You Only Get One Shot.

Eminem rapped in 8 Mile, "If you had one shot, one opportunity, would you capture it? Or just let it slip?".  Social media works in a somewhat similar albeit less dramatic fashion. Do things right, and your business could have millions of followers that grow at a steady pace. However, make a mistake and most of those fans might leave and never come back.

One of the biggest mistakes is poor content. If you have loyal customers that are willing to track you down, follow you on Twitter or like your Facebook page, then at a minimum you need to keep them there. It doesn't take much. Brands like Barclays quickly realized the price of not having great content and then losing the attention of millions of fans. Don't make that mistake. You have an audience, so go out and wow them.

Marketing 3.0

The evolution has begun - are you ready?

Marketing, both as a science and job function, has evolved greatly in the past few years. From the advent of social media advertising, the relationship between customers and marketers has become more equal. Earlier, marketers could come up with a campaign that targeted their captivated audience through very precise channels. It was okay not to measure every single aspect of a launch. I call this Marketing 1.0.

Now the audience is distracted, informed and definitely more alert. Marketing campaigns need to be managed at multiple levels, with new customers flowing in and out of different channels. The biggest mistake an organization can make at this time, is use the same old principles to manage their ad campaigns. Setting up a social media presence without asking basic questions about your aim can be disastrous. Most firms have realized that, and now have dedicated and sophisticated social media advertising units. The best ones keep a captivated batch of loyalists coming back for more. (See: Red Bull). This is Marketing 2.0.

As organizations get better at recording data, measuring success ratios and creating specific campaigns for social media- the question is, what does Marketing 3.0 look like? The latest flurry of activity indicates that content is still king, and will increase in value over time. Content has always mattered, however, content used 'as media' is new (See Mitch Joel's blog on Marketing Agencies of the Future). Netflix has shown media agencies the way by creating their own shows and offering content that no one else can.

The same principles can be applied to organizations that create their own in-house newsrooms. By siphoning off content and marking your territory, customers are being told that "we offer something that no one else can". It would be interesting to see where this leads. My guess is that it will create more fragmented content in an already fragmented world. This in turn would feed into the impatience and luxury of choice that the audience already suffers from.

The question is: How does the media agency of the future handle it? How does an organization trying to build a brand deal with it? How do you gain credibility in a world where the customer gives you their attention for only a fraction of a second while your competitors distract them by colorful hand waving? Marketing 3.0 will be about creating fierce loyalists and giving them tremendous value in return for their loyalty. It will be about creating multiple fragmented products that can be customized with ease and tailored down to the individual. It will be about ads that are personal and displayed on media that enables one-on-one interaction. It will be more intimate and responsible than marketing has ever been. As a customer, that is amazingly good news. As a marketer, make sure you are ready to deliver in this new world.

In a recent assignment, we were asked to capture the essence of the INSEAD MBA experience in under a minute. Here it is:

Score Your Core.

If I were to ask you - what is your core product - how long would you take to answer? Your product, which could be a good, service or an idea - is why you are a business at the end of the day. But in a time of mergers, acquisitions, spin-offs and subsidiaries, the core product frequently gets lost in transition.

Spend some time thinking about your core product today. What have you done in past quarters to develop or strengthen it? Is it getting the adequate attention it deserves? Is your core product different from what it was when your business began?

At the end of this, you might walk away feeling comfortable that your business development is still aligned with your core competencies. Or you might be surprised to learn that your flagship product is no longer at the center of your business strategies.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing can be used as a powerful tool by marketers in order to reach their target audience in ways that were previously not possible. It is not only a way to reach your consumers but to also connect with them and get valuable feedback. Some of the basics involve a presence on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites and there are many businesses that do this today. But to extract the maximum benefits from this network, companies need to build upon this presence and set up some mechanisms to check the pulse of their market. For those that are new to the world of social media marketing, a good place to start is this book.

A trend that I can see developing is that with the plethora of social networking sites, there will be a need to consolidate this information in one place, for marketers. Similar to how a supermarket consolidates basic utilities for our convenience and how datamarts allow applications to consume data from a central repository - I see the emergence of something I call - "sociomarts". A sociomart would be a type of enterprise social supermarket, where marketers can extract information about a particular set of consumers, or a consumer, from one location. It would pull relevant information from the different social networking sites to compile one "profile" for your target audience. Through this, trends and meaningful information can be gleaned.