Mini Study 1: Social Sweet Spots

All:
I have been inundated with uses for social media …. how can you us it in analyzing your market, in service, in different industries, and the list goes on! Especially after yesterday’s discussion with over 3300 women on Marketing 2.0!

Mini Case Studies
I decided to create mini case studies on 10 different uses of Social media — some from my book and some are recent uses! Send me others that you want me to include ! Today’s is a fun one! Social Sweet Spots!!!

Here we go! Short and sweet!!!

Typically, a simplified view of traditional marketing might starting with the articulation of new marketing requirements. Then marketing professionals would create new messages and images, which are then delivered via various media for consumption by the audience.

But with Marketing 2.0, which features Social Media + Traditional Methds, new behaviors have the capability to ‘short-circuit’ the
existing model. With 3.5B conversations occuring each day on social sites, and 1.2M blog conversations happening daily, more
listening must be done to shape our views. Obviously, traditional marketing and media does not go away, but undoubtedly these
changes are providing new opportunities for to research and engage our market.

How we listen:
So we have started listening and analzying the blogsphere and twittersphere. We research what the market is discussing and searching for, in or around a set of defined topic areas vs. Inside Out – we research what the market thinks of what we want to say. We look at the thousands of conversations around these topics and glean insight from that listening. This allows us to develop Social Sweet Spots!

How do we do it? From the “New Langauage of Marketing 2.0”, we document the steps to doing this Social Sweet Spot work!

• Identify key sites and blogs where conversations are happening – use tools to get the biggest bang — like TweetLater, StumbleUpon, AllTop, TweetDeck, etc.
• Translate the content into needs and preferences that inform your offerings and messages – you will find core topics like economic changes show interest in different topics, etc.
• Identify the best opportunities to participate
• Develop a repeatable, systematic and focused process!   We use Banter a process from 2 business partners to do this so that we can compare results week to week.

Conclusion:

Listening and learning to me is one of the most valuable assets of social media.  It complements my market intelligence and helps me to make better decisions.  For example, I have used it to gather market requirements for new products, for message and positioning tweaks, and for new offerings!