Mobile is not just mobile phones and social media is not just social networks.
Mobile and social are two of the hottest buzzwords in the marketing arena. By now, almost every brand has accepted that they need to adapt their marketing strategy to both. But when your CMO tells you at a meeting that “we need a mobile and social strategy,” what does that mean? What do you do?
The first thing that comes to mind for many is that a mobile and social strategy means they need to reach people while they’re on their iPhones and when they’re on Facebook.
That’s only a small fraction of the story.
The power of mobile and social is that it has forever changed the way people behave and the way they expect to interact with each other and with brands.
Mobile is not just smartphones.
Mobile is also tablets, and cars and wearables, but more importantly, mobile is about and has given rise to cross-device experiences. Mobile is controlling my TV from my phone and being able to seamlessly take that content on the go. It’s easily transferring what I’m listening to on my earbuds to my home speakers when I get home. A true mobile strategy has to take into account how these devices each play unique and integral parts of our lives. During the World Cup, I would sometimes watch games on WatchESPN on my laptop while browsing Twitter on my phone to see what people were saying about the match. Other times, I would chromecast the match from my phone to my TV and surf the Internet for articles about the game, statistics, etc. A challenge for brands will be to figure out how to optimize for these different behaviors and figure out how to get the right content in the right places the right time. Mobile has multiplied the different ways consumers can consume content as well as share it.
Mobile is a whole new set of behaviors for brands to understand. Those who can track and analyze their customers’ mobile-driven behaviors, and ultimately deliver the right content to the right people at the right time, will be successful.
Social media is not just social networks.
Yes, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, etc. are all very important for marketers to understand. But where is the line that separates social networks from non-social networks drawn? Are messaging apps like WhatsApp social networks? What about gchat? If we go there, isn’t gmail social? Our belief is that social isn’t limited to self-categorized social networks-social is a behavior. Anywhere that a person can digitally share/receive is social media. And for brands, a smart social strategy will focus on this sharing behavior.
When developing a social strategy, it’s imperative to figure out how your customers are sharing. Are they posting statuses on Facebook, pinning on Pinterest, messaging on gchat, emailing, or blogging? A social strategy that can track where your sharing occurs, beyond traditional social networks, can lead to huge insights and breakthroughs for your marketing.
For example, if a brand finds that most of their sharing is happening on Facebook, but not via any posts, their customers may be sharing links in one-to-one chat messages. Brands can then optimize by making sure their link preview is something that is descriptive and enticing. Ehow describes how to do this.
Let’s look at a couple examples:
Good-the McSweeney’s image is there and the title of the article is catchy enough.
Not so good-the image is no longer available and the description doesn’t do much for the reader. If the website title was less vague, having the title as the description would be fine, but in this case, it doesn’t work. I have no idea what is going on with this website based on the title alone. Small details like this are definitely not the first things that come to mind when marketers think about social media, but they can be the difference between clicking or not clicking and sharing or not sharing.
When developing your mobile and social marketing strategy, it’s not enough to leave it at mobile phones and social networks. Mobile and social are incredibly powerful because they’re part of something bigger-they’re changing the way people share and behave. And the ability to understand the new behaviors is what will separate the best marketers from the rest.
