I recently had the opportunity to see Adrian Ho of Zeus Jones speak. His firm does exceptional things in marketing that are non-traditional and approach social marketing in a way that is seemingly at odds with many of the “Best practices” floating around. Here’s the video and below that is the slide deck.
#Btvsmb
View more presentations from Zeus Jones.
For me some of the big takeaways were:
- Identify existing human behavior that can be made faster/easier/better through good design and programming (see the teen girls photobooth for Nordstrom’s or the Nordstrom Backroom program).
- Your company doesn’t have to “engage” in a conversation. Real people engage in conversations. So put real people in charge of your social media. Or try something else.
- Something else might look like an application or curated collection of content that your audience finds useful and valuable.
- And the biggest: stay focused on a real business objective. Buzz is not necessarily the best metric to measure the success of your online initiatives.
Some other Burlington, VT Social Media Breakfasters have made posts as well:
- Mitch Lieberman‘s quick followup, focusing on the “people don’t want relationships with companies” aspect of the presentation.
- Jonathan B Wilson‘s assessment of the point that it’s important to find and create value for your customers, and that’s social media.
- Rich Nadworny, one of the organizers of the #btvsmb, writes more about the idea of social media being a way to do something for people.
- Also, for my real estate industry friends and colleagues, I wrote a review of the event for Inman.com (free on the date of publication, requires premium membership later).
