As communities are building around common themes in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn, the B2B press release and traditional corporate marketing process is continuing to go through makeovers. It wasn’t long ago that to get to your target audience, you had to appear in specific articles in specific magazines and websites, and competing for that space was and continues to be a potential challenge.
With social media networks and communities that congregate on narrow themes, using your community, where fans congregate, to spread the word should be as important as say getting mentioned in the WSJ. And it makes a case that the traditional press release needs to conform to a new announcement format. I’m not saying anything new about the new press release format, but I’ve still seen press releases written in traditional format with lots of links and blah blah social media rah rah. But if word-of-mouth and referrals from colleagues is the most important reason people purchase a specific product then social media is where the action is. Social media as an announcement platform is an overpass to traditional sources and takes you right to the community where word-of-mouth is the point.
The Forrester Research report, Activating word of mouth through social technologies, shows that social technologies are playing an increasingly important role in the way people talk to each other about products and purchases. Word of mouth over social media networks is growing and playing a more influential role.
If you would like to learn more about best practices around word-of-mouth marketing and social media, check out WOMMA.
What excites me about the future is that social media and communities allow the marketer to share information that never sees the light of day in a press release.
Corporate communications needs to ramp up and start paying attention to how these communities absorb messages, share experiences, and spread the word. It goes without saying that social media and communities will continue to push changes at the corporate communications and corporate marketing offices.
Social media networks and media are the next big paradigm shift for marketing since e-marketing and online advertising replaced print. B2B is just starting to take note, but I believe we are in for another huge shift. The speed with which Facebook users has grown is a huge indicator that we are seeing a massive change again for the B2B marketer.
If you haven’t set up a social media overpass yet, it’s not too late to consider how to best add this to your marketing and customer relationship strategy.