By Simon van Wyk
As Peer Group Media director Andrew Reid mentioned in an the earlier post “The music in me…”, successful music marketing campaigns are a multi-year commitment, which means there are a wide range of things that need to be measured to gauge the overall success of the venture.
By Simon van Wyk
We recently discussed the merger between art and commerce represented by brand music marketing with Peer Group Media’s strategy and research head Andrew Reid. Here’s a bit more information on a couple of Peer Group’s projects:
By Simon van Wyk
Music is a powerful tool. It can affect people emotionally and physically. Hearing a few bars from a familiar tune can immediately take you back to a time long past, when you first heard that song or when something significant happened while the song was playing.
It’s no surprise that sharing music has emerged as one of the most popular ways people have used the personal realm of social media.
As most people know, music was one of the first media to be transformed by the Internet – think Napster and Kazaa. But just as illegal file sharing led to iTunes, music has moved from a grassroots phenomenon online to one that is becoming entwined with big brands.
Determining the success of word of mouth marketing activities, like measuring social media campaign success, is best done on a case-by-case basis. Importantly, it needs to integrated with the measurement of other marketing activities, particularly since so much word of mouth activity happens offline.
Having said that, there are a few general guidelines to follow when attempting to measure word of mouth. Larry Freed from US website satisfaction agency Foresee Results has identified what he calls the six truths of word of mouth measurement:
By Simon van Wyk
In the same way that digital technology helped convert the world’s oldest profession into the booming global industry of Internet pornography, word of mouth, probably the oldest of all marketing techniques, has emerged as arguably the most powerful selling tool of the 21st century, thanks to the Internet.
Traditional advertising and marketing is in chaos as people turn their back on advertising messages and turn to recommendations from their friends, via social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter, when deciding what products and brands to buy.
Businesses who can use online tools to cleverly and ethically leverage the power of word of mouth will be able to successfully make the transition from traditional marketing .
Word of mouth marketing online can even be a successful business model in itself. Yelp, a US-based service where people write reviews of restaurants and other local service providers, recently knocked back a US$500 million offer from Google to buy its business.
Justin Kirby, interviewed for this month’s HotHouse podcast, is the founder and CEO of both one of the UK’s first digital agencies and Australia’s word of mouth marketing firm Yooster, and is a globally recognised expert on word of mouth marketing.
By Simon van Wyk
They’re unpredictable, opinionated, and, particularly in Australia, they’re doing it part-time. So why should companies care about engaging with bloggers?
Jason Preston, a US-based social media strategist, writes that more companies these days are turning from blogs to focus on social networking sites. “If you can generate good word of mouth and drive sales from efforts in sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace, why bother to court the hard-to-reach and often hard-to-impress blogerati?
By Simon van Wyk
In this month’s podcast and in his book “Branding Only Works on Cattle”, Jonathan Salem Baskin discusses a few examples of “anti-branding”, successful branding by companies that are focused on getting people to buy things, rather than simply creating an image or a feeling. I’ve collected some links to more information about these successful anti-branders. read more
I recently came across an article that reported that most U.S. small businesses have not found social media sites to be beneficial in generating business, despite the growth in usage.
What I found interesting is that those results come in complete contrast to big business’ enthusiastic embracement of it. In contrast to the previous report, this Telegraph article reports that Microsoft is setting up an 82-person Future Social Experiences Labs designed to stimulate social media innovation.
By Simon van Wyk
The Internet, as they say, is a broad church. It’s becoming easier to find both global and local news online.
