| ROBERTO ROCHA |
| The Gazette |
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Adman Ignacio Oreamuno pointed to marketing execs in the audience and fired off quick tips for promoting their brands online.
“L’Oréal, your business is to make women pretty. So why don’t you offer a service to make women’s websites pretty?
“Bell, Telus. There are forums out there where phone nerds talk about customizing and changing their handsets. Why don’t you create a network for them to have these discussions in your site?
“Canon, photo-sharing sites like Flickr show which camera people used to take pictures. Why don’t you create a network for people who use your cameras and offer them promotions, like free photo printing?”
But in the end, what matters most is for companies to be bold and creative, speakers said yesterday at a conference on using social networks to build a brand.
“This is the Wild West,” said Oreamuno, president of Ihaveanidea.org, a social network for advertising people.
Social networks like MySpace and Facebook are very new, there are few rules, and usually, the first one there gets to the gold.
However, they represent a massive shift in how people communicate. They empower consumers to slam a brand without mercy. And they can no longer be ignored. Any company serious about being “with it” has to be willing to pour resources into it, said Rick Murray of the digital division of public-relations firm Edelman.
“You need to think about how you’ll play in this space every single day,” Murray said. “You can’t just launch a campaign and see how it evolves. That kind of thinking is so yesterday.”
It’s a lesson that Cogeco Cable Inc. took home.
The cable company, which serves parts of Quebec and eastern Ontario, had dabbled in Facebook, targeting ads to university students at Queens, Windsor and McMaster.
“We only touched the tip of it,” Marie-Claude Caron, Cogeco’s director of marketing, said at the conference hosted by advertising magazine Infopresse.
“A year ago, we weren’t even thinking about having these positions. I mean, a social marketing manager? Who knew?”
This rapid change of how people use technology to share tastes is a source of panic attacks for marketing departments that can’t keep pace. Murray travels the word preaching to his clients that they should accept this reality or become obsolete.
“This is a major societal shift,” he said. “We need to think from a sociologist’s and cultural anthropologist’s perspective.”
It’s fashionable for companies to say they want to have dialogues with customers, rather than relying on traditional top-down messages. But of all the brands that say they get it, only five per cent are doing it, Murray said.
“Sending an email to bloggers does not count,” he said. “Putting an ad in Facebook is not a conversation.”
He pointed to cold medicine Motrin, which made a site for moms with tips and news on children’s cold medication. The site has a forum where they can ask questions and talk among themselves.
“You have to think about being a newspaper,” he said. “Offer new snack-sized content every day.”
This shift does not mark the death of traditional marketing, Murray assured. To have
a mass nation-wide reach, television spots, billboards and print ads will still have a role to pay.
But even though marketing departments will have to increase in head count, the costs of marketing will decrease, he predicts. Social campaigns are cheap, and as more resources shift online, it will pull down spending.
This should be all the more reason for companies to take chances.
“In this world of communities, you get credit for trying,” Murray concluded. “You don’t have to get it right every time.”
