Kerisma

Emails: Ksinger@gmail.com, kerisays@yahoo.com

What Does A Recession Mean to Digital Business?

During recessions, people tend to cut back on marketing spend, when in fact, it’s the best time to make the most amount of noise about your business! The focus for many of your customers will be first creating brand awareness to generate leads through PR, as well as looking for ways to promote their businesses through new forms of social media (Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, blogging, etc.). This costs very little, but relies much on word-of-mouth. Marketers will also focus on creating content, syndicating their content, looking for ways to generate leads and putting better lead scoring measures in place, as people are spending less for advertising and some large-scale events. The great thing about digital is it empowers marketers allowing them to monitor the information better than any other source (email and website analytics, Google alerts, Technorati alerts, etc.). Other ways to monitor brand awareness are through discussion groups forming through social media, YouTube video postings, as well as blogs and making efforts to increase link building with credible partners in their industry to stay top of mind of others. Yet, one can’t let all the metrics in the world take precedence, but it’s also important to speak and reach out directly to your customers, provide a two-way dialogue to learn more about their emotional attachment and use with your brands.

Bloggers are Your Best Asset

Encourage bloggers to write more about the experience with your brands and look to reward them through your relationships with your partners, advertisers, etc. Remember, the blogging community can also become your partners and it’s important to listen to their thoughts, as well as respond. Don’t ignore someone to solve something. Think of social media as the new social phone. Would you ignore the phone that was ringing? Unless of course it was a telemarketer bothering you, but think about you are trying to reach some of the brands that you use in your own life each and everyday. You have to sometimes jump thru “voicemail hell” or you feel ignored. Wouldn’t you share that story or an incident of poor customer service with your friends and/or colleagues? Don’t you think that your audience may do the same thing when it comes to your brands? Well folks, they are and they are not only doing it over the phone, in person, but also ONLINE. Take the information spoken by others, whether good or bad and use that knowledge to your advantage. In this day and age, it’s best to listen, learn and consider a positive response, so that others will be a sound board to rally your fans across the world behind your brands. At the same time, turn to your bloggers in a way you would at a networking event. Establish loyal, genuine relationships and don’t just use pushy sales tactics to grab their attention. Treat them as a friend and allure them to your brand by also paying attention to their content, background and interests. Remember, they are your audience as well.

1. Join New Social Communities
2. Create Transparency with Your Brands and Speak in An Authentic Voice
3. Try New Technology – Are you asking me to Twitter? Sure why not!
4. Learn more about GoogleFriend Connect
5. Create widgets, RSS feeds and more opportunities for others to spread our content
6. Meetup.com , EventBrite, Yahoo’s Upcomingevents and others online to Spread the News About Your Event

The new model for B2B businesses and how they market, added David Meerman Scott, is for them to ACT AS PUBLISHERS. Some are staffing up with former editors of the Wall Street Journal and other writers from specialized markets. Editors are becoming the new marketers and it’s important for also marketers to embrace new online tactics and begin acting like editors. You can have the best SEO tactics implemented on your site, but once you grab the attention of the search engines, how are you going to keep your audience further engaged! People have emotions, needs, desires and they seek answers through our brands. I agree that we have to consider the elements of SEO, good architecture for our websites and utilize best practices, but we can’t lose sight that we are communicating to people. People like rewards and appraisal, they want to know WIFM (What’s In It for Me). They want a forum to learn from others, communicate and share ideas, so think of ways you can do that with your brands and your potential advertising clients.

It’s important to embrace the new ways of communication and technology, but also realize the importance of building face-to-face relationships and more personable encounters. This week it’s Twitter, next week it’s Plaxo, Linkedin, Digsby, what else is new? Hopefully, we don’t end up in a world that people forget the importance of those personable relationships in the real world and how it compliments the virtual world. The move is towards more personable and intimate relationships online. It’s ironic that they are trying to replicate the face-to-face, authentic experiences, but rather online. What scares me is more and more people are going to be too reliant on online tactics and lose out on the healthy balance with more real world personal encounters. One has to look at the web as new tools to communicate with others, but not neglect the personable experiences that can inflect moods and emotions. We need to learn from those personable encounters and see how to translate that online best. The companies that find the right balance between the virtual and the real world would become the true leaders in my mind.

This is why it’s important for me to start my blog and for others as well to be your own patriot!