conversations Archives - Page 3 of 6 - Social Email Marketing

The connected buyer in the social networking age: welcome to the ‘pull’ customer

When looking back at this week’s earlier post regarding the shift from selling to buying, I remembered an article I wrote a while ago about what I then called ‘the pull customer’.

The marketing and communication reality has changed dramatically since the arrival of new digital media. Whether we call it Web 2.0, social media or any other buzzword, we tend to summarize these changes as the end of mass communication as we knew it, an explosion of new communication channels, the fragmentation of media, the participation of people in the marketing and communication process, customer-centricity, more focus on value and relevance and so on.

One of the changes, that is going on since many years now, is the fact that communication and marketing have increasingly become a ‘pull’ instead of a ‘push’ process. Remember those words? Push versus pull marketing?

Value in engagement, content and social media marketing: respect and ROI

Value is a word with a lot of meanings. Most of the time I use it in the context of ‘valuable’ content or delivering value to people in a content, engagement and social media marketing context.

But of course it also has other meanings. The first meaning, as I just described it, has to do with perceived value in relationships and ultimately is about respect, which is something completely different from value as in $.

Value is like conversations: it’s two-ways. In social media marketing you need commitment and the will to really communicate. And that includes sharing.