IMC Vancouver: Social Media for Business

I’m looking forward to paneling at IMC Vancouver on September 18th. The topic is social media for business. Naturally, I’ll be talking about social media analytics.

The intersection of business strategy, quantitative methods, and online word of mouth (social media) has the capacity to be really powerful in the hands of somebody who understands that it’s actually a medium. There’s message, there response, there’s measurement of that response, there’s an opportunity to improve upon the next message. It’s also like any other medium too. You got to pay to play. It isn’t free.

It isn’t free for your customers either. Social media still takes time and attention time: and that’s still a cost. But the difference is that it’s never been more convenient for customers to rave or to rant about your company and your brand.

In 1995, a customer needed to know HTML or BBS software if they wanted to rant and rave online. It didn’t keep them from using good old fashioned open-your-yap and tell your friends word of mouth marketing. It wasn’t convenient to do so online is all. In 2009, you can tell your friends on Twitter in a scant 140 characters. You can get your Twitter hooked up to your Facebook and annoy hundreds of more people with those updates. It’s becoming almost too convinient.

Every marketing medium is somewhat measurable in some way. I’ll talk aboout practical ways of measuring this ‘new’ medium.