Facebook - A New Marketing Avenue

Facebook and Social Media - The Next Marketing Opportunity

Marketing as an activity is all about reaching the right customers with the right products, and the result sought is delighted customers who are more than willing to open their purses wide enough to boost your revenues. For many years, marketers stalked their target customers through various means and by trying to get their message across to spread awareness about their wares.


Traditional Means of Communication

Traditionally, marketing communications were conducted via print, broadcast and such traditional media through disruptive advertising, where advertisements appear in between the content of interest for the customer.

Traditional media does give a large reach to a marketer with its programming of mass appeal. However, the wastage is equally high, since a large portion of the audience would belong to a different segment than the one that is to be targeted by the marketer.

Enter Social Media and the Internet

The revolution stirred by the internet as a medium took place because of the fact that it is highly personalized and provides more content on-demand than any other available medium. Social sites proliferated far and wide in their usage for a few simple reasons:

The power to create and distribute content is equally available to every user, irrespective of him/her being a customer or a marketer. In the earlier forms of media, that power rested with the editorial staff of the channel or the advertiser, but hardly ever with the user.
The medium is completely personalized, and a user can create or join groups and further create content based on what he/she likes.
Opinions are free and fair. This is one reason why social media is of utmost concern to marketers, since buying decisions are no more influenced as much by advertisements. The traditional word-of-mouth marketing approach has grown leaps and bounds on social networks.


Facebook – At the Center of Social Media

With 500 million (and growing) unique users worldwide, Facebook is the number one social networking site in terms of activity and subscriptions. What started as a garage initiative by Mark Zuckerberg has now become the biggest phenomenon on the internet.

A user interface that allows for quick communication and the ability to create fan pages and groups at the click of a mouse button are what make Facebook extremely popular. Another important reason for its immense popularity is the wide variety of social applications that have been developed and made available within the Facebook environment.

These applications can allow users and friends to do joint activities like playing games that run endlessly, sharing photos, videos, and web links, and many more.


How does this help a marketer?

Traditionally, media plans were drawn to include television channels, publications, or any other media that can grab maximum eyeballs and effectively reach a selected target audience. The science of segmentation and targeting has become only more accurate in the case of social media.

Facebook provides a wide variety of avenues to communicate with the audience, which opens up an entirely different world of possibilities to have a fruitful dialogue with customers. Some of these methods used popularly by marketers are:

Advertising: The first opportunity, which is the most obvious one, is advertising on Facebook. The difference, however, is the fact that you can create your own advertisement in a matter of minutes and also specify the details of your target group in terms of demographics and types of discussions where you want your advertisement to appear.
Fan Pages: Facebook allows every brand, as well as individual users, to create fan pages for their favorite celebrities and their own homegrown businesses. Large brands have also created their official pages on Facebook that have a huge, immediate fan following around the world. The fan page has immense utility to convey first hand information about the brand and also to collect immediate and frank feedback from your customers.
Branded applications: One of the most effective ways to engage a user toward your brand is by creating an application; this could be a game or a contest, with your branding coming across subtly through it.

What makes Facebook even more exciting is the way it allows you to target your communication sharply just to the customer segment you want to attract. It also provides analytics and page insights that give good feedback and measurement on the activity done.

The options provided by Facebook can be creatively explored and used judiciously for bringing about maximum benefits to any brand.

However, while doing all this, you need to be aware of the fact that customers have an equal say and have the ability to respond immediately to any of your actions with a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Availing the service of a social media consultant to work out a social media strategy may be required so that your efforts will not be in vain.

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New biography of Mitt Romney claims to deliver 'The Real Romney'... but will anyone really care?

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Last night, January 19, 2012, The Boston Globe, the biggest and most influential newspaper in New England, pulled out all the stops for two of their best and brightest reporters; Michael Kranish, deputy chief of the Washington bureau of The Boston Globe and Scott Helman, staff writer at The Boston Globe. The occasion was the release of their new biography of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the likely Republican presidential nominee.

First, my compliments to The Boston Globe. The special reception before a panel on der Mittster was nicely done and gave us all the opportunity to meet the authors and chat with them. The helpers were all efficient, polite, unobtrusive. Perfect.

It looked like a long evening until....

I sought out Michael Kranish first; he seemed like the senior member of the team and I try to get what I need for my article out of the way as soon as possible, so that I can sit back and enjoy the event. I told Kranish I had three brief questions for him.

First, would Romney ever be president? His unpromising answer: "It's possible. It could happen." This was not the incisive, insightful comment I was looking for... and suggested the possibility of a very long evening in the making, one to be ditched as soon as I'd eaten more of their fine brie.

Question 2: will Mormonism be an issue in the campaign? "In some places it could be," he answered. OMG! It was indeed going to be a very long evening.

But I said I wanted to ask him three questions... and it wasn't over until it was over. I ventured my third query. "What was the most unexpected thing about Romney you discovered in your research"? Then the intriguing answer, "What happened at Stanford University" when he was a student there during the Vietnam War, the war that derailed his father's presidential campaign. Ok, this was something promising... at last.

Of father brainwashed and campaign imploded.

Mitt Romney (born 1947) had as his dad a human dynamo called George Romney, celebrated as the rescuer of American Motors (which gave me my push button Rambler in high school), governor of Michigan, member of the Nixon cabinet; a man who rightly thought he had a superb shot at being president of the Great Republic... until...

... he went to Vietnam, where he got star treatment and massive misinformation about how the war was going, how we'd win, how the people loved us, and enough manure to fertilize Connecticut. He came back to America feeling like a fool; then shot himself through the head when he claimed the military had "brainwashed" him. His presidential campaign ended the minute the words were out of his mouth. Nobody wanted as president a man who could be controlled by the military or anyone else. And so George Romney's career ended... providing his son with a lifetime of lessons about what not to do... including the vital necessity to avoid the media whenever possible.

On his way back from Vietnam, Pere Romney stopped to visit Mitt at Stanford... where this devoted son got the opportunity to talk to his father about Life, War, God... of winning, losing, what's important and what isn't. It's the kind of conversation one has with a parent once in a lifetime... and Mitt took it all in and to heart. He would, he vowed, revenge what had happened to his father... being sure to derive all the proper lessons from this seminal event, including the absolute need in his life for God, the God of the Mormons...

God.

To understand Mitt Romney, you must appreciate the importance and influence of his Mormon faith. It has provided the sinews of his life while isolating him from other people; people who often disdained his religion, calling it a "cult" and worse. Mitt learned to be private, very private, about his religion...letting very few people into that side of himself. Privacy, particularly privacy about his faith, became an obsession... something that may have connected him with God... but most assuredly estranged him from his fellow men, the people he'd need if he was ever to run for president.

Money.

What further separated him from the run of mankind was money... he made awesome amounts of it, largely through what are called leveraged buy-outs. This is a practice whereby investors buy a company, with the intention of doing everything they can to make it as profitable as possible, as quickly as possible; so they can sell the whole or its parts, often for staggering return on investment. This almost always involves the firing of employees in an attempt to decrease expenses and increase efficiency. Here Mitt Romney was king; a paragon who knew the delights that come when making only millions in a day was "bad" compared to the brilliant days, and plenty of them, when you made tens, even hundreds of millions lickety-split. Such days did absolutely nothing to connect him with mere mortals... and presented a problem he has still not been able to solve. Every time he got richer, Mitt got more disconnected... and less electable.

So, here we've got a candidate with a perfect marriage, 5 sons made by Disney, nary a scandal to be had... richer that God Himself... super bright... the hardest worker on the planet... but a loser for all that, because he just cannot connect with people and their everyday concerns to save his life.

Thus as I roamed the thin crowd talking with people, who were very keen to be asked their opinion about Mitt and his prospects, the temperature never rose above "tepid." Yes, right smack dab in the middle of Boston, capital of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that Mitt had reigned over as governor (2003-2007), he couldn't have thrown off less heat. And so, the people whom he needed so desperately to make him president evinced absolutely no excitement at all, much less any abiding glow.

And you could see this puzzled authors Kranish and Helman because their unauthorized biography (without a single interview with Mitt), into which they had poured time, life and commitment could only go as far as its subject, and not an inch more. If he sailed into the White House, their book (which I made sure they both autographed) would have the legs most political books never do, but if the world was as lukewarm as the folks in their audience, their $30 book (praised though it was by the usual East Coast media suspects) was DOA...

That's why they came back to this point several times: awkward and disconnected as Mitt was in public, he was in private something of a cut-up (of the wonk variety), a man who could tell a story, give a hug, engage... even (and this arrested my attention for sure) moon walk while singing tunes from the Grateful Dead, tunes like "There's Whiskey In The Jug", an odd favorite for a tea-totalling Mormon:

"Mush-a ring dum-a do dum-a da Whack for my daddy-o. Whack for my daddy-o There's whiskey in the jar."

But this, though it made me smile and nod my head in wonderment was not the highlight of the evening. That was the rapt attention and joy in Aime Joseph. You see Mr. Joseph is my driver, a Haitian by birth, obsessed with American politics, always quizzing me about political people and their measures. He dressed up for this event, and imbibed every word with the utmost focus and concentration. "We have nothing like this in Haiti," he said as I gave him the present of a lifetime, an autographed copy of the book. And when he saw me about to drop it, he grabbed it from my hand, the better to ensure it did not fall; chiding me for lack of care with this valuable artifact.

And I saw so clearly what was the best part of all: the fact that this kind of forum, this kind of book, this kind of open dialogue and honest conversation still was foreign to most of the world... and the thing we should be most proud of, our gift to the world and our collective future.

Now, go to any search engine and find "Whiskey in the jug," and imagine Mitt moon walking to it... If there's enough whiskey in the jug, that should be no problem.

*** What do you think? We invite you to post your comments below.

About the Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is CEO of Worldprofit, Inc., providing a wide range of online services for small and-home based businesses. Services include home business training, affiliate marketing training, earn-at-home programs, traffic tools, advertising, webcasting, hosting, design, WordPress Blogs and more. Find out why Worldprofit is considered the # 1 online Home Business Training program by getting a free Associate Membership today. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com.