the conventional Internet
marketing strategies currently in use, such as search engine
optimization, pay-per-click advertising, permission email
marketing, and banner advertising. The presentation then
transitioned to a discussion of marketing opportunities made
possible through the evolution of tools and technologies on the
social web. These tools include blogs, wikis, podcasts, social
networking sites, bookmarking sites, video, and photo sharing
sites. I also discussed the technological, demographic, and
cultural evolutions that have made these tools so popular.
Each presentation usually begins with my asking the audience for
a show of hands in response to a few basic questions in order to
gauge the makeup of the audience. The audience size for most of my
presentations ranges from 25 to 125. The questions I usually ask
(along with the answers I receive) are:
- "How many of you are with a company the size of (less than 100,
100 to 250, 250 to 500, more than 500)?" The vast majority of
attendees are with firms with less than 500 employees, many with
less than 100 employees.
- "How many of you actively read a blog?" Usually about one-third
raise their hands.
- "How many of you actively maintain your own personal or company
blog?" Usually two to five people raise their hands.
- "How many of you have a profile in a social network such as
LinkedIn, Facebook, or MySpace?" More than half usually raise their
hands—most are on LinkedIn.
- "Of those who have a profile in a social network, how many of
you actively participate in the social network at least once per
week and consider this time well-spent?" Unfortunately, very few
hands usually go up to this question. In other words, many people
have completed a profile in a social network but they don't do much
with it.
- "How many of you feel that social networking or blogging or any
type of social media marketing has the potential to be a valuable
aspect of your marketing strategy?"
I usually get an interesting response to this last question.
Usually a few hands are raised, maybe in the 10 percent to 20
percent range of the audience. But, judging by the body language
and blank stares in the audience, I can see that most in the
audience don't have good answers to this question. Perhaps they
don't know how to answer it, or maybe they haven't given it much
thought. Or, maybe they don't know much about it. Initially, I was
greatly puzzled by this response and it started me thinking
... that's how this book came into being.
My goal is to help you—the business owner or marketing
executive in a small or medium-size business—understand what
marketing on the social web is, what it means within a business
context, and how it can be a valuable component of your marketing
strategies. As you read, consider the marketing mind-set: how do
successful marketers on the web think? What assumptions do they
make? What principles do they use? How do they engage with their
target market? How do they produce results? How do they measure
results? While this book is written primarily for the SMB
executive, nonprofits can benefit as well. Any reference to
business goals should be replaced by your specific goals. Since I
am a blogger, I wrote this book in plain English in a somewhat
conversational tone. I wrote a book I would want to read. I tried
to connect dots for you. My hope is that you will take away from
this book sensible and actionable ideas and strategies that will
have a valuable impact on your business. If you are in a larger
company, I believe the principles in this book apply to you as
well, depending on where your company is in the adoption of social
media strategies.
Another part of the inspiration for this book comes from my own
active participation in social media marketing. I run an Internet
marketing agency, so it should come as no surprise that I have an
interest in all things marketing on the web. That said, I spent
more than twenty years in corporate jobs in technology sales and
marketing, and I don't consider myself a web geek. I am more of a
business–marketing strategist who happens to be in the
Internet marketing business. I do admit that I am very encouraged
by how many businesses around the world are actively using social
media to engage their customers in community and conversations on
the web. However, I also am discouraged by how few SMBs have yet to
embrace the social web at the time of this writing. There are many
case studies regarding the effective use of social media by larger,
well-recognized brands such as Apple, Best Buy, Cisco, Comcast,
IBM, and Oracle. I encourage SMB CEOs and their marketing and sales
managers to embrace the social web as three things: a
culture, a mind-set, and a platform. Marketing
on the social web is not a technology strategy, although technology
plays an important role. The social web allows any business of any
size in any location to reach the people they desire to reach and
build solid relationships with them. Often, these relationships
evolve offline into traditional and productive relationships. The
social web is a place to relate to others, not a place to launch
shouting-style campaigns, although campaigns are possible using the
social web. The social web is a place to listen because people are
talking—and they may be talking about you, your products,
your team, your competitors, and ideas that could someday become
your future products. The social web is a mind-set. And any
business that doesn't understand the mind-set is at risk of being
left behind or using it inappropriately, producing negative
results. Understand that effective marketing on the social web
requires a revisit to your organization chart. The people you need
to implement your social media strategy may or may not be the
people in your current org chart. Your current boss may not embrace
the social web, in which case you may need to assess whether your
career is at risk.
This book is for people who don't mind admitting they are just
getting started in social media marketing, and who want to learn
how to develop a strategy and learn what mistakes to avoid. You
don't need an advanced degree to understand Marketing 2.0 concepts.
However, you do need to be willing to let go of old paradigms. You
may need to stretch yourself and your organization in ways that may
be uncomfortable at first. The examples I have provided of
companies that range from individuals, small start-ups, to midsize
companies that use the social web successfully in their marketing
strategies will help you realize its potential. This book was
written during the height of our most recent global economic
decline. Headlines are currently dominated by credit financial
crises, federal bailouts of huge banks, and massive company
layoffs. Yet the SMB marketers who have successfully implemented
social media marketing strategies have survived if not thrived.
I've also provided a resources section that points you to
excellent books and web logs (blogs) to help you gain other
valuable perspectives and insights regarding social media marketing
from other thought leaders. I strongly urge you to use these
valuable resources.
I don't mind telling you that I struggled on a title for this
book. Throughout most of my writing, I was planning to title it
Social Media Marketing for the Rest of Us because it's not
written for the Fortune 1000 brands, but rather for SMBs and
nonprofits. I changed the title to Marketing 2.0 primarily
because social media is still an evolving term for many in
the SMB world. I really want you to grasp that this book is about a
marketing mind-set that involves producing meaningful content and
building relationships on the web. It just so happens that
the web has become a social gathering place where relationships and
authenticity win out over shouting and deals of the month. The web
has also gone from being a flat, one-dimensional platform to a
multidimensional, multisensory experience.
I really want to stress the importance of having a mind-set for
marketing on the web that requires and facilitates changes in the
way you think. As Mike Volpe described in the foreword, most
marketers have a history of pushing out a message (outbound
marketing) aimed at disrupting the target audience. For decades we
got away with that. Sorry, but that just doesn't work anymore. The
sooner you accept that, the sooner you can enjoy the results
available in Marketing 2.0. The consumer (your buyer) is now
in control. She knows where to go to find the products and services
she needs and is willing to talk to people who have something to
say about your products, your business, your people, and your
competition. What she hears from them is going to influence her
buying decision, and you cannot and will not control
that—unless you are engaging the consumer in authentic
relationships on and off the web. Only then can you have a positive
influence on how she thinks about you.
At some point in this book, I may offend you a little, not with
offensive language but rather with strong and blunt sentiment. I
don't sugarcoat my sentiments, and I offer no apology for that. My
goal is to shake you up and get you thinking differently so your
competitors don't eat your lunch. You'll see examples in the case
studies of companies that are competing effectively against
competitors many times their size by building relationships with
customers online, giving them great content, and listening to and
engaging them through the social web.
There is one truth you simply can't deny: social media is
growing at an amazing rate. The Universal McCann Report: Power
to the People, Social Media Tracker: Wave 3 offers some amazing
statistics worth noting. This report, completed in March 2008, was
compiled through interviews of 17,000 Internet users across
twenty-nine countries. Here are a few summary statistics:
- 57 percent of Internet users have joined a social network
- 73 percent have read a blog
- 34 percent post opinions about products and brands on
blogs/social media
- 36 percent think positively about companies that have
blogs
- 83 percent have viewed video on the social web
- 184 million people worldwide actively maintain a blog
In the 2008 Technorati Report: State of the Blogosphere,
Technorati surveyed 1.2 million bloggers around the world who had
registered with its service. Here are some summary statistics:
- 133 million blogs are registered with Technorati
- These blogs are from sixty-six countries in eighty-one
languages
- Blogs have representation in top 10 website lists in all key
categories
- Blogs are now a part of mainstream media
- Bloggers are savvy and sophisticated in driving traffic to
their blog
- Bloggers are meticulous about tracking statistics about their
blog
- Bloggers are successful—they are achieving career
enhancement opportunities including speaking engagements
- The majority of bloggers are advertising on their blog,
producing an income stream for themselves
- 90 percent of bloggers say they write about the products and
services they love or hate (take note of this!)
BusinessWeek
In May 2005, BusinessWeek featured a cover story titled,
"Blogs Will Change Your Business." The article focused on how blogs
had transitioned from the Internet fringe to the business
mainstream. Blogs were no longer just a tool for individuals to
rant about their favorite recipes, movie stars, or political
viewpoints. Businesses were deploying blogs, and people were
visiting them, reading them, and participating in the blog
conversations. Brands awakened to the fact that bloggers working
within a corporate setting had become influential. Prospects were
visiting corporate blogs to read what they couldn't read on
websites and gaining insights from bloggers who had something
provocative or insightful to say about vendors, their products, and
their employees. The voice of the blog was being heard loud in the
business arena. BusinessWeek's cover story included a
subtitle: "Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our
advice: catch up ... or catch you later."
In May 2008, BusinessWeek did something they had never
done before. They wrote a cover story as a follow-up to a previous
cover story (May 2005). This story, titled, "Beyond Blogs," opened
with this sentence: "Three years ago our cover story showcased the
phenomenon (blogs). A lot has changed since then." Is that ever an
understatement! The May 2008 story discussed the evolution of the
social web to include platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace,
Twitter, and sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, and Flickr. The
article pointed out the risks of employees wasting time hanging out
with friends on the Internet or leaking secrets on social
networking sites. And it also highlighted the power of the social
web to facilitate connections with resources in order to "assemble
global teams for collaborative projects, and connecting with people
capable of opening doors for new deals and strategic
opportunities." It also pointed out that "the resume is 140
characters," referring to the explosive popularity of Twitter.
BusinessWeek admits this story's appropriate headline is,
"Social Media Will Change Your Business."
Marketing on the social web is not appropriate for all
businesses, but probably is for most. If you're in an industry
where your customers don't use the web, or you sell to a very
small, finite customer base, the social web is not necessarily a
viable place to market. However, using the social web for your
research and education is strongly recommended.
In the end, I will judge the success of this book primarily not
by how it sells but by feedback from the community. The social web
will allow me to hear readers' reactions to and opinions about what
I've written, and I will engage them in conversations online. What
will matter most to me is the feedback regarding this book's effect
on your willingness to embrace the social web as part of your
marketing strategy. I invite your feedback at my blog, http://www.findandconvert.com/blog/.
The tools and technologies I discuss in this book evolve. Some
may cease to exist or be made obsolete by others. This book isn't
about Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or YouTube, though I cover them
extensively. This book is about how to embrace the most viable
tools and platforms to bridge the gap between you (the seller) and
your buyers.
I truly hope Marketing 2.0 has a positive impact on the
way you think about reaching your customers, the employees you
hire, and your future products and services. Most of all, I hope
you embrace the two core concepts—the pillars—of
Marketing 2.0: a content marketing strategy and a focus on building
relationships through social media. The tools and technologies
discussed are not the answers but the enablers. If Marketing 2.0
becomes a mind-set in your organization, you will bridge the
buyer–seller gap, compete effectively, win market share,
grow, thrive, prosper, and possibly reinvent your business along
the way, if that's what it takes. Marketing 2.0 offers you endless
possibilities if you allow yourself the opportunity to engage,
listen, and take action on the social web.
