David Wesson's Digital Culture

Social Media set to overtake Google as the main source of product information!

2009-10-22T22:50:17+11:00

"There is a very fundamental shift going on from the information Web to the social Web, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg stated at the recent San Francisco web 2.0 summit.
At the moment most online marketing is geared to visibility in Google but I am going to go out on a limb and predict in the next two years social media will have overtaken Google as the main method by which we find out information about goods and services.
The 5 ways that social media is changing our lives” puts into context that whilst Companies currently are spending thousands of dollars each year to rank highly in Google this will be a thing of the past if the in the not too distant future and that the whole way to do marketing is fundamentally changing at an alarming rate which companies are struggling to keep up with.
With US Corporate’s such as P&G now willing to pay for advertising based on Customer engagement and the birth of the real-time web as a viable form of marketing for companies, is it any wonder that people who used to turn to Google for the latest information now turn to Twitter search instead .
It therefore really comes as no real surprise Google is about to unveil social search in an attempt to protect its online monopoly BUT perhaps more interesting is the news that very soon Bing will have access to all of twitters search feed so you will be able to search Bing for public tweets which is a pretty major coup for Microsoft.
The development of the real time web furthermore has prompted prominent technology blogger Louis Gray to declare “did you know there is a second parallel internet and its name is Twitter and forget about linking instead of re-tweeting .That’s the old way of web 1.0 dinosaurs"
So why not ponder how much time do you spend floating in and out of the real time web and static websites on a daily basis and how will your marketing be geared to these very different domains.
Watch Louis Gray’s fascinating take on the real time web below and make up your own mind what the future has in store for you and your online marketing!

Online Engagement-The New Frontier of Consumer Relations

2009-08-27T14:03:00+10:00

This week I had the pleasure of presenting at the 19th Annual Australian SOCAP Conference here in Sydney (see below Presentation) alongside Katie Harris from Zebra Bites to a receptive audience. It’s always great to get a different perspective on how social media can be applied in today’s organisations.

Much was the debate afterwards was surrounding the legal implications holding back companies from engaging with Twitter and most interestingly what a complaint is defined as.The definition reads as "any communication a customer has with your company in which 'displeasure is expressed' .As much as it pains consumers to fill out forms does simply letting off steam on Twitter constitute a complaint? Apparently so and customer service departments are charged with the mean feat of logging all of these instances in some cases.

On the other hand maybe this is an opportunity and interesting way just to connect with consumers to find out what’s eating them. As one delegate from the conference explained, they make a point of arranging to meet those most vocal about their brand and afterwards the regularity of those tweets subsides. What is it about knowing a person that means we become less inclined to vocalise our thoughts?

Are we fulfilling an emotional desire to be heard amongst all the noise out there, or are we just wanting to have a connection with those brands that make up part of our daily lives with whom we are looking for a 'return on emotion' to justify the money we invest with them?

Perhaps spare a thought for the organisations that are monitoring the space and would like to offer extensions to their customer care programs by starting Twitter streams but have their hands tied because of what they can and can’t disclose online through rules of privacy. Cue lets take this conversation offline. Not every company is able to introduce a unique business models like Zappos into the market place so what are the lessons we can learn from this?

I would certainly be interested to hear from any body with information or strong views on the subject. Customer advocacy and the handling of customer complaints is an fascinating area and with the increasing use of social media there is still a way to go before legislation fully meets the needs of both the consumer and the organisations before we see more effective customer service programs that fully harness the power of the social web.

Hopefully the two can meet in the middle in the not too distant future But if the social web continues to transform at the current rate which it will according to Jeremiah Owyang more hurdles will need to be crossed along the way before this happen. Are organisations and the government ready for the changes?

Online Engagement -The New Frontier of Consumer Relations

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Lifestreams and Personal Branding

2009-08-13T10:29:29+10:00

This week I had the opportunity to present to the Billy Blue school of design here in Sydney on the theme of personal branding (see presentation below) and it was great to spend some time researching a subject dear to my heart and getting some feedback from a different audience for a pleasant change.

I have previously written about personal branding and failure but this subject introduced me to the idea of life stream which as been pioneered by a few commentators so I thought I take this opportunity to provide you with some information if your not already aware of the concept.

David Armano introduced me to the idea a while back but I didn’t take much notice to be honest but it was Steve Rubel more recently and a fantastic post by the New York Times about Obama being the new media president that really opened my eyes to the concept which left me in no uncertain doubt that when we think of our personal brands that we promote them through the many different streams of information that now percolate the web. It is not enough to simply have a website or a blog and that we have to engage with our audiences in the many different places they now can be found to achieve our goals.

For a definitive explanation of streams go to the excellent blog by John Borthwick

How we bring it all together is perhaps the most interesting question we face as the environment is constantly evolving into a more social context. All the more topical in the week that Facebook bought Friendfeed perhaps one of the best pieces of social technology that aggregates all of our streams of information.

As Mark Zuckerberg said some time ago now when discussing life streams

“Lifestreams are continuous stream of information that delivers a deeper understanding for everyone participating in them . As this happens, people will no longer come to Facebook to consume a particular piece or type of content, but to consume and participate in the stream itself.”

You can subscribe to me at Friendfeed here

Personal Branding & You How To Create A Personal Brand Using Social Media

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Australian Busineses Using Twitter Study

2009-07-22T10:33:54+10:00

Thank you for coming to this blog Iam conducting a quick survey to deliver some research as part of a forthcoming study and would welcome your input

Many thanks for your time

4 Simple Questions to highlight the Importance of Online & Viral marketing

2008-10-04T19:57:54+10:00

Traditionally people talk about their products and provide information on a corporate website and quite frankly people are not interested.

A sure fire way to stress to anybody the importance of online marketing is to ask them the them the following questions:

1/In the last 2 months have you or anybody you know answered a direct mail advertisement?

2/In the last 2 months have you or anybody you know used mainstream media to answer a question or researched a product or service?

3/in the last 2 months Have you or anybody you know used Google or another search engine to answer a question or researched a product or service?

4/ In the last 2 months have you or anybody you know used social media or a peer to peer network like e-mail, IM or facebook, to answer a question or researched a product or service and the answer came back was a URL that you linked to?

Chances are that you would answer a resounding yes to using a search engine and yes to being referred by a friend to a product or service via URL via social media but possibly to mainstream media and doubtful to direct mail.

A statistic that is backed up wholeheartedly in a May 2008 Nielsen Online survey that said Eight out of ten respondents who had recently made consumer electronics purchases in a brick-and-mortar store said they had visited the store's Website first. More than one-half said they purchased from the retailer on whose Website they had spent the most time.'

Conclusion is that potential customers today most likely have already researched what your company's products on your websites. And is much further along in the sales process than you might think.

The spread of idea's through viral marketing by social media and peer to peer networks has quite simply the power to transform an ordinary everyday products like toilets into some thing cool which gets people talking and when David Meerman Scott showed the below video depicting a Swedish self cleaning toilet at a recent Podcamp keynote address to a room full of B2B marketers the penny dropped.

So next time a business colleague talks about the problems they have marketing their product tell them to watch this video and ask themselves what they cool thing can they do to get people talking about their product. Ordinary everyday items never looked so good!

The Swedish self cleaning toilet viral video sensation viewed 2 million times.