A Guest Post by Christian Arno

Marketing, in one form or another, has been helping the cause since time immemorial and now it just got personal. Market savvy entrepreneurs are using social media websites like Facebook and Twitter and their online communities to target customers and listen to exactly what they say.

Social Media websites give both producer and consumer a voice and offer the transparency and sense of community that are now charming customers across the world into parting with large amounts of money. Here are some things to remember:

Marketing, the Differences

Traditional marketing, like press releases and advertising can be likened to throwing your advertising budget up in the air and saying ‘I hope these lands on someone interested.’ Tapping social media opens up a dialogue with your customers and usefully corrals all of your cash-cows in a few, easy to find, on-line fields. People can then say what they specifically like or loathe about your product and you, through careful monitoring, can act accordingly.

Marketing, the Similarities

You need not think that you can set up a group on Facebook and Lo! Your product has created an on-line community of well-wishers and unpaid market researchers. You still need to put the advertisements out there. Pay Per Click advertising campaigns (PPCs), for example, allow you to see which adverts the fish have been nibbling at and allow you to tailor your approach. Targeted audiences have always been at the heart of marketing, social media just takes it a step further.

Get Community Going

People will work for free. The happy sense of bonhomie and camaraderie that web groups and chat forums engender brings out the best in human nature and offers entrepreneurs a splendid opportunity to profit from this.

Translating is one way of doing this. Any international marketing scheme has to face the thorny question of translation. Keywords for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and subtle nuances must all be carefully interpreted and adapted to suit new target audiences, but a team of professional, native-speaker translators can be a serious drain on the purses.

Crowdsourcing is one way round this — when you invite the community of web-users out there to come and do the spadework for you. People always like showing off their bright ideas and this increasingly popular practice is the perfect forum for doing so. It also allows people to get directly involved in your brand. Wikipedia is one such example.

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival ran an extremely successful crowdsourcing project on Twitter for their 2010 program cover. Festival lovers were encouraged to tweet their ideas for illustrations, which were then heaped with praise and/or criticism by everyone else before the successful ones were drawn by a professional illustrator, whose work was streamlined live online. The festival hype this built up created a strong sense of community and beat all but the most ambitious advertising campaigns.

The Misguided Public

The problem with People Power is that people can get it wrong and this is particularly true of translation and technical material. Take, for example the case of Chicken entrepreneur Frank Purdue. His slogan was ‘It Takes a Tough Man to Make a Tender Chicken!’ Taking his campaign into Spanish this became, ‘It Takes a Tough Man to Make a Chicken Aroused!’

If you do not invite a professional to translate your material from the start then you should strongly consider getting one to check what the well-meaning public have submitted.

Wit Goes a Long Way

Burger King put Facebook to good use with its whoppervirgins.com campaign. It offered the ‘sacrifice ten friends’ application which caught people’s imaginations to the tune of over 20 000 users, who ‘sacrificed’ 200 000 friends for free whoppers. The campaign was memorable, unusual and had just enough humour to make it a real hit.

An Honest Embrace

Social media encourages a culture of transparency and honesty that can create great interest in your company. Sun Microsystems’s CEO, Jonathan Schwartz set up a blog that received about 400 000 hits a month and attracted positive, negative and downright insane comments. This kind of transparency, at the highest level, increased trust among consumers and therefore interest in the product.

Likewise, Graco have managed to hugely personalise their brand by building a community on Flickr. They promote it heavily on the Graco blog and in doing so encourage people to submit pictures. The pictures highlight the people behind Graco and the people who use their products. They have introduced offline community gatherings and the pictures from these are also posted on the Flickr page. This takes the concept of social media beyond the blogosphere and combines it with offline marketing, humanising the community around the product. Something that TV advertising campaigns struggle to do at a much higher cost.

Who Does All This Reach?

Lots of people. Young, geeky men are not the only people who use the simple to use and highly gregarious social media sites. You have only to take a look at Facebook to see the number of middle aged users has risen dramatically in recent years. A survey by Insidefacebook.com reports that 22 percent of registered users are between 35 and 65, and that the fastest growing group is women over the age of 55.

But this is just one site. The international marketer must look beyond Twitter and Facebook et al, to capitalize on the opportunities social media offer. In Japan, for example, 80% of social media users are signed onto Mixi.jp, while Orkut predominates in Brazil, Xanga in Hong Kong.

Wherever you launch, social media marketing is a source to be reckoned with.

What do you think it takes to win in social media?

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About the author: Christian Arno is the founder and managing director of Lingo24, an international translation company which provides language translation services to and from all the major languages in the world. Follow him as @lingo24chr on Twitter.

Thanks, Christian! The whole thing changes when we realize the world is our community!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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